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 transformation and renewal by means of a sexual energy that dominates language and fuels action, The Merry Wives of Windsor presents a static community for which transformation is a threat, language lacks creativity, and a dearth of real sexual desire parallels the characters' linguistic barrenness. In bourgeois Windsor, the unsavory characters—Ford and Falstaff—are impelled by jealousy or greed masquerading as sexuality, while the heroes—Mistresses Ford and Page—are motivated to protect rather than change their world by frustrating Ford's and Falstaff's damaging vices and expelling them from the community. The play's language correspondingly is not imbued with the poetic power to transform; it serves instead repetitively and prosaically to express the villains' unchanging humors, or alternatively is employed medicinally by the heroes to deflate those humors. The consequent absence of transformative and regenerative possibility in both plot and language marks Merry Wives as an early experiment in what we now call Jonsonian humors comedy. This characteristic demonstrates Shakespeare's early participation in the fashioning of that genre.¹

The Merry Wives of Windsor seems in fact to have been the first or second humors comedy performed in Elizabethan England and may well have functioned as something of a dramatic archetype for Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, which appeared a year later (and in which Shakespeare the actor played a leading role).²Merry Wives, which is thought to have been written for the 1597 spring Garter Feast at Westminister,³ was composed about the same time as George Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth, long considered the first humors play. Whatever the true order of composition, the chronological proximity of Chapman's, Shakespeare's, and Jonson's plays suggests the theater's general interest in the formation of this new type of comedy in the late 1590's; and Shakespeare's appearance in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour in 1598, coupled with the fact that it was Shakespeare's own Lord Chamberlain's Company which first staged Jonson's play, suggests Shakespeare's particular interest in the form.⁴

In participating in the formation of humors comedy, Shakespeare was developing a drama which used language in a way antithetical to its use in romantic comedy. Broadly speaking, the language of romantic comedy opens up realms of imaginative possibility for its characters, while the language of satiric humors comedy serves mainly to express a humor character's imaginative limitations or, in the mouth of the wit, mockingly to deflate another's humor. Thus Helena's declaration of love for the churlish Demetrius in A Midsummer Night's Dream, which asserts that “Things base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (I.i.232-33), contrasts jarringly with the contemptuous sentiment expressed by Truewit toward Jack Daw and Amorous La Foole at the close of Jonson's Epicoene: scoffing at Daw's and La Foole's “own imagin'd persons” as valiant lovers, Truewit asserts that the two are in fact merely “they, that when no merit or fortune can make [them] hope to enioy [women's] bodies, will yet … make their fame suffer” (V.iv.233-34, 237-39).⁵ Where Helena's ennobling poetry endows imagination with the power to transform a “base and vile” man to “form and dignity,” Truewit's deflationary prose punctures Daw's and La Foole's imaginary form and dignity and reveals them to be truly base and vile.

In humors comedy, the language of the wit deflates, like a rapier or lance. In the mouth of the foolish humors character, language is stunted, expressing mental limitations. We see this in the “tag speech” so common to Jonson's plays in which a character is marked by the parroting of others' words (Mathew's and Jack Daw's plagiarized poetry in Every Man in His Humour and Epicoene, respectively) or by the mindless repetition of a single phrase (Wasp's “turd i' your teeth” in Bartholomew Fair). The closedness and stagnancy of the resulting discourse demonstrate the character's imaginative sterility: his or her inability to originate language.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is like Jonson's comedies and unlike most of Shakespeare's in that it develops similar patterns of “boxed-in” discourse. The speech of Nym, Falstaff's disgruntled follower, is dominated by the word “humor” (“The humor rises; it is good. Humor me. …” “I thank thee for that humor” [I.iii.56-57, 64]), a fact which has convinced some critics that Shakespeare was merely satirizing the new humors genre.⁶ But other characters use repetitive speech as well. “Said I well?” the Host of the Garter Inn continually and mechanically asks after he has spoken (I.iii.11, II.i.218, II.iii.89, 95). The Welsh parson, Evans, and the French physician, Caius, are also marked by what William Carroll calls an “idiosyncratic verbal quirk,”⁷ which is simply their consistent failure to pronounce English correctly. And Mistress Quickly's running-gag malapropisms are a similarly redundant “quirk”; mistaking “allicholy” for “melancholy” (I.iv.154), “infection” for “affection” (II.ii.115), and “speciously” for “specially” (IV.v.111), she earns laughs through the sameness of her errors rather than through linguistic inventiveness.⁸ These characters' humor—and their humors—is thus seen to lie in dysfunctional speech rather than in verbal mastery.

The language of the main characters, Mistresses Ford and Page, Ford, and Falstaff, is allowed freer rein, but it too is restricted by the humors format of the play. Mistresses Ford and Page, the play's wits, are charmingly inventive in the plots they devise to humiliate Falstaff, but their language, like their plots, is ultimately directed toward destruction rather than creation: the puncturing of Falstaff's silly fantasy of himself as a lover. Their deflationary wit in the play's catastrophe might have inspired Jonson's Truewit's previously cited remarks to Jack Daw and Amorous La Foole: “Why, Sir John,” the wives ask mockingly, “do you think, though we would have thrust virtue out of our hearts by the head and shoulders, and have given ourselves without scruple to hell, that ever the devil could have made you our delight?” (V.v.146-50). Like Jonson's Truewit, the wives use clever discourse to annihilate unwholesome fantasy.

And in humors comedy, fantasy tends to be not only unwholesome but unpoetic as well. Ford's jealous fantasy determines and limits his conversation; whether in conversation with Falstaff or in anguished soliloquy, he can talk of nothing but Mistress Ford's supposed infidelity (“See the hell of having a false woman! My bed shall be abus'd …” [II.ii.291-92]). And unlike Othello's or Leontes' discourses of jealousy, which reach terrifying imaginative heights,⁹ Ford's language shrinks in comic self-compression to one obsessively repeated word as his humor escalates: “Cuckold! Wittol!—Cuckold”; “… cuckold, cuckold, cuckold!” (II.ii.299, 313-14). The pattern recurs where, awash in what Evans will call “fery fantastical humors and jealousies” as he fails to locate Falstaff in his wife's buck-basket, Ford screams, “Buck! … Buck, buck, buck! ay, buck!” (III.iii.170-71, 157-58). In Ford's hysterical repetitions, we hear the ultimate compression of the human imagination to animal size; he sounds like a chicken. Ben Jonson was later to make standard this correspondence between foolishness and animality; Jonson's Mrs. Otters and Sir Pols, like Shakespeare's Ford, are comically reduced by their association with small, funny beasts. Shakespeare's Ford is an early type of the mindlessly chattering humors figure, locked into an unimaginative, bestial speech system.

Even Falstaff, whose language is more interesting than anyone else's in Merry Wives, is, as most critics acknowledge, a mere verbal shadow of the Falstaff of the Henry plays.¹⁰ Although still capable of outlandish conceits—“my belly's as cold as if I had swallow'd snowballs for pills” (Merry Wives III.v.23)—this Falstaff is unable to construct the imaginative verbal escapes with which he foiled Prince Hal's mockery in the histories. In I Henry IV when Falstaff is challenged for his cowardly flight from the disguised prince at Gad's Hill—“Come, let's hear, Jack, what trick hast thou now?”—Falstaff improvises an elaborate, fourteen-line response commencing, “By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye. Why, hear you, my masters, was it for me to kill the heir-apparent?” (I Henry IV II.iv.265-69). Later in the same play, Falstaff, after ignominiously collapsing at Shrewsbury, similarly gains the prince's indulgence as well as battlefield honors through his preposterous claim to have killed Hotspur (V.iv.138-43). These imaginative rhetorical defenses contrast markedly with Falstaff's lame responses when confronted with his own misbehavior in The Merry Wives of Windsor. For example, in this play's first scene when Justice Shallow charges Falstaff with having “beaten my men, kill'd my deer, and broke open my lodge” and demands, “This shall be answer'd,” Falstaff only briefly and unimaginatively retorts, “I will answer it straight: I have done all this. That is now answer'd” (I.i.112-16). And his final gulling at the hands (literally) of the Windsor community, who, disguised as fairies, surround, pinch, and verbally insult him, totally destroys his witty capacity for rebuttal to the point where he declares his inability to respond: “Well, I am your theme. You have the start of me, I am dejected. I am not able to answer …” (V.v.161-62). Pat Carroll, who played Falstaff in the 1990 Folger production, links Falstaff's verbal incapacity in The Merry Wives of Windsor with his susceptibility to theatrical neutering; she feels that this Falstaff is accessible to a female actor because of the “total de-bristling” of his language. “In the Henry plays,” Carroll asserted, “he was always able to get out of it, and it was always with his mouth.”¹¹ That verbally virile Falstaff, continually able to reauthor his relationship to the world with a witty answer, is in The Merry Wives of Windsor only the impotent, “dejected theme” of others' mockery.

His “total de-bristling” is, of course, the necessary comic result for the humors drama, which enacts the healthy purgation of diseased imaginations. Both Falstaff's vain fantasies, called a “dissolute disease” by Mistress Page (III.iii.191-92), and what Falstaff calls Ford's “continual 'larum of jealousy” (III.v.71-72) are appropriately mocked and deflated by the events of the play. The deflationary process, effecting as it does the safeguarding of the wives' chastity and reputations, is of the Jonsonian satiric rather than the Shakespearean comic pattern as usually defined—a definition concisely summarized by H. B. Charlton:

Shakespearian comedy … does not assume that the conditions and the requisites of man's welfare have been certainly established, and are therefore a sanctity only to be safeguarded. It speculates imaginatively on modes, not of preserving a good already reached, but of enlarging and extending the possibilities of this and other kinds of good. … Hence Shakespearian comedy is not finally satiric; it is poetic.¹²

Ironically, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor helped originate the alternate, non-Shakespearean genre of satiric comedy, which is concerned to “safeguard” communal “welfare” and “preserve a good already reached.” As Anne Barton puts it, in rejecting Falstaff's deluded schemes, Windsor

simply closes ranks and reaffirms its original values against an outsider. … The end of the play does not accord with Shakespeare's usual comic practice. … [T]here is no sense that a new or transformed society leaves Herne's oak.¹³

It is the stability and concreteness of Windsor in the specific form of the merry wives' inviolable chastity that Falstaff threatens with destructive change. The terms with which Ford imagines Falstaff's attack emphasize the likeness of his wife's virtue to an embattled fort: Falstaff's seduction of Mistress Ford could “drive her … from the ward of her purity, her reputation, her marriage vow, and a thousand other her defenses, which are now too strongly embattled …” (II.ii.248-51). The power which Falstaff imagines he has (and which Ford imagines Falstaff has) to alter Mistress Ford is a destructive power; it would corrode her defenses. In Windsor, transformation is to be feared. As William Carroll observes, “Shapeshifting is bad form.”¹⁴

This fear of change is a logical constituent of drama that presents selfhood as a fixed good and heroes as consequently bound to defend their prior integrity against the dangers of imaginative role-play. In “Jonsonian” humors drama, make-believe holds little regenerative power for the community. Falstaff's swaggering “show” of himself as “young gallant” (II.i.22) and Ford's paranoid dream of himself as cuckold alienate their subjects from their true selves—and threaten Mistresses Ford and Page with like losses of self. After reading Falstaff's “mash” note, Mistress Page puzzles:

it makes me almost ready to wrangle with mine own honesty. I'll entertain myself like one that I am not acquainted withal; for sure unless he know some strain in me that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me in this fury.

(II.i.84-89)

The play shrinks from the danger to real identity posed by an imagination which is powerless to generate valid new ways of being and hence can only construct false, damaging identities. Its recoil from imaginative self-creation implies a “Jonsonian” distrust of the theatrical—a distrust identified by Jonas Barish¹⁵ and represented in this passage from Jonson's Timber, or Discoveries:

I have considered our whole life is like a play wherein every man, forgetful of himself, is in travail with expression of another. Nay, we so insist in imitating others as we cannot, when it is necessary, return to ourselves; like children that imitate the vices of stammerers so long, till at last they become such, and make the habit to another nature. …¹⁶

According to this view, theatrical speaking is an anti-creative act which can render only invalid “selves.” Such theatrically conceived identities are associated with failed, dysfunctional speech (stammering). In “Jonsonian” drama, language is thus limited to a binary capability, exercised in mutually exclusive ways by what Ann Blake calls “two unchanging groups of fools and clever men.”¹⁷ Used erroneously by the fools, it can miscreate false “selves”; used correctly by clever men (or women), it can destroy the false “selves” so generated.

“Jonsonian” or satiric dramatic language, then, is at best an instrument to protect what is integral and pre-existent. It cannot create new worlds or new identifies. Characters in humors comedy cannot, like A Midsummer Night's Dream's Helena does with her Demetrius, recast faults as virtues through imaginative poetry; such recasting is a suspect operation which is inevitably foiled by the keen lance of the hero's wit. Reformation is thus only restoration to true form, as when Ford renounces the “heresy” of jealousy (see Merry Wives IV.iv.9) and Falstaff is publicly “Falstaffed,” simultaneously disclosed and described as “a hodge pudding,” a “bag of flax,” and a “puff'd man,” “Old, cold, [and] wither'd” (V.v.151-53). The resistance to actual metamorphosis in The Merry Wives of Windsor is registered even by the villainous: Falstaff, terrorized by the disguised Evans in Windsor Forest, protests; “Heavens defend me from that Welsh fairy, lest he transform me to a piece of cheese!” (V.v.81-82).

It follows logically that a play in which language is powerless to engender new modes of being should resist sexuality with all its implicit regenerative energy. And in The Merry Wives of Windsor the sexless solution to social ills complements the linguistic rejection of transformation for restabilization. Unlike The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, and The Winter's Tale—indeed, unlike almost all of Shakespeare's comedies—Merry Wives avoids a multiple-marriage or marital-reunion plot resolution, while the romantic outcome is marginalized by relegation to the secondary plot involving Fenton and Anne Page, the “shadowy young lovers.”¹⁸ The extreme discomfiture of Slender's and Caius' marital hopes through the crossed designs of Page, Mistress Page, and Mistress Quickly—designs which cause the suitors to “marry” boys dressed as women while Fenton elopes with Anne—dramatizes the resistance to socio-sexual regeneration that renders this play “un-Shakespearean.” Indeed, the final scene, in which Shallow's and Caius' “brides” unmask and reveal themselves to be male, looks forward to the denouement of Jonson's Epicoene, where Morose is similarly un-wived and sexually mocked. Like that of Jonson's play, Merry Wives' comic resolution depends on frustration rather than consummation for the greater part of the cast.

But the deeper sterility of both “Jonsonian” dramas lies beneath the obvious turn from sexuality in the plays' foiled marriages and is concerned with virtually all the characters' lack of significant sexual motive. Like Morose's desire for a wife, which springs from a miserly wish to disinherit his nephew, Falstaff's sexual stalking of Mistresses Ford and Page is motivated by a perceived economic necessity; he is “almost out at heels”—or, as Pistol comically observes, “Young ravens must have food” (I.iii.31, 35). The true objects of Falstaff's attack are Ford and Page, men “of substance good” (I.iii.37) whose wives are only important insofar as they offer access to their husbands' wealth. “I will use her as the key of the cuckoldy rogue's coffer,” Falstaff boasts of Mistress Ford (II.ii.273-74). Earlier, he has observed that “she has all the rule of her husband's purse” and that Mistress Page “bears the purse too; she is a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty. I will be cheaters to them both, and they shall be exchequers to me” (I.iii.52-53, 68-71). As in Epicoene, an apparent sexual motive masks a genuine financial power-play. Slender, Anne Page's most reluctant suitor, is similarly impelled toward courtship by Anne's monetary worth rather than by her personal qualities. When Evans informs him that “seven hundred pounds of moneys, and gold, and silver, is her grandsire upon his death's-bed … give,” the sluggish Slender shows his first spark of interest: “Did her grandsire leave her seven hundred pound?” (I.i.50-54, 58-59). As William Carroll has noticed, this “recurring displacement of natural impulses by commercial self-interest” is found to be “typical of all the characters in the play except Fenton and Anne.”¹⁹

It is certainly true of Ford, whose treatment of his wife's virtue as his own threatened personal possession prefigures the obsessive proprietary jealousy of Kitely and Corvino in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour and Volpone. Ford's comment that “I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, Parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vitae bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself” (II.ii.302-05) reifies his wife's identity by associating it with sexual honor, itself rendered a static commodity by its association with butter, cheese, liquor, and livestock. Ford's fear of identity-fracturing in Mistress Ford—he will not trust his “Wife with herself”—echoes Mistress Page's earlier dismayed response to Falstaff's seduction letter: “I'll entertain myself like one that I am not acquainted withal; for sure unless he know some strain in me that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me. …” Both Ford and Mistress Page, objectifying selfhood, express the view that displacement from a “true” identity is both possible and dangerous; one can be “forgetful of himself,” to recall Jonson's phrase in Discoveries. But Ford, surpassing Mistress Page in this objectifying act, reduces his wife's selfhood/sexual honor to his own personal treasure. Like Kitely in Jonson's 1616 folio edition of Every Man in His Humour who (in Ford-like soliloquy) frames his fears of sexual betrayal in economic terms—“Who will not iudge him worthie to be rob'd, / That sets his doores wide open to a thiefe, / And shewes the fellon, where his treasure lies?” (III.iii.15-17)—and like Corvino, who locks his Celia in a room like a jewel in a strongbox (Volpone II.v), Ford is impelled by miserliness rather than sexual energy. He and Falstaff represent the principle that, in Anne Parten's words, “it is perfectly possible for a man to be inclined toward jealousy without loving and toward adultery without lusting. A concern for guarding or accumulating property supplies an entirely adequate alternate motivation.”²⁰

Just as Ford and Falstaff lack significant sexual motive, the play as a whole lacks romantic trepidation. Besides Fenton, the only young suitor for Anne's hand is the “softly-sprighted” Slender (I.iv.24), who “cannot abide the smell of hot meat” (I.i.285-86) and, as noted, is reluctant to have anything to do with the young woman. Justice Shallow's concern over whether Slender could even perform physically were his suit successful—a concern implicit in his question, “Cousin Abraham Slender, can you love her? … Can you love the maid?” (I.i.232, 243)—seems well founded: having successfully obtained an interview with Anne, Slender disclaims all personal interest, saying, “Truly, for mine own part, I would little or nothing with you. Your father and my uncle hath made motions” (III.iv.62-64). Mistresses Ford's and Page's sexual power is similarly curbed by the plays' references to their ages; Mistress Ford is “not young” (II.i.112), and Mistress Page is, by her own admission, past “the holiday-time of [her] beauty” (II.i.2). Finally, the critical attention paid to the Windsor community's repudiation of Falstaff's unwholesome libido—Nancy Cotton calls the public mocking of Falstaff in the play's final scene “symbolic castration”²¹—has obscured the fact that that libido has always been mostly bravado, employed in pursuit of cash. Falstaff is “wellnigh worn to pieces with age” (II.i.21-22), “Old, cold, [and] wither'd” (V.v.153).

Generally speaking, sexual energy in humors drama is an unrealized phantom; what looks like sex is usually something else just as what look like wives to Morose, Caius, and Slender are actually boys in women's clothing. Humors comedies are finally not about sexual jealousy or desire at all; they are about greed, which, masquerading as libido, hides a profound sexual avoidance that corresponds to these comic worlds' resistance to regenerative change.

It follows that, where cross-dressing in romantic comedy opens up new dimensions of sexual possibility, cross-dressing in humors comedy merely confirms sexual foreclosure. Viola as “Cesario” in Twelfth Night and Rosalind as “Ganymede” in As You Like It, so far from losing sexual power garbed as males, actually trigger erotic reaction: Olivia responds romantically to “Cesario” as does Phoebe to “Ganymede,” and these responses initiate Olivia's and Phoebe's progress to sexual fulfillment with real male characters. In contrast, Falstaff's disguise as the “fat woman of Brainford” during his final escape from Ford's house further muffles an already provisional sexual nature, adding to it another layer of sexual impossibility. Unlike Viola's and Rosalind's disguises, Falstaff's fools no one but the brain-sick Ford. Says Evans, “I like not when a oman has a great peard. I spy a great peard under his muffler” (IV.ii.193-94).

The play's most explicit rejection of the fantasy of sexual change comes in its final scene, where Windsor communally affirms its original moral sufficiency and consequently recoils from transformative engagement. Although critics since Northrop Frye have argued that the Windsor Forest scene ritually transforms Windsor in much the same way that the world of the Athenian wood transfigures Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream,²² and although, as Peter Evans notes, producers have historically staged this scene so that “Windsor Forest … drives in tandem with the wood of Athens,”²³ I believe the scene can best be understood with reference to the differences it invokes between its dramatic world and that of the earlier play, which Jan Kott has called “the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays.”²⁴

The Windsor Forest episode, in fact, merely parodies the events in the Athenian wood. Where A Midsummer Night's Dream offers genuine transformation and communal regeneration through the agency of real fairies and authentic human sexuality, The Merry Wives of Windsor resists sexual adventure by exposing it as unhealthy fantasy and does so through the ministrations of fake fairies who strip Falstaff of his false disguise. William Carroll, who calls A Midsummer Night's Dream “the most explicitly metamorphic of Shakespeare's comedies” and reads sexuality as a force mysteriously intrinsic to the very language of change—he sees “amor in metamorphosis”—argues that Bottom's literal transfiguration to an ass parallels Falstaff's metaphorical transformation to a stag in his “Herne the Hunter” outfit. Both transformations, Carroll believes, embody the drama's encounter with the “monstrous,” which he astutely argues is “the way to marriage, to achieved eros.”²⁵ And it is true that Falstaff's change to a stag is like Bottom's change to an ass in one way: like Bottom, Falstaff is an ass, whose theatrical animalization helps to demonstrate that fact; Falstaff himself does finally “begin to perceive that I am made an ass” (Merry Wives V.v.119). But Falstaff's monstrousness, unlike Bottom's, has no further value (as William Carroll argues it does); it is a false and, above all, inappropriate monstrousness which lacks the transformative power to move him “to achieved eros.” It exposes him as an ass so that he can stop being one, specifically by ceasing to chase the merry wives. Bottom's literal “translation,” in contrast, is comically celebrated with an apparently consummated “marriage” to Titania (see III.i.197-201). Further, despite William Carroll's contention that Bottom is given an ass head only, the play slyly suggests otherwise in a way which adds to the events' sexual charge. The rehumanized Bottom's amazed recollection of his “dream”—“Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but [a patch'd] fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had” (IV.i.208-11)—gains erotic significance when we consider that from classical times the ass, as Jan Kott reports, “was credited with the strongest sexual potency and … the longest and hardest phallus.”²⁶ The translated Bottom's sexual encounter with Titania, who as a result of Oberon's and Puck's magical ministrations responds erotically to his monstrousness, thus helps to create the play's general involvement with marriage and sexual gratification. Ultimately, the play will unite or reunite four couples, three of whom retire “to bed” at the drama's close (V.i.368, 370).

The falsely translated Falstaff's painfully non-sexual encounter with the pinching Windsorites, on the other hand, represents The Merry Wives of Windsor's consistent turn from consummation of sexual fantasy, as is fitting for a play wherein such consummation would be transgressive rather than redemptive. Sexual congress between the wives and Falstaff is avoided, as is marital success for two of the three suitors, who end up with male brides. So far from achieving ritualistic sexual renewal through its encounter with the “monstrous,” the Windsor community mocks and expels the symbolically half-human beast in deer costume. In this Windsor's comic world differs from Athens, which assimilates Bottom's sexually charged monstrousness into the overall regenerative pattern of the play. Likewise, it differs from The Tempest's magic island, whose sexually dangerous monster, having threatened to people the “isle with Calibans” by violating Miranda's honor (I.ii.347-51), is nonetheless accepted as a necessary part of the comic community through Prospero's ultimate admission: “This thing of darkness I / Acknowledge mine” (V.i.275-76). And it differs from Illyria, where Viola's seeming double gendering, rendering her in her own terms a “poor monster” (Twelfth Night II.ii.34), initiates (through Olivia's arousal) the erotic progress of the play; and even from Padua, where Petruchio, “a very monster in apparel” at his wedding (The Taming of the Shrew III.ii.70), behaves like a beast in order to create an opening for Kate's transformation from shrew to wife. Unlike that of Bottom, Caliban, Viola, or Petruchio, Falstaff's monstrosity lacks sexual potency and creative power; it is a thing to be shunned rather than an affirmed instrument of comic transformation. While the monstrous in “Shakespearean” comedy enhances sexual power, Falstaff's Jonsonian animality, implicit in his stag's antlers, merely demonstrates his weakened and debased humanity. His beastliness is like that of Volpone's Sir Pol, who, fearing arrest for his ridiculous gossip about political conspiracies, hides under a tortoise shell to escape the “authorities”: “What beast is this?” the disguised wits ask (Volpone V.iv.65). And the removal of Falstaff's buck-antlers after his “fairy” pinching more closely resembles the wits' subsequent discovery of Sir Pol under the shell, which mocks and repudiates unreasonable (and thus animalistic) foolishness, than a “symbolic castration.”

Falstaff's is indeed a Jonsonian monstrousness, conceived with the skepticism toward the unnatural expressed in Jonson's prologue to the 1616 revision of Every Man in His Humour: Jonson there exhorts an audience which has foolishly “grac'd [stage] monsters” to prefer his drama of “men” (Pro., l. 30). Jonson's “monsters” are consequently, like Falstaff, men and women who act like animals—Epicoene's beastly Lady Centaur and Mrs. Otter, Bartholomew Fair's stinging Wasp, Volpone's Sir Pol (who chatters mindlessly like a parrot) and the foxy Volpone. These characters' unnaturalness threatens communal stability; it does not, like Shakespearean monstrousness, facilitate powerful social change.

It must therefore be repudiated. So resistant to metamorphosis is solid Windsor that Falstaff is compelled to undo even the minor alterations he has made in its unimpeachable worth; to cap his disgrace he is told that he must “repay that money” with which Ford financed his test of Mistress Ford's virtue (V.v.169).

The Windsor Forest scene thus registers a profound skepticism toward the possibilities of sexual regeneration through the power of the monstrous. The Merry Wives of Windsor, expelling rather than accepting the non-human, makes its monsters representative of destructive rather than constructive transformation. The Shakespearean Midsummer Night's Dream realizes a fantasy of sexual metamorphosis, first redirecting the young lovers' erotic desire so that “Jack … [hath] Jill” (III.ii.461) and finally bringing its fairies into the Athenian household directly to inspire all the lovers' sexual energy: they bless the “bride-bed / … And the issue, there create” (V.i.403-05). The Jonsonian Merry Wives of Windsor, however, mocks and rejects “sterile” fantasy. Dreams are unwholesome “fantastical humors” (III.iii.170), like Ford's paranoid dream of cuckoldry: “Gentlemen, I have dream'd tonight; I'll tell you my dream,” Ford raves (III.iii.160-61), as he exhorts his friends to search his house for the “monster” Falstaff (cf. III.ii.81). Not only monsters but also fairies are only human; Page and Mistress Page, a mock Titania and Oberon in the Windsor Wood, prove mutually powerless to accomplish the sexual pairing of Anne and the suitors they've chosen: both Page's scheme to match Anne with Slender and Mistress Page's counterscheme to marry her to Caius run aground on Mistress Quickly's alternate plot to secure Anne's and Fenton's elopement. The Pages' human tinkering with events, unlike Titania's and Oberon's divine plots and counterplots, achieves nothing but the ludicrous anti-sexual pairing of two men with two boys.

Thus Shakespeare's participation in the construction of the humors genre, registered in The Merry Wives of Windsor, shows him out of his more characteristic romantic-comic vein; as Russ McDonald has observed, in this play Shakespeare was “attempting something different from what [he] did best.”²⁷ Although The Merry Wives of Windsor is consistently successful in the theater, it is successful as satiric rather than romantic comedy, and as such the drama is somehow not quite what we have come to expect from Shakespeare—thus the oft-seen critical tendency to view this play as one of his lesser works. Recognizing the play as consciously “Jonsonian” provides us with an alternate context for its appraisal. As in Every Man in His Humour, Every Man out of His Humour, Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, where romance is marginalized or overtly mocked, the romantic plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor is peripheral to the predominant interaction between wits and humors. The result, implicit in and guaranteed by the general design of the play, is deflation and expulsion rather than creation.

Notes

1. Critics have traditionally assumed that Shakespeare's experimentation with “humours” in Merry Wives was parodic rather than straightforward and have dated the play correspondingly. Sydney Musgrove, for example, dates the composition of Merry Wives after that of Jonson's Every Man in His Humour because of Nym's excessive use of the word “humor,” which he sees as Jonsonian leg-pulling (Shakespeare and Jonson [Aukland: Aukland University College, 1957], p. 6). This view is also expressed in O. J. Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (1943; rpt. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1963). More recently, Russ McDonald, supporting the now generally accepted early 1597 date for Merry Wives (which would place it just before Jonson's play), has nevertheless argued that Shakespeare may have been straightforwardly imitating Jonson, with whose developing work he was probably familiar, and that the result was a hybrid drama blending the romantic with the humors form (Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1988]; chap. 2). Jeanne Addison Roberts suggests further that “the composition of Chapman's A Humourous Day's Mirth [and of Merry Wives] would have been almost simultaneous and would probably show a common trend rather than influence in either direction” (Shakespeare's English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979], p. 47).

2. See McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare, p. 31.

3. See Anne Barton's Introduction to Merry Wives in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), esp. pp. 286-87; all quotations from Shakespeare's plays in my paper are from this edition.

4. McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare, p. 5. McDonald notes (p. 192n) a claim made by Nicholas Rowe in his 1709 biography of Shakespeare that he personally had “recommended” the production of Jonson's play.

5. Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-41), 7 vols.; all quotations from Jonson's plays in my paper derive from this edition.

6. See n. 1, above; although Nym is obsessed with the word “humor,” virtually all the other characters use the term as well, suggesting the play's general concern with humors theory. Unfortunately, the traditional critical insistence on polarizing Shakespeare's and Jonson's art, while justifiable in many respects, has blinded us to this concern and to the real role Shakespeare seems to have played in developing the drama which became “Jonsonian.” Russ McDonald is one of the few critics who has suggested Shakespeare's straightforward interest in the humors genre (see Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare, esp. p. 34).

7. William Carroll, “‘A Received Belief’: Imagination in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 200.

8. McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare, p. 39, reiterates Carroll's claim that Ford's and Mistress Quickly's language reveals their “creative energy” (“A Received Belief,” p. 201). Obviously, I disagree.

9. Compare, for example, Othello's expansive metaphorical treatment of Desdemona's supposed guilt in Othello IV.ii and Leontes' similarly poetic accusation of Hermione in The Winter's Tale I.ii with Ford's repetitive “Cuckold! Cuckold!” and “Buck, buck, buck!” Othello's and Leontes' imaginations, though no less diseased than Ford's, empower and unleash verbal skills in a romantic style more characteristically “Shakespearean.”

10. Barton, for example, sees the “Windsor version of Sir John” as “tame and unresourceful compared with his far greater self of Eastcheap, Shrewsbury, Gaultree, and even Gloucestershire” (Introduction to Riverside Merry Wives, p. 287). See also H. B. Charlton's Shakespearian Comedy (New York: Macmillan, 1938), which describes the Falstaff of Merry Wives as a “cynical revenge which Shakespeare took on the hitherto unsuspecting gaiety of his own creative exuberance” (p. 193).

11. Telephone interview with Pat Carroll (1 Nov. 1990).

12. See Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy, pp. 277-78.

13. Introduction to Riverside Merry Wives, p. 288; see also Peter Erickson, “The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology, ed. Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 116-40.

14. Carroll, “A Received Belief,” p. 196.

15. Jonas Barish, “Jonson and the Loathèd Stage,” in A Celebration of Ben Jonson, ed. William Blissett, Julian Patrick, and R. W. Van Fossen (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 27-53.

16. Ben Jonson, Timber, or Discoveries, ed. Ralph S. Walker (Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1953), p. 71.

17. Ann Blake, “‘Sportful Malice’: Duping in the Comedies of Jonson and Shakespeare,” in Jonson and Shakespeare, ed. Ian Donaldson (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, 1983), p. 133.

18. Anne Barton, “Falstaff and the Comic Community,” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic,” ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), p. 142.

19. William Carroll, “A Received Belief,” p. 188. Carroll further notes that “Page's ultimate taunt is not that Falstaff is impotent, but that he is ‘as poor as Job’ (V, v, 156). That is the sterility best understood in the relentlessly middle-class Windsor” (p. 188). However, having contended that Falstaff's motive is economic rather than sexual, Carroll confuses the issue by characterizing Falstaff as a “too-visible reminder of folly and sexual license,” a “presumably tumescent buck” who “represents an aspect of man that Ford … would prefer to suppress” and “embodies the possibilities, often dangerous ones, of change and transformation” (p. 196). In his later Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), chap. 6, esp. p. 191, Carroll links Falstaff to other creative agents in Shakespearean romantic comedy. But, as I will argue, the fact that Falstaff is financially rather than romantically motivated is what limits the “possibilities of change” he embodies to destruction rather than transformation.

20. See Anne Parten, “Falstaff's Horns: Masculine Inadequacy and Feminine Mirth in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Studies in Philology, 82 (1985), 192.

21. See Nancy Cotton, “Castrating (W)itches: Impotence and Magic in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (1987), 323. See also Coppélia Kahn's discussion of Falstaff in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), pp. 147-50, and the description of Falstaff's “rapacious tendencies” in Judith Kollmann: “‘Ther is noon oother uncubus but he’: The Canterbury Tales, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Falstaff,” in Chaucerian Shakespeare: Adaptation and Transformation, ed. E. Talbot Donaldson and Judith J. Kollmann (Detroit: Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1983), pp. 47-48.

22. See Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearian Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 141-42, and also J. A. Bryant, Jr., “Falstaff and the Renewal of Windsor,” PMLA, 89 (1974), 296-301.

23. Peter Evans, “‘To the oak, to the oak!’ The Finale of The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Theatre Notebook, 40 (1986), 107.

24. Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1964), p. 212.

25. William Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 142, 147.

26. Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, p. 220.

27. McDonald, Shakespeare and Jonson/Jonson and Shakespeare, p. 55. McDonald's argument differs from mine in that he sees both Jonson and Shakespeare as dramatizing “the transformational power of the human mind” (p. 32).