Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Cancer and its Ruler The Moon
SNOUT: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?
BOTTOM: A calendar, a calendar — look in the almanac, find out moonshine, find out moonshine."
(III, i, 44-6)
The Story
In Athens, Duke Theseus will be married to Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, in four days at the time of a new moon. One of his subjects, Egeus, complains to Theseus that his daughter Hermia refuses to marry his choice for her, Demetrius, because she loves Lysander, an equally handsome and appropriate suitor. Theseus supports Athenian law: Hermia must marry Demetrius or face death — or life in a convent. Hermia and Lysander decide to elope the next evening through a wood near the city. They unwisely tell Hermia's friend Helena, who betrays the plan to Demetrius, whom she loves, hoping to win his favor. Demetrius, who loves Hermia, heads for the same forest and the unhappy Helena follows him.
In the same woods are faeries, whose king (Oberon) and queen (Titania) are quarrelling over a young boy in Titania's care. Witnessing Demetrius' rude rejection of Helena, Oberon instructs his henchman Puck to apply the juice of a magical flower to the young man's eyes as he sleeps. This will induce him to fall irresistibly in love with the first person he sees when he wakes. But Puck mistakenly squeezes the potion into Lysander's eyes, and the first person he sees upon awakening is ... Helena! Now each of the lovers loves someone who loves someone else and none have their love reciprocated.
A group of Athenian workingmen has also come to this same wood to rehearse a play for Theseus' wedding. Puck mischievously puts an ass's head onto their leader, Bottom the weaver. Oberon has anointed Titania's eyes with the love juice as part of a scheme to get the changeling boy from her. The first person she sees — and loves — on waking is the ass-headed Bottom.
Instructed to correct his mistake with the lovers, Puck only further confuses the situation by squeezing the flower's juice into Demetrius's eyes. Although upon awakening he first sees Helena and immediately loves her, she becomes angry, thinking that he's mocking her. With the undoing of the spell on Lysander's eyes, the lovers are now magically matched.
Taking compassion on Titania and having obtained the young boy he sought, Oberon instructs Puck to remove the ass's head from Bottom and to see that all the human company return to Athens thinking "no more of this night's accidents/ But as the fierce vexation of a dream." He frees Titania from her enchantment and they are reconciled.
With the coming of dawn, Theseus, his fiancée Hippolyta, and Hermia's father arrive in the forest to agree that the mystified pairs may marry each other. Bottom awakes to marvel at his "most rare vision."
In Theseus' palace, all three nuptials are celebrated with a well-intentioned but hilariously incompetent performance by the workingmen of the Greek myth of Pyramus and Thisbe. At midnight, the faeries appear to bless the place and the couples. Finally, Puck begs the audience's indulgence: if these "shadows" have offended, they are to think of what they have seen as but a dream.
The Sign Cancer and its Ruler the Moon
We don't have to look far to deduce the hidden astrological key to the play. Normally we'd listen carefully to the language of the first (or second) scene to discover the underlying astrological symbolism, but in this case the title reveals the sign and planet inspiring the play's action and themes — in fact, every word of the title gives away the secret key. "Summer" begins around June 21 each year at the time of the summer solstice, when the days are at their longest in the northern hemisphere," at the beginning of the zodiacal sign of Cancer which has the Moon as its ruler. "Night" is obviously the dark half of the 24-hour day, whose light is the Moon. It's the time when we sleep and "dream."
Supporting the idea that the key to the play is CANCER, a sign ruled by the MOON, A Midsummer Night's Dream has more references to the Moon than all of Shakespeare's other plays combined! In Caroline Spurgeon's pioneering study of Shakespeare's imagery, she notes that in this play "The word 'moon' occurs twenty-eight times, three and a half times more often than in any other play, partly of course owing to the prominence of moonshine, often addressed as 'moon', as a character in the comedy of the 'homespuns'."
The very first lines of the play mention the Moon. Theseus announces the time of his wedding to Hippolyta and impatiently awaits the nuptial day: "Four happy days bring in/ Another moon — but O, methinks how slow/ This old moon wanes!" (I, i, 2-4) Hippolyta assures him that the time will speedily pass:
Four days will quickly steep themselves in night,
(I, I, 7-11)
You can't miss the emphasis on this astrological symbol. Each time new groups of characters appear they mention the Moon. This provides a unifying symbolism that helps to harmonize the disparate groups of characters in the play. After Theseus and Hippolyta, the next to allude to it are the young lovers Hermia and Lysander. Lysander reveals their plans to escape from Athens to the unhappy Helena:
To-morrow night, when Phoebe [a Greek name for the Moon] doth behold Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass,
(I, i, 209-13)
Shakespeare keeps the symbolism consistent with lunar associations, since PEARLS and SILVER are associated with the sign Cancer and the Moon. Appropriately, since Cancer is assigned to the WATER element (the "wat'ry" glass), pearls are generated by a mollusk that lives in water.
The next set of characters to appear in the play after Theseus, Hippolyta, and the young lovers are the Athenian workingmen rehearsing the story of Pyramus and Thisbe that they hope to perform at Theseus' wedding. Once the parts are assigned, Quince the carpenter, who's organizing the group, instructs them to "meet ... in the palace wood a mile without the town by moonlight." (I, ii, 82-3)
The fourth and last group to materialize is the faeries. (I use the word "faery" because it connects us to the older meaning of the word and because it has fewer associations with the tiny, trivialized "fairies" of the Victorian period.) Puck, a "merry wanderer of the night" (II, i, 43), and another faery meet in that selfsame wood, with the faery regaling Puck with a lovely description of her recent wanderings:
Over hill, over dale,
(II, I, 2-7)
Now she's off to "go seek some dew drops here,/ And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear." (II, i, 14-5) (Moon, water as dew, and pearls again)
Since the faery attends Titania, Puck advises her to warn the faery queen to keep away from the angry faery king. Sure enough, as if on cue, Oberon appears and in his first line reminds us of the night-time setting: "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania." (II, I, 60) Even the faery queen's name, "Titania," ties in with the theme because according to the Greek writer Ovid it's another name for the Moon goddess Diana.
To clinch the argument, Shakespeare does something that definitively reveals his inspiration: he has the workingmen who are rehearsing the play bring the Moon onstage as a character! The Moon becomes a literal participant in the drama, carrying the items conventionally associated with it: a lantern and a little dog.
So, all the various groups — nobles, lovers, workingmen, and faeries — refer to the Moon at their first entrance, and continue to do as the action unfolds. They all encounter each other in the same forest to which the lovers have fled. The main action of the play happens in that specific place, during the night, and under the spell of the Moon. The hints in the title and the many and repeated references to the Moon give us the key to understanding the comedy.
The Many Meanings of the Moon
The Moon has for centuries been the pre-eminent symbol of IMPERMANENCE and continual CHANGE. The most striking fact about the Moon is that unlike the Sun it continually waxes and wanes. First it's invisible at the dark of the new moon, then an increasing crescent, next totally visible at the full moon, and finally decreasing to crescent and invisibility again.
No wonder Shakespeare has many references to the Moon in his poems and plays with just this connotation. In one of his earliest works, Love's Labour's Lost, Rosa-line mockingly urges, "Play, music, then. Nay, you must do it soon./ Not yet? — no dance! Thus change I like the moon." (V, ii, 210-1) Juliet begs Romeo, "O swear not by the moon, th' inconstant moon,/ That monthly changes in her circled orb,/ Lest that thy love prove likewise variable." (Romeo and Juliet: II, i, 153) The changeability of the Moon accords with the metal appropriately associated with the Moon (silver) that darkens as it tarnishes, unlike the metal linked to the Sun (gold) that never loses its luster.
So love begun under the light of the Moon is not to be trusted. When Egeus complains about his daughter Hermia's infatuation with Lysander, he specifically accuses Lysander of wooing her not by clear daylight but by mesmerizing moonlight. In his eyes Lysander has used the notoriously fluctuating lunar light to lure her into his affections, only pretending to love her. Furious, he outlines Lysander's strategy in his complaint to Theseus: "This hath bewitched the bosom of my child. ... Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung/ With feigning voice verses of feigning love,/ And stol'n the impression of her fantasy ..." (I, i, 27, 30-2) As far as Egeus is concerned, Lysander's love is untrustworthy.
Demetrius, though, seems no more steadfast than Lysander. He's another example of lunar unreliability, since, despite Egeus' preference for him as a son-in-law, Lysander accuses Demetrius of having switched allegiances before the action even began:
Demetrius — I'll avouch it to his head —
(I, i, 106-10)
Nothing in this play seems fixed, as not only affections but also experiences and appearances transform. Prior to loving Lysander, Hermia equated Athens with paradise; now that she loves him and her life is at stake, love "hath turned a heaven unto a hell." (I, i, 207) Puck, being a faery, has literally the power to shape-shift, for he torments the workingmen by changing his appearance and chasing them through the forest. Bottom, of course, is the one most "translated," sporting an ass's head in place of his own for part of the play due to the merry Puck's prank. When the sound of his singing awakens Titania, she starts up saying, "What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?" (III, i, 132) For her he is not a hard-handed workingman but a divine being.
The power of attraction to transform the loved object into something wondrous is foreshadowed earlier in the play, when the unhappy Helena ponders the power of lovers' vision: "Things base and vile, holding no quantity,/ Love can transpose to form and dignity." (I, i, 232-3) So one of the agents of change, under the light of the Moon, is the power of love — even though in this play it's for the most part immature and capricious.
On a literal, physical level the sign Cancer is associated not only with inexperienced youths whose emotions seem to fluctuate like the weather, but also with those even younger: CHILDREN. This association features prominently in the plot since the conflict between Oberon and Titania is over custody of a changeling child whisked by Titania from the human realm into faeryland. It's significant, given the symbolism of the Moon, that the child is a CHANGEling, transported from one dimension into another, higher one. Titania's attachment to this mortal child is due to her affection for the MOTHER, another association with the Moon, as revealed in these charming images of her while pregnant:
... we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind,
(II, i, 123-132)
In the female body, the Moon governs the WOMB as well as breasts that suckle a child, and so it especially symbolizes FERTILITY. In human beings fecundity coordinates with the female's monthly cycle that closely matches the Moon's cycle from New to Full and New again, taking about 27 or 28 days. The faeries' blessing at the end of the play specifically mentions the children that will be born to the wedded couples. Oberon's instructions to the faeries are to bless "the best bridebed" so that "the issue there create/ Ever shall be fortunate." (V, ii, 33, 35-6)
Astrological symbols are always double-sided, containing their opposites. In line with her varying phases, the Moon can signify quite the opposite of fertility: BARRENNESS. This is mentioned early in the play as a threat, for if Hermia refuses to obey her father and marry his choice of suitors for her, Theseus decrees that she may withdraw into a nunnery. He presents this as a not terribly attractive option: she'll have to "endure the livery of a nun,/ For aye to be in shady cloister mewed,/ To live a barren sister all your life,/ Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon." (I, i, 70-3)
At least Theseus has softened Egeus' demands by offering a third option (other than marriage or death) of "protest[ing]/ For aye austerity and single life" on Diana's altar (Diana being the Roman name for the Moon goddess). (I, i, 89-90) Hermia must make her decision, declares Theseus, by the day of his and Hippolyta's anticipated wedding, the day of the apparently approaching new moon.
The Enigma of Time in A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Moon is indispensible to the measurement of TIME. The earliest calendars were based on lunar cycles, marked by notches in bone that apparently tracked new and full moons as well as eclipses. Days and years were established later by the sun's daily rising and setting and by its seasonal variations, but intermediate periods were set by the Moon whose cycle roughly established the length of the weeks and months ("moonths"). Lunar calendars are still used by some cultures and religions, like Judaism and Islam. The Chinese New Year is always the first New Moon in the sign of Aquarius; Easter's date is fixed as the first Sunday following the first Full Moon after the Spring Equinox.
New moons are especially significant interim time markers. They are moments each month when the Sun and Moon align in the sky as viewed from Earth, inaugurating a new cycle. Theseus specifically wants the old moon to wane as quickly as possible, allowing fresh energy to enter. Astrological tradition generally considers new moons particularly auspicious times for starting new ventures. Thus the setting of Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding date harmonizes with a natural cycle of new beginnings. Any Elizabethan audience would have understood this.
However, the "new moon" that Theseus and Hippolyta mention may not be the moment when the two lights actually appear to conjoin. Earlier peoples measured the beginning of the month about four days after the Sun and Moon aligned, at the point when the first sliver of the Moon became visible. At this time the Moon is "waxing" or growing in size, a time considered auspicious for a wedding. "Ideally, the moon should be waxing at the time of sexual consummation in order that the woman can partake of its generative power. This is why Theseus and Hippolyta refuse to marry while the old moon is on the wane. For an Elizabethan audience, no explanations were needed: the sympathetic link between humans and planets was self-evident."
This first appearance of the thin crescent moon is what Hippolyta describes as "like to a silver bow new bent in heaven." (I, i, 9-10) We have jumped from the precise moment of the new Moon to a point some days later. So what are the two referring to? The actual new moon or the point at which the Moon first becomes visible?
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Midsummer Night's Dream"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Priscilla Costello.
Excerpted by permission of Ibis Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
