Essay on the Moon in the Works of William Shakespeare :: Biography Biographies Essays

The Motif of the Moon in the Works of Shakespeare In the paper, The Hounds of mania A Midsummer Nights fantasy, it is suggested that Shakespeare borrowed heavily from Chaucers Knights Tale to the extent that Shakespeare dramatized the image drawn in Chaucer of Diana, the stargaze goddess, with the hounds of love about her feet--Lysander and Demetrius behaving like the hounds of love in A Midsummer Nights Dream. While Shakespeare creates unity of atmosphere in Midsummer Nights Dream in general by flooding the play with moonlight (Schanzer 29), he also--by frequency of allusions to sympathetic cyclical motifs (Moon, Diana, Wheel of Fortune)--creates an overall atmosphere, or structure, to many of his other plays. Northrup Fryes thesis--that the comedies obtain a cyclical pattern of the characters who depart from the city to the forest therefore return to the city recovered from the madness that occurred in the forest (see segmentation handout)--can be applied to many of the o ther plays. But one must look beyond the locality of the characters (as Frye does) to note the frequent allusions to Diana, the Roman personification of the moon, and the similar allusion to the Wheel of Fortune. What does the Wheel of Fortune have to do with Diana? Shakespeare considered twain of them to be much the same. Both have a cyclical nature the moon waxes and wanes just like Fortune waxes and wanes. The motif of both figures in Shakespeares plays reveals his belief that the moon is a token of the fickleness and changeability of passel and luck, at once an omen and a blessing, and the result of the changeability of the moon/Wheel is the characters madness, leading to the audiences laughter (as in A Midsummer Nights Dream and Much Ado About Nothing) or catharsis (as in baron Lear, Macbeth, or Hamlet). Diana figures mostly in the comedies, the most blatant example in A Midsummer Nights Dream. Shakespeare begins with Theseus vocalizing his desire that the moon should ch ange, a symbol for his impatience for the wedding Four happy days bring inAnother moon but O, methinks, how slowThis gray-haired moon wanes (1.1.2-4) The old moon is own aging self that shall be renewed by his marriage just as the moon passes through its cycle to finally become a new full moon. It is under the auspices of the ever-changing moon that overlooks the forest that the madness of all of the characters ensue.