Moonstruck

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a group of slightly ramshackle workmen decide to put on a play. The play they choose — The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe — is famously and funnily terrible, as is their handling of it. Its central scene takes place at night, so they decide to dress up one actor with a lantern and a thorn bush: the idea is that light might shine through the thorns and convey the illusion of moonlight. This is an elegant solution, but Peter Quince, who is directing the scene, adds that the actor must explain to the audience that ‘he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of Moonshine’.

Much of the play’s humour lies in this kind of mangled overexplanation and predictably, when our workmen come to perform their play, the onstage audience laughs. ‘The man in the moon?’ they mock, ‘I am aweary of this moon.