The motif of the moon in the works of ShakespeareIn the essay "The Hounds of Love: A Midsummer Nights' Dream", it is suggested that Shakespeare borrowed heavily from Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" to the extent that Shakespeare dramatized the image drawn in Chaucer of Diana, the moon goddess, with the hounds of love at her feet - Lysander and Demetrius behaving like the hounds of love in A Midsummer Night's Dream . While Shakespeare "creates unity of atmosphere [in A Midsummer Night's Dream] primarily by flooding the work with moonlight" (Schanzer 29), furthermore, by the frequency of allusions to similar cyclical motifs (Moon, Diana, Wheel of fortune), creates an overall atmosphere, or structure, to many of his other plays, to Northrup Frye's thesis - that the plays have a cyclical pattern of characters departing from the city to the forest and then returning to the city madness occurred in the forest (see class). handout)--can be applied to many other plays. But one must look beyond the locations 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 them more or less equal. Both have a cyclical nature: the moon waxes and sets just as Fortune waxes and sets. The motif of both figures in Shakespeare's works reveals his belief that the moon is a symbol of the fickleness and changeability of luck and fortune, at once an omen and a blessing, and the result of the changeability of the moon/Wheel is the madness of the character. , leading to audience laughter (as in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing) or catharsis (as in King Lear, Macbeth or Hamlet). Diana figures mostly in comedies, the clearest example in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare begins with Theseus expressing his wish for the moon to change, symbolic of his impatience for marriage: Four happy days bring another moon; but oh, it seems to me, how slowly this old moon wanes! (1.1.2-4) The old moon is one's aging self that will be renewed by its marriage just as the moon goes through its cycle to eventually become a new full moon. It is under the auspices of the changing moon that hangs over the forest that the madness of all the characters takes place..