The Merry Wives of Windsor

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.BookishMall.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 Mistress 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.