Moonlight and Madness

The absurdity of describing shafts of moonlight as sunny beams and the light itself as golden is in keeping with the confusions, reversals and mad misperceptions that are integral to the play's texture. Pyramus will see his truest Thisbe. He appears to be perhaps the only lover who sees accurately until we remember that this is only pretend, that Thisbe is actually a man playing a man playing a woman. But Pyramus too misperceives in seeing the bloodstained mantle as a sign Thisbe has been mauled to death by a lion. Nothing is what it seems and constantly changes like the content of a dream. And it is all illuminated by the eerie light of the moon that helps create the atmosphere of unreality and other- worldliness that fills the play and is a presiding symbol of the many changes portrayed. Its phases, its ability to bathe a scene with magic or with edgy mystery reflects the many changes or transformations threaded through the texture of the piece: Theseus and Hippolyta going from enemies to lovers to married couple, Egeus from rational to raging, Hermia from obedient to transgressive, Lysander from gentleman to abductor and would- be illicit husband, Demetrius from lover to jilter, Helena from friend to betrayer, both young women from upper- rank ladies to screeching cats, workmen to actors, fairy king and queen rowing indecorously, a changeling boy, Puck's many shape- changing forms, Bottom turned ass- head, night to dawn, antipathetic lovers to harmonious couples. And the moon presides over all.

It would not be amiss to retitle the play A Midsummer Night's Nightmare, for, though matters in Athens are complicated and tense enough, the escape to the woods releases all manner of dark things and makes the entanglements even worse. The piece can be acted in two ways. The traditional approach has been to display it as a fast- moving, action- packed, farcical romp…