Shakespeare and the Moon: from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Othello

In William Shakespeare's plays the Moon appears hundreds of times, as an image, a measure of time, a symbol and even a character. The English playwright inherited a rich store of beliefs: the Moon as the star of chastity, changeability and madness, but also as queen of the tides and of magical nights. Following her appearances in a few plays means travelling through the entire lunar imagination of the Renaissance.

The Dream, a comedy under the Moon

A Midsummer Night's Dream, probably written around 1595-1596, is the lunar comedy par excellence. From the first scene time is measured by the Moon: Theseus and Hippolyta await their wedding, set for the rising of the new Moon, and Hippolyta imagines it as a silver bow newly bent in the sky. Much of the action then takes place at night, in a wood near Athens peopled by fairies.

Titania, queen of the fairies, holds the Moon, «governess of floods», responsible for the rains and illnesses afflicting mortals because of her quarrel with Oberon. The Moon here is a natural and mysterious power, in keeping with contemporary beliefs about the star's influence on the tides and on the fluids of the body.

The character of Moonshine

The most comic device in the play concerns the Athenian craftsmen preparing a show for the duke's wedding, the tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe told by Ovid. Since the lovers meet by moonlight, the amateur actors decide that someone must play the Moon: the tailor Starveling enters with a lantern, a thornbush and a dog.

Those objects are no accident. According to a belief widespread in the England of the time, the lunar spots showed the man in the Moon, an old man with a bundle of sticks and a dog, sometimes identified with the biblical figure punished for gathering wood on the Sabbath. In the last act Theseus then delivers a famous reflection: «The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact».

The inconstant Moon and the Moon that maddens

In Romeo and Juliet, in the balcony scene, Romeo wants to swear his love by the Moon that tips the treetops with silver. Juliet stops him: «O, swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon», which changes monthly in her circled orb, for fear that his love too might prove just as changeable.

In Othello, by contrast, the Moon becomes a cause of madness. After killing Desdemona, the protagonist blames the disorder of the world on an error of the Moon, which has supposedly come nearer the Earth than usual and made men mad. The idea draws on an ancient belief, already widespread in the Greco-Roman world, from which the word lunatic also derives.

Diana's chastity, the changeability of the phases, power over the waters, the link with madness and fantasy: Shakespeare uses all these meanings with extraordinary freedom, bending them now to comedy, now to tragedy. In his verse the Moon is never a mere ornament, but a way of speaking about human passions and the instability of the mind.