The scene is an outdoor court, the “pleasure grounds” of a well-run mansion, in the aptly named Belmont, “Lovely Mountain.” We see a young married couple, beautiful and well-spoken and utterly in love. It is evening. The young man begins:
The moon shines bright! In such a night as this,
When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees
And they did make no noise, in such a night
Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls
And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents
Where Cressid lay that night.
And his lovely young wife, who one bright night in Venice stole from her father’s house to elope with him whom she loved so dearly, takes up the song:
In such a night
Did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew
And saw the lion’s shadow ere himself
And ran dismayed away.
Thisbe could see the shadow, because the moon was full — and that’s our Word of the Week. She and young Pyramus had planned to elope from their fathers’ houses, two young people in love despite the enmity of their parents. (By the way, if you want a delightful reversal of the story, see the sweet and tenderly human play The Fantasticks, with its most beautiful song, Try to Remember.) But our two married lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica, are “singing” in prose, about loves that ended in tragedy — and maybe they are moved by the silence of the moon to do so, till they end in merrily teasing one another. It is hard for directors nowadays to stage this scene from The Merchant of Venice, both in its beginning above and as it continues, because it requires a delicate sense of the interplay of mirth and solemnity, and a deep and abiding belief in the goodness of the love of man and woman.
But who does not love the full moon? Wolves are apt to howl when the moon is full, possibly because there’s more action then, or because in that better light they can more easily tell where the rest of the pack may be. It always surprises me, how you can see colors in the light of the full moon, and how strong and sharp the shadows are. And you can orient yourself by the moon, too, finding the four cardinal directions, as you can do by the sun. That’s because the orbit of the moon around the earth is very close to the ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun and the other planets across the sky. For the planets travel in what’s nearly a plane. Not counting Pluto, the most off-kilter planet is Mercury, at 7 degrees; everybody else is within a very slender 3.4 degrees. The motion of the moon was easy for man to track, because of the “phases,” from new moon gradually on to the half moon (called “first quarter”), to the full moon, back to another half moon (called “last quarter”), and to the invisible new moon again. The moon’s orbit around the earth is locked in to the earth’s rotation, so that the same side always faces us. Anyhow, after the day, the month was the easiest unit of time for ancient man to measure, so that many calendars are lunar rather than solar. That means that there will always be discrepancies between the lunar “year” and the solar year, since a lunar month is a bit short, only 29 1/2 days. So the Hebrew year, based on the moon, had to make up the shortfall by adding in an extra month to the month of Adar, every three years. That ensured that the feasts based on sowing and reaping would always be in the same seasons.
The earth’s moon is almost as big as Mercury, and it is by far the largest moon in the solar system by proportion to its planet, which is a good thing, because it’s hard to imagine life on earth without the scattering and mixing action of the tides. When the moon is overhead, the water beneath it bulges, because of the moon’s gravitational pull, and it’s the bulge that we experience as the tide coming “in.” Yet for all that, the ancient Hebrews did not name the moon or the sun when they described God’s creation, in Genesis. That was to poke fingers in the eyes of sun-worshipers and moon-worshipers roundabout: for, after all, the Babylonian sun-god Shamash and the Hebrew word for the sun, shemesh, were pretty much the same. So we are told that God “made the two great lights,” the greater to rule the day and the lesser to rule the night, and almost as an afterthought, “and also the stars.” That was, we might say, to put them in their places. Yet the Psalmist rejoices in that creation, naming the moon, and saying that man is greater than the moon and the stars, being “a little less than the angels.”
The word moon comes from an Indo-European root with descendants across the board. From that root we get Latin mensis, month (and English month is a moon-th, the suffix turning the concrete noun into a noun of measurement, as it does to the adjective wide, producing width, and so on). We also have modern Greek menas, Russian mesyatch, Sanskrit mas, Persian mahtab, and many others; all of which mean month. But often the name of the moon itself is very different: so we have Welsh lloer, Latin luna, Russian luna (not descended from Latin, but a cousin), Greek selene, and more. But a moon by any other name shines as sweetly.
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