The Merry Wives of Windsor
William Shakespeare
The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Jan Sewell and Will Sharpe
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,
Dee Anna Phares, Héloïse Sénéchal
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Clare Smout (RSC stagings) and Peter Kirwan (overview)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Bill Alexander and Rachel Kavanaugh
Playing Falstaff: Simon Callow
Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK
2011 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2007, 2011 by The Royal Shakespeare Company
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of
The Random House Publishing Group, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
“Royal Shakespeare Company,” “RSC,” and the RSC logo are trademarks
or registered trademarks of The Royal Shakespeare Company
The version of The Merry Wives of Windsor and the corresponding footnotes
that appear in this volume were originally published in William Shakespeare:
Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, published
in 2007 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House
Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-1-58836-879-9
www.modernlibrary.com
Cover design: Gabrielle Bordwin
Cover photograph: © Comstock Images/age fotostock
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Women on Top?
Why Windsor?
Which Falstaff?
The Comedy of Englishness
About the Text
Key Facts
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Textual Notes
Scene-by-Scene Analysis
The Merry Wives of Windsor in Performance:
The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of Merry Wives: An Overview
At the RSC
The Director’s Cut: Interviews with Bill Alexander and Rachel Kavanaugh
Playing Falstaff: Simon Callow
Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater
Beginnings
Playhouses
The Ensemble at Work
The King’s Man
Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology
Further Reading and Viewing
References
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
INTRODUCTION
WOMEN ON TOP?
In 1702 the poet and critic John Dennis rewrote The Merry Wives of Windsor with the title The Comical Gallant: or, the Amours of Sir John Falstaff. Dennis claimed that the original Shakespearean play was a particular favorite of Queen Elizabeth. Indeed, he reported, “This comedy was written at her command, and by her direction, and she was so eager to see it acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days; and was afterward, as tradition tells us, very well pleased at the representation.” A few years later, the story was elaborated in the biography appended to Nicholas Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare: the Queen was so well pleased “with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry the Fourth” that she commanded Shakespeare “to continue it for one play more, and to show him in love.”
We do not know whether the story is true, but there is great appeal in the idea of Falstaff reincarnated by royal command and transposed from tavern and battlefield to lady’s chamber and linen basket. There is no doubt that the play’s popularity on the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage owed much to its status as a vehicle for Falstaff. And at the end of the nineteenth century, the drama underwent another transposition as it was re-created in perhaps the greatest of all Shakespearean operas, Verdi and Boito’s Falstaff. This afterlife, together with the sheer comic energy of the fat knight, means that it tends to be thought of as “his” play. So it is often forgotten that this is the only First Folio work named for its women. Or, to be more exact, the only one in which the women have the title to themselves: Juliet, Cleopatra, and Cressida have to share a billing with their lovers, while The Shrew is identified as object rather than subject (The Taming of clearly implies a tamer).
The play first appeared in print in a quarto-format text printed in 1602, with a title page listing a full roster of characters for promotional purposes: A most pleasant and excellent conceited Comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor. Intermixed with sundry variable and pleasing humours of Sir Hugh the Welsh Knight, Justice Shallow and his wise Cousin Master Slender. With the swaggering vein of Ancient Pistol and Corporal Nim. By William Shakespeare. As it hath been divers times acted by the right honourable my Lord Chamberlain’s servants. Both before her Majesty and elsewhere (the description of Slender as “wise” is a rare instance of wholesale irony on a title page). A payment to the King’s Men for a 1613 court performance of “Sir John Falstaff” probably refers to the play, but in the First Folio ten years later the “Merry Wives” stood alone at the head of the text.
In 1656 an educational theorist called Philip King complained that it was ridiculous to suggest that “the condition of all our English women may be drawn out of Shakespeare’s merry wives of Windsor.” Eight years later, the leading English female intellectual of the age, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, singled out those wives as particularly strong examples of Shakespeare’s gift for representing women: “who could describe Cleopatra better than he hath done, and many other females to his own creating, as Nan Page, Mrs Page, Mrs Ford, the Doctor’s Maid, Beatrice, Mrs Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, and others, too many to relate?” Though King disapproved and the duchess approved, they clearly agreed that The Merry Wives was one of Shakespeare’s best plays for women.
Whereas Shakespeare’s other comedies are courtship dramas that end with weddings or the promise of them, The Merry Wives of Windsor is more interested in how it is witty wives who sustain society. There is a courtship plot in which a handsome, if opportunistic, young gentleman named Master Fenton wins his girl, Anne Page, while his rivals, two comic suitors—the irascible French physician Dr. Caius and the country gentleman Master Abraham Slender, whose name reflects both his girth and his IQ—are tricked into eloping with boys. But the main focus is upon the girl’s worldly-wise mother and her equally knowing friend M
istress Alice Ford, who has the misfortune to be married to a man of pathological jealousy. In later plays—Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale—the husband’s sexual insecurity has catastrophic consequences for the wife, but here Alice knows exactly how to deploy her hand.
The play is Shakespeare’s nearest approach to farce or sitcom. People are forever rushing in and out of doors. One moment Falstaff is bundled into a stinking laundry basket and dunked in the Thames; the next he is dressed up as the old fat woman of Brentford, in whose garb he is heartily beaten. As a final indignity, he is persuaded to wear a pair of horns, and he finds himself pinched black and blue by a gaggle of children. The play tells some simple home truths about male jealousy (Ford’s false fears) and vanity (Falstaff’s ludicrous expectation that he will make his way into Alice’s bed).
WHY WINDSOR?
“The Merry Wives” indicates that this is a play in which the women will be on top. “Of Windsor” promises a comedy of English town life. This is in sharp contrast to Shakespeare’s other comedies of the late 1590s and early 1600s, with their courtly, continental, and often pastoral settings. Indeed, with the exception of the Eastcheap scenes in the Henry IV plays, Windsor is the closest Shakespeare comes to the one major dramatic genre of the age which he did not attempt: the comedy of London life. City comedy was the forte of the group of slightly younger dramatists who came onto the theater scene around the turn of the century—Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Middleton.
But Windsor is not London. Though the play includes several types familiar from city comedy—the jealous husband, the marriageable citizen’s daughter, the simpleton up from the country—the setting is more provincial town than buzzing metropolis. The dramatist’s own experience of life in Stratford-upon-Avon was probably a more formative influence on the creation of this play than any literary source of the kind that inspired most of his other comedies. The scene in which a cheeky boy called William is drilled in Latin grammar feels as close to autobiographical reminiscence as anything in Shakespeare.
Nor is Windsor a generic English town. The castle and the royal park made it synonymous with the monarchy. During the closing nocturnal scene in the park, Mistress Quickly in the role of Queen of the Fairies offers a good luck charm to Queen Elizabeth, whom the poet Edmund Spenser had immortalized a few years before under the guise of England’s Faerie Queene:
Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out.
Strew good luck, oafs, on every sacred room,
That it may stand till the perpetual doom,
In state as wholesome as in state ’tis fit,
Worthy the owner and the owner it.
Quickly’s speech goes on to make a series of very specific allusions to the Knights of the Garter, the most senior and oldest Order of English knighthood. Founded by Edward III in 1348, the Order of the Garter was reserved as the highest reward for loyalty and military merit. Membership was confined to the monarch and twenty-five knights; the founders had all served against the French at the battle of Crécy. The emblem of the Order was a blue garter. The story of its origin was that when King Edward was dancing with either his queen or the Countess of Salisbury (with whom he was in love), her garter slipped to the floor and he retrieved it and tied it to his own leg. In response to those watching, the King said “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Shame on him who thinks this evil”), which became the motto of the Order. Through such spectacles as her Accession Day tilts, Queen Elizabeth had revived many of Edward III’s chivalric rites as a way of bolstering the cult of the monarchy. During the 1590s, particular emphasis was placed on the Order of the Garter. Its spiritual home was the Chapel of St. George in Windsor.
Many scholars suppose that The Merry Wives of Windsor was especially written for a Garter ceremony, perhaps in 1597. Whether or not that was the case, there is no doubt that the equation of Windsor and the Garter made for a strong allusion to the idea of true English knighthood and absolute loyalty to the crown. That one of the main locations of the play is the Garter Inn only highlights the connection. The offstage Knights of the Garter evoked by Fairy Queen Quickly are clearly intended as an extreme contrast to the onstage figure of the debased and humiliated knight Sir John Falstaff.
WHICH FALSTAFF?
This opposition raises the question of when in Sir John’s imaginary history the action of the play is supposed to take place. The Merry Wives was unquestionably written after Henry IV Part I, where Falstaff and company first appeared in their role as misleaders of Prince Hal. There is, however, a debate among scholars as to whether the comedy appeared before, during, or after the composition of Henry IV Part II. After the second history play seems more likely, since, like Falstaff himself, Justice Shallow, Bardolph, Pistol, and Mistress Quickly have the air of familiar comic characters brought back to the stage because of their popularity in an earlier work. The shift from chronicle to comedy means an abandonment of historical specificity: the play has a very contemporary feel, creating the illusion that Sir John and his friends have jumped from the age of Henry IV into that of Queen Elizabeth. Quickly, meanwhile, has become housekeeper to a French physician resident in Windsor instead of hostess of a London tavern. A reference in the past tense to Master Fenton having “kept company with the wild prince and Poins” suggests that we are supposed to imagine the action taking place after the transformation of riotous Prince Hal into heroic King Henry V.
At the end of Henry IV Part II, the newly crowned king banishes Falstaff from his company, but allows him “competence of life.” Perhaps we are to suppose that the fat knight is now a “crown pensioner,” one of a group of retired soldiers who resided at Windsor and were expected to pray twice a day for the king in return for clothing and a small annual allowance. They were popularly known as “poor knights of Windsor.” There may be an allusion to them when Quickly, describing to Falstaff the arrival of the court at Windsor, erroneously—or teasingly—ranks “pensioners” above “earls.” If The Merry Wives was written after Henry IV Part II the play may have been Shakespeare’s compensation for his failure to deliver in Henry V on the promise that “our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it” (epilogue to Henry IV Part II)—Henry V in fact features Bardolph, Nim, Pistol, and Quickly, but no Falstaff, only a report of his death.
The action of The Merry Wives begins with Shallow boasting of his status and pedigree as a Justice of the Peace in the county of Gloucester and a gentleman with a well-established coat of arms. He is in dispute with Falstaff and has come to Windsor to seek redress from the Star Chamber or the King’s Council.
FALSTAFF Now, Master Shallow, you’ll complain of me to the king?
SHALLOW Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.
This is the play’s only reference to the king, and it is not made explicit whether Henry IV or Henry V is on the throne. The action soon veers away from the dispute: Shallow’s principal role is his attempt to marry his kinsman Slender to Anne Page, while Falstaff turns his attention to Mistress Ford. This has not prevented the spilling of centuries of scholarly ink over the first scene’s reference to deer-stealing and its wordplay on the “luces” in Shallow’s coat of arms. There is a long tradition of reading the sequence in the light of the unsubstantiated story that Shakespeare left Stratford-upon-Avon because he had been caught stealing deer from the park of the local grandee, Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote. The link was first made in the late seventeenth century by a Gloucestershire clergyman called Richard Davies:
William Shakespeare was born at Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire about 1563–64. Much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits particularly from Sir [] Lucy, who had him oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement, but his revenge was so great that he is his Justice Clodpate and calls him a great man and that in allusion to his name bore three louses rampant for his arms.
It appears that Lucy did not have a dee
r park at Charlecote, though there was a rabbit warren there, so perhaps Shakespeare was actually a “cony-catching rascal,” as Slender accuses Bardolph, Nim, and Pistol of being. Whatever personal allusion there may or may not be, for an audience the purpose of the opening scenes is to reestablish the image, familiar from Henry IV, of Falstaff and his followers as rogues and chancers, living from hand to mouth on the far edge of the law.
Heavy-drinking Bardolph, bombastic Pistol, and filching Nim are no sooner introduced than Falstaff says he needs to dismiss them because he is short of money. They come and go without being fully integrated into the plot, strongly suggesting that Shakespeare brought them on because an audience would expect them in a Falstaff play, but that he then lost interest in them. In the list of roles in Henry IV Part II, they are described as “irregular humorists,” “irregular” meaning “lawless” and “humorist” meaning a person subject to an excess of one of the four humors that made up the human temperament (melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, sanguine). The Merry Wives has strong elements of the comedy of humoral types that Ben Jonson pioneered with his Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour (1598–99). In particular, Doctor Caius is a case study in the humor of hot-blooded choler (explosive anger) and Ford’s pathological jealousy is—as in a Jonson comedy—a deformation of character produced by an unbalanced temperament.
THE COMEDY OF ENGLISHNESS
Given its close relationship to the history plays and the fact that it is the only Shakespearean comedy with an English setting, The Merry Wives is inevitably interested in questions of Englishness. The comic treatment of honor and cozening, true and false knighthood, and the nature of gentility rearticulates some of the matter of the Henry IV plays in a new key, but the most sustained exploration of national identity takes place at the level of language. Shakespeare has always been so admired for his poetry that the language of The Merry Wives has often been underrated for the simple reason that of all his plays this is the one with the highest proportion of prose. Yet its command of the prose medium is unstoppable: from first to last there is a stream of wordplay, innuendo, and hilarious linguistic misapprehension. The comic suitors are the key here: the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans and the French doctor Caius are characterized by their abuse of the English language. Extraordinary mileage is obtained from Caius’ verbal tics (“By gar,” “vat is?”) and such simple substitutions as Evans’s “f” for “v” (thus in the Latin language lesson, the grammatical term “vocative” becomes the obscene-sounding “focative”). Verbal sparring stands in for physical. Whereas in the history plays national pride comes from prowess at arms, here it is a matter of prowess at words. When the Welshman and the Frenchman prepare to fight a duel over their rivalry for Anne, Shallow and Page remove their swords and the Host says “Let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English.”
