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. Would he would change.’ The joke, of course, is that a single person acting out the moon inevitably misses its essential quality: that it is always changing. When Romeo wishes to swear his love to Juliet, he begins by invoking the moon, but she cuts him off. ‘O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,’ she pleads. ‘That monthly changes in her circled orb,/ Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.’

A new exhibition at the Watts Gallery near Guildford captures this odd slipperiness and variety of the moon. Neatly enough, this year is the 50th anniversary of the first moon landings, and the exhibition — called Moonscapes — both notes the anniversary and returns us to an earlier age. It concentrates upon 19th-century paintings of the moon and its associated mythology, but includes also other moon-related material: a handsome French lunar globe; some more recent prints; a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with splendid illustrations by W.