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.”

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:

But mark the sequel, Master Broom. I suffered the pangs of three several deaths: first, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether: next, to be compassed, like a good bilbo in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head, and then, to be stopped in like a strong distillation with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease. Think of that, a man of my kidney, think of that — that am as subject to heat as butter — a man of continual dissolution and thaw: it was a miracle to scape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing hot, in that surge, like a horse-shoe. Think of that — hissing hot — think of that, Master Broom.

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.

ABOUT THE TEXT

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.