grant you peace and happiness'; the Oxford English Dictionary records uses of this phrase from 1534 onwards. It appears in Shakespeare's 1599 play As You Like It. However, merry is often misinterpreted as an adjective modifying gentlemen. In Romeo and Juliet, the servant who inadvertently invites them to Capulet's masqued ball twice tells Romeo and Benvolio, "Rest you merry." The transitive use of the verb rest in the sense "to keep, cause to continue, to remain" is typical of 16th- to 17th-century language. Etymonline.com notes that the first line "often is mispunctuated" as "God rest you, merry gentlemen" because in contemporary language, rest has lost its use "with a predicate adjective following and qualifying the object" (Century Dictionary). This is the case already in the 1775 variant, and is also reflected by Dickens's replacement of the verb rest by bless in A Christmas Carol. Some variants give the pronoun in the first line as ye instead of you, in a pseudo-archaism. In fact, ye would never have been correct, because ye is a subjective (nominative) pronoun only, never an objective (accusative) pronoun. A variant text was printed in 1775 in The Beauties of the Magazines, and Other Periodical Works, Selected for a Series of Years. This text was reproduced from a song-sheet bought from a caroler in the street. This version is shown here alongside the version reported by W. B. Sandys (1833) and the version adopted by Carols for Choirs (OUP, 1961), which has become the de facto baseline reference in the UK. Melody Musical settings Gustav Holst includes the carol in his 1910 choral fantasy Christmas Day. The third movement of Victor Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony (1927) is a scherzo on the tune of God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen. Versions by popular music artists American country singer Garth Brooks (2000) American rock band Boston (2002), as "God Rest Ye Metal Gentlemen", released online and on a special tour edition of the album Life, Love & Hope. American contemporary Christian band MercyMe (2006) American smooth jazz gospel singer Tim Bowman (2010) The cast of Glee (2010) American metalcore band August Burns Red (2011) The Canadian band Barenaked Ladies and singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan, on the 2004 album Barenaked for the Holidays American a-capella band Pentatonix, on the 2016 album A Pentatonix Christmas, and on the soundtrack of the 2018 animated film adaptation of The Grinch Christian band Tenth Avenue North with