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 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).