The Merry Wives of Windsor (2 page)

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.

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:

It appears that Lucy did not have a deer 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.

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.”

Comedy at the expense of foreigners for their abuse of the English tongue might be described as crudely patriotic or mildly xenophobic. A deeper patriotism and a richer form of comedy come from the capacity of the English language to turn adversity to advantage. That is the art of Falstaff, as it is in a more general sense the art of Shakespeare and his actors. Falstaff is repeatedly humiliated, but his mastery of the English language always gives him the last word. On discovering that he has been pinched and beaten not by real goblins but by Sir Hugh and his class of children, Falstaff magnificently retorts “Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?” and then “I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel.” He is physically humiliated (“dejected”), but his linguistic gift never fails. Like his creator, he can seemingly conjure anything into language. Again and again, a bodily battering is transformed into the opportunity for a verbal display in which a tone of feigned incredulity creates a unique combination of excess and humility, self-delusion and self-knowledge, that is irresistible to a theater audience:

By redescribing farcical action in words of mock-epic excess, verbally reenacting the ducking from the point of view of the ducked, Falstaff embodies his creator’s greatest achievement: the triumph of the English language.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

Because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, with some plays there are major editorial difficulties. Decisions have to be made as to the relative authority of the early printed editions, the pocket format “Quartos” published in Shakespeare’s lifetime and the elaborately produced “First Folio” text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press after his death by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The
Merry Wives of Windsor
appeared in a Quarto of 1602 of dubious authority (reprinted in 1619), which was apparently a memorial report of a text adapted and shortened for performance, and in a much fuller form in the First Folio. The Quarto text omits much of Act 5, and shows evidence of theatrical adaptation in Acts 3 and 4 in its transposition of scenes and of dialogue. The Folio text was apparently prepared by Ralph Crane, the company scribe, and is unusually clear of profanity in accordance with the 1606 Parliamentary Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players, which forbade theater companies taking God’s name in vain. As Crane’s texts are often not so censorious, the nature of the copy from which he was working was possibly a post-1606 theatrical text that had itself been expurgated.

The following notes highlight various aspects of the editorial process and indicate conventions used in the text of this edition:

Lists of Parts
are supplied in the First Folio for only six plays, not including
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, so the list here is editorially supplied. Capitals indicate that part of the name used for speech headings in the script (thus “Master FENTON, a young gentleman, in love with Anne Page”).

Locations
are provided by the Folio for only two plays, of which
The Merry Wives of Windsor
is not one. Eighteenth-century editors, working in an age of elaborately realistic stage sets, were the first to provide detailed locations (
“another part of the town”
). Given that Shakespeare wrote for a bare stage and often an imprecise sense of place, we have relegated locations to the explanatory notes at the foot of the page, where they are given at the beginning of each scene where the imaginary location is different from the one before. In the case of
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, the action is set entirely in the small Berkshire town of Windsor, situated at the foot of one of the oldest of the royal castles.

Act and Scene Divisions
were provided in the Folio in a much more thoroughgoing way than in the Quartos. Sometimes, however, they were erroneous or omitted; corrections and additions supplied by editorial tradition are indicated by square brackets. Five-act division is based on a classical model, and act breaks provided the opportunity to replace the candles in the indoor Blackfriars playhouse which the King’s Men used after 1608, but Shakespeare did not necessarily think in terms of a five-part structure of dramatic composition. The Folio convention is that a scene ends when the stage is empty. Nowadays, partly under the influence of film, we tend to consider a scene to be a dramatic unit that ends with either a change of imaginary location or a significant passage of time within the narrative. Shakespeare’s fluidity of composition accords well with this convention, so in addition to act and scene numbers we provide a
running scene
count in the right margin at the beginning of each new scene, in the typeface used for editorial directions. Where there
is a scene break caused by a momentary bare stage, but the location does not change and extra time does not pass, we use the convention
running scene continues
. There is inevitably a degree of editorial judgment in making such calls, but the system is very valuable in suggesting the pace of the plays.

Speakers’ Names
are often inconsistent in Folio. We have regularized speech headings, but retained an element of deliberate inconsistency in entry directions, in order to give the flavor of Folio. Thus ROBIN is always so-called in his speech headings, but is often referred to as “Page” in entry directions.