The Merry Wives Of Windsor – William Shakespeare, c. 1597 ★★½

Forced Farce Still Amuses

Farce does not age like fine wine or mahogany furniture. But it can still draw a chuckle with the right mindset. Part of that involves some grounding in the material; more depends on not expecting too much.

With The Merry Wives Of Windsor, I find I enjoy it more accepting that it is a minor work. Critics do rate it fairly low in William Shakespeare’s oeuvre, a royal command sketch best known for its title and the way it uses (or misuses) Falstaff, one of comedy’s great characters.

All in all, though, as weak plays go, it’s actually not bad. It is chock full of loose ends and bad puns, yet it does put on an entertaining and diverting show, the final goal.

In Windsor, near the royal palace of the Queen, two housewives discover themselves in receipt of indecent proposals from a fat, dissolute noble, Sir John Falstaff. Indignant, the pair punish him with tricks.

In the meantime, subplots abound involving stolen horses, sputtering duels, and mislaid brides. If Shakespeare had landed more than one of these subplots convincingly, this might have been a terrific little play.

An idealized scene from The Merry Wives Of Windsor as painted in 1843 by William Powell Frith. Falstaff gets farther with one of the wives in this moment than he ever does in the actual play. Image from http://www.artnet.com/artists/william-powell-frith.

Falstaff does his part to keep things bouncing:

FALSTAFF

I have writ me here a letter to her: and here
another to Page’s wife, who even now gave me good
eyes too, examined my parts with most judicious
oeillades; sometimes the beam of her view gilded my
foot, sometimes my portly belly.

PISTOL

Then did the sun on dunghill shine. [Act I, scene iii, lines 53-58]

Fat jokes abound in The Merry Wives Of Windsor; so do japes about Falstaff’s character and the shadiness of his companions. But while Falstaff is the focus here – reputedly because Queen Elizabeth I wanted a play about him – he doesn’t actually have much to do in it.

More dominant are its title characters, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, who really glom on punishing Falstaff’s misspent attentions. As Mistress Page puts it: “We’ll leave a proof, by that which we will do/Wives may be merry, and yet honest too. [IV, ii, l. 95-96]

Boiling down the essence of The Merry Wives Of Windsor. Image from https://goodticklebrain.com/the-merry-wives-of-windsor.

That is the money line as far as the whole play is concerned; these women play rough, but with a moral purpose. For a playwright who made cuckoldry a defining element of his comedies, Shakespeare takes a different tack here by making constancy, not straying, the motive force.

Critics through the ages have noted how Falstaff is a frail echo of his life-loving self as seen in Henry IV Part I and Part II. Mark Van Doren describes him in this play as “no longer a man of mind but a tub of meat to be bounced downstairs and thrown into the muddy river.”

Indeed, he gets beaten, burned, and dumped in the Thames with a pile of dirty linen. Falstaff here is less schemer and more shuttlecock; unbelievably pathetic in his gullibility. It has been suggested Shakespeare was reluctant to revive Falstaff, who had been conceived in the Henry IV plays as comic relief, not the whole show. Will certainly doesn’t seem invested in a fuller depiction of Falstaff.

Falstaff in disguise as an old lady, about to get a thrashing from Ford. Falstaff's inability to learn from his mistakes as he returns for more abuse is a principle source of comedy in this play, and also much critical frustration. From an 1801 engraving by Thos Ryder. Image from https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:h989r515n.

Still, this is one of Shakespeare’s most antic comedies. The one successful subplot concerns Mistress Page’s daughter, a candidate for marriage. The principal contestants are fiery French doctor Caius, whom Ma Page favors; wimpy schoolteacher Slender, the candidate of Page the husband; and a repentant bravo, one Fenton, who seems to lack any visible support but is certainly determined.

The play kicks off with protracted discussion around a bitter argument between Falstaff and one Justice Shallow (one of several characters here who appeared with Falstaff in the Henry IV plays). Much of the fourth act involves the theft of horses by some suspicious Germans. Both those subplots are left unresolved; according to William Green’s introduction in my Signet Classics edition, a sure sign of haste in the writing.

The play is on shaky ground in other ways. The Henry IV plays had been set in a specific historic period some 170 years before; yet The Merry Wives references people and places around Queen Elizabeth’s court. There’s even a shout out to old Beth herself:

PISTOL

Elves, list your names; silence, you airy toys.
Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap:
Where fires thou find’st unraked and hearths unswept,
There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry.
Our radiant Queen hates sluts and sluttery. [V, v, l. 43-47]

The title page for a 1602 Quarto edition of Merry Wives Of Windsor, the oldest extant edition, prominently advertising Falstaff's participation. Debate continues whether the play was written after before, or even during the writing of Henry IV Part II. Image from https://oxfraud.com/TMWOW.

Falstaff at times displays his old charm. His come-on letter to Mistress Page, which she indignantly reads aloud, is a comic highpoint reminiscent of the cagey clown who amused Prince Hal back when:

“You are not young, no more
am I; go to then, there’s sympathy: you are merry,
so am I; ha, ha! then there’s more sympathy: you
love sack, and so do I; would you desire better
sympathy?” [II, i, l. 6-10]

What is funnier about this mash-note: that he thought it might work, or that he employs the exact same text wooing Mistress Ford?

Yet Falstaff’s motives throughout this play are unclear. At the outset, he seems interested in the two wives only for their wealth: “They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both.” [I, iii, l. 66-67] But as the play develops, his interest becomes more sexual, and thus more pathetic being they are neither fooled nor attracted by him.

Falstaff (wearing horns) is set upon by Windsorites disguised as fairies at the antic fifth-act windup of Merry Wives Of Windsor, as performed by members of the American Shakespeare Center in 2014. Merry Wives has been a popular-enough play over the years, at least on stage. Image from https://americanshakespearecenter.com/events/the-merry-wives-of-windsor-2014/.

Mistress Ford’s ultra-jealous husband is set up into several near-miss confrontations with Falstaff. Falstaff alternately evades him by hiding in a basket and disguising himself as a woman. Ford is maybe the best original character in this play, very one-note but at least amusing in his lunatic desire to catch his wife in the act of adultery, so as to gain the hollow satisfaction of proving himself right.

FORD

I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh
the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my
aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling
gelding, than my wife with herself. [II, ii, l. 290-294]

The Welshman mentioned above is another character unique to this play, much of whose humor is driven by his accent. The same is true for the Frenchman, who says things like: “If dere be one or two, I shall make-a the turd.” [III, iii, l. 219]

It is funny stuff, if more in line with Inspector Clouseau than the Bard.

Stagings of Merry Wives Of Windsor often monkey with the era when the play was set. Normally this smacks of cultural revisionism, but here Shakespeare wasn't at all clear himself on when this play is set. Image from a 2018 Royal Shakespeare Company production at https://www.rsc.org.uk/the-merry-wives-of-windsor/past-productions/fiona-laird-2018-production. 

The play wraps things up with a fifth act where Falstaff is assaulted by elves and fairies, actually the good people of Windsor in disguise. He is then called out for trying to sneak into the beds of other men’s wives. Meanwhile, the Pages’ daughter defies the wishes of both her parents by making off with Fenton, a lesson in love even the parents take to heart:

FORD

In love the heavens themselves do guide the state;
Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate. [V, v, l. 229-230]

Yet when the play is done, Falstaff is invited to dine with his tormentors, one character constant here being his desire to eat at others’ expense.

The Merry Wives Of Windsor might enjoy more critical regard had Falstaff been left out. In that case, of course, it probably would not have been written in the first place. It may suffer from higher expectations being the product of Shakespeare, but I doubt it would be remembered much today had another Elizabethan scribe produced it.

I think the play would have worked better with Falstaff, but without his usual buddies in support. Pistol, Nym, and Mistress Quickly all have lines here, as does Bardolph, who makes a record fourth appearance in a Shakespeare play. But all are rendered supercargo; Falstaff dismisses the three male characters from his retinue early on, and so they float around the sidelines while the Pages and Fords dominate.

While elements of Merry Wives Of Windsor show up in Orson Welles's famous Chimes At Midnight, the play has not often made its way to cinemas. In 1965, there was an Austrian-British co-production of Merry Wives co-starring Colette Boky, at left, as Mistress Ford and Norman Foster as Falstaff.

Ultimately the main fault of the play is the one-sided nature of its slapstick. Falstaff takes a licking while everyone else keeps on tssk-ing. Yes, Ford’s all-consuming jealousy is played for (and gets) laughs, but otherwise Falstaff is the butt of all the jokes.

FALSTAFF

I would all the world might be cozened; for I have
been cozened and beaten too. If it should come to
the ear of the court, how I have been transformed
and how my transformation hath been washed and
cudgeled, they would melt me out of my fat drop by
drop and liquor fishermen’s boots with me. [V, v, l. 88-93]

Going with the theory this was a rush job, one can see how the Bard cut corners. A better play would have had more give-and-take, especially considering Falstaff’s craftiness in his other plays.

Merry Wives will not impress you, especially given the vast expanse of time that has hoovered away since it was created and written. But give it a chance and you will likely find as I did moments of real enjoyment during this peek into another era…whichever era it is supposed to be.