Humors Comedy - Grace Tiffany (essay date 1992)
Grace Tiffany (essay date 1992)
SOURCE: Tiffany, Grace. “Falstaff's False Staff: ‘Jonsonian’ Asexuality in The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Comparative Drama 26, no. 3 (fall 1992): 254-70.
[In the following essay, Tiffany contends that Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor is an early experiment in Jonsonian humors comedy, and that Shakespeare participated in the formation of the genre.]
The Folger Shakespeare Theater's use of a female actor as Falstaff in its 1990 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, besides its witty reversal of the Elizabethan convention of all-male casting, had this to recommend it: the “distaff” Falstaff, an embodiment of sexlessness, confronted audiences with the curious absence of regenerative possibility which distinguishes Merry Wives from “Shakespearean” romantic comedy. Unlike, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream, which creates a world capable of...
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