Burning it at both ends

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!"
                                                      
                                                             Macbeth      (V, v )


Far more often than not, Shakespeare's Macbeth is regarded as his darkest play, both figuratively and literally. Almost all of the scenes are nighttime scenes, when "Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;/While night's black agents to their prey do rouse" (III, ii).

Try for a moment to imagine the sealing darkness of a world not yet illuminated by electric light. As peculiar as it might sound, we've become so accustomed to the benefits of the bulb that we've generally forgotten just how dark darkness can be. The real and imagined perils of the night become a lot easier to understand once we see them in the context of not being able to see them. When we cannot see our hands in front of our faces, should we be surprised when the imagination takes over?

In Shakespeare's day, even candles were not an inexpensive trifle. Whether the wax came from the honeycomb of bees or tallow from sheep or other livestock was used, only the wealthy could afford to be profligate in their use: the typical Elizabethan house was not ablaze with light, but was for the most part dark to a degree we'd find startling.

Pictured above is a rush light, burning at both ends in a holder, in the Tudor Kitchen at Agecroft Hall. As the name suggests, the material used for burning generally consisted of a river rush, similar to the stem of a cattail, with its hollow center filled with perhaps lamb's fat or the tallow of some other farm animal. It would burn fairly slowly, but one of the drawbacks of using animal fat was its frequently less-than-pleasant odor as it burned. Yet it was an age of smells that we've grown less accustomed to: the smell of wood smoke, of farm animals and what they leave behind, of fish and meat in an open-air market, of the buzzard's breath of a town drunk, slumped in the corner of a tavern.

Being an important and versatile material, beeswax had at times throughout European history even been a target of taxation, making it all the more expensive and prompting the use of alternatives like the rush light.

It's simply another example of using home-spun ingenuity to avoid any unnecessary "rendering unto Caesar."