[In the following essay, Reid argues that Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor employs humors in its burlesque of Christopher Marlowe's plays and in particular his bourgeois characters.]

Is there not a double excellency in this?

The germ of this essay lay in my inability, as a director, to answer the questions of an actor playing Sir Hugh Evans during rehearsals of an amateur production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. My subsequent efforts to make good this initial failure, forced me to rethink the handling of burlesque, particularly in relation to key roles like Evans and Ford. No one would want to dissent from G. R. Hibbard's claim that The Merry Wives of Windsor is “a most consummate piece of burlesque”.¹ Aside from the play's obvious targets of burlesque—such as Jonson and ‘humours comedies’ generally—Hibbard draws attention to the structural importance both of the burlesque of revenge tragedy and the travesty of Ovidian myth. However, while agreeing that burlesque is at the heart of the comedy in Merry Wives, I found that Marlowe became a key figure in appraising the force and range of that burlesque in its contemporary rhetorical situation: a situation that involved significant interplay between the theatrical and the political.

Understanding of the ‘Sir John’ plays has been considerably advanced by a range of recent scholarly work exploring Shakespeare's contretemps with the house of Cobham.² As I see it, this work makes it imperative that the satire in Merry Wives is not considered in isolation from the religious and political overtones to the censorship of Henry IV Part 1 and Merry Wives. Throughout the sixteenth century there was a running controversy between Catholic and Protestant factions about whether Oldcastle was a martyr or a heretic. Shakespeare's provocative treatment of him as a hypocritical buffoon must have been tantamount to treasonable heresy for some Protestants. While, in theory at least, Shakespeare had the weight of historical tradition behind him in his portrayal of Oldcastle, it was clearly a deliberate caricature, and it did cause offence. Furthermore, in spite of the enforced change of name from ‘Oldcastle’ to ‘Falstaff’, and the belated apology in the Epilogue to Part 2—‘for Olde-castle died Martyre, and this is not the man’—Shakespeare's character continued to play a part in the ideological contest over Oldcastle's reputation.

In the 1590's the Marlowe plays were the flag-bearers for Henslowe's company and recent accounts suggest that not only was there considerable rivalry with Shakespeare's company in terms of repertories but also in contrasting acting styles.³ It is this kind of context which suggests a quite different order of uptake on the issue of burlesque. Although there are three explicit references to Marlowe's work in Merry Wives, little importance has been attached to these textual signs beyond the specific annotations of particular editors content to place each allusion and point its local significance. But in what follows I will make a case for viewing Merry Wives as a play that draws the force of its comic structure and characterisation from a burlesque of the Marlovian theatrical tradition.

Much of my argument focuses upon the way in which ‘heresy’ turns out to be an overdetermined category with respect to what is known of the rhetorical situation of this particular play. Marlowe's work was uniquely associated with transgressive possibilities, including heresy. His plays were not only exhilaratingly transgressive at the thematic level but they also actively foregrounded the risks and thrills of transgressive role playing. It has often been observed that the Marlovian performance mode is a conspicuously actorly process in which the hero, typically, conjures his transgressive attributes into existence: a process which may have encouraged audiences to experience acting itself as the dangerously equivocal force that preachers fulminated against.⁴

It is the latter theatrical context that allows us to explore the possibility that, for the contemporary audience, the thrust of the burlesque depended upon presenting Ford as a character who is driven to the outer reaches of the Marlovian performance mode. Unlike Marlowe, Shakespeare maintains a gap between the character and his transgressive role. Later, I will examine a similar saving gap between the character of Evans and the alter ego whose Marlovian version of desire threatens to draw him beyond the boundaries of conventional behaviour. Falstaff serves as a comic foil to Ford and although no stranger to transgressive behaviour, magnifies Ford's Marlovian lunacy through a role that is a comic inversion of the higher heresy.

At the beginning of the play, Falstaff enters the action as a knight of Misrule, nonchalantly shrugging aside Shallow's catalogue of his transgressions: “Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.” (1.1.103-4) Poor Shallow has been led into expecting confession of wrongdoing but Falstaff roguishly misinterprets the charge against him as a sin of omission—“But not kissed your keeper's daughter?” A moment later, the unruly knight confounds matters further by barefacedly declaring “I have done all this.” Falstaff's transgressions may be small beer in the Marlovian scale of things but as the play progresses such episodes make their contribution to the low burlesque of Marlowe. Although he is presented as the comic antithesis to the Marlovian overreacher, Falstaff does tend to see himself as an accomplished actor who can dominate the tiny stage of provincial Windsor in any role he chooses.

The comedy in the play arises from a deliberate clash of styles and registers. In the first act, the plain, sober style of the bourgeois characters suggests a verbal decorum in keeping with the social decorum that defines the horizons of “honest, civil, godly society” (1.1.165) in Windsor. But Shakespeare's virtuoso handling of burlesque allows the audience to see the unrhetorical, ‘realistic’ register of Windsor man as just as much a matter of ‘humours’ as the indecorous, rhetorical excesses of Falstaff's cronies. But, more importantly, this clash of registers goes beyond mere parody of verbal mannerisms. It invites the audience to respond to a contest of attitudes and behaviours. The terms of this contest are established in the first scene of the play.

Slender's confrontation with Pistol involves one of Shakespeare's first allusions to Marlowe and is a good example of how the burlesque conspires to work simultaneously at several levels. Slender has compromised his pristine, bourgeois credentials through succumbing to the cony-catching wiles of Nym and Pistol. His petulant recriminations are bluntly dismissed by Pistol with what seems to be little more than a menacing non sequitur—“How now, Mephistophilus?” Most editors award Pistol poor marks for quotation and treat the Doctor Faustus allusion as merely a term of abuse. However, it seems to me that Pistol has talents not unlike those associated with Mr F's Aunt.

Pistol is aware of the need to retain the “haviour of reputation” and he attempts to counter Slender's accusations by pointing the finger at him. His rhetorical question is a typically fustian rope-trick designed to undercut Slender's pose of peevish self-righteousness: by this means he transforms the moralising accuser into an agent of the devil. Pistol is no stranger to what speech act theorists would take to be matters of uptake and implicature. Unfortunately, Slender lacks the imagination to respond to Pistol's high astounding terms. Not only is he intimidated, his banally lame response suggests incomprehension—“Ay, it is no matter.” This scene is the first of many collisions between the dull world of Windsor prose and the razzle-dazzle histrionics of regular theatregoers.⁵ The burlesque technique embraces both bourgeois humours and Faustian humours, linguistic under-reachers and over-reachers.

In a play that has often been assumed to “endorse the values of the Elizabethan bourgeoisie”,⁶ there is one further point about Pistol's behaviour that can be usefully raised at this stage. Pistol's ‘street-cred’, and his self-esteem, depend upon his prowess in verbal swaggering: it is his way of asserting his yearning to thrive, to soar above “unconfinable baseness”. The effort required for such histrionic self-fashioning should persuade an audience that a degree of comic pathos attaches to this outlandish overreacher. Pistol's bizarre fusion of theatrical cliché, military jargon, and cony-catcher's cant argues a vitality that is entirely absent from the plaintive bleat of bourgeois man. Pistol's mocking question works on an audience's sense of discrepant awareness—bourgeois man is incapable of such threatening Marlovian humours.

This is one small instance of the way in which the comic action of the play exposes the limitations of bourgeois man through provoking parodic comparisons with that Marlovian world that is assumed to be beyond the ken of honest, godly folk. The plague of bourgeois custom in Windsor is thrown into high comic relief by setting the underreaching of its moralising citizenry against the ghostly presence of the archetypal overreacher.

Ford enters the play as an under-reacher. He appears to be a remarkably dull-witted audience for Pistol's meancing innuendoes. In performance, most directors allow us a glimpse of Pistol working hard at the ‘humours of revenge’ in portentous, conspiratorial whispers and no doubt making use of his complete histrionic repertoire which (in Falstaff's words) includes “cat-a-mountain looks”, “red-lattice phrases”, and “bold-beating oaths”. Bourgeois man's response to the cuckoldry melodrama conjured up by Pistol, is fittingly anti-climactic and pusillanimous—“Well, I hope it be not so.” The tiny pause-filler ‘well’ is one of Shakespeare's deftest comic touches in Ford's characterisation because it is used as a verbal tic that points up ‘inadequacy of response’ as a distinctive, bourgeois humour. But such inadequacy is only a small part in a much larger, comic pattern whereby Ford is presented as an inadequate Faustus.

Although the closest narrative analogue to the play, a novella in Fiorentino's Il Pecorone (1558), included the suggestion that the jealous husband's behaviour must have come about through succumbing to a temptation from the devil, Shakespeare expands the comic possibilities of this devil-tempting motif by giving it a Marlovian twist. Ford's obsessive jealousy turns him into a heretic with respect to the rest of the Windsor community: he alone has no faith in his wife's honour. For bourgeois man there can be no greater heresy than loss of faith in one's wife. Although Ford alludes to “the folly of my soul”, he is too smug and self-righteous to recognise that, like Faustus, he is the agent of his own damnation.

The religious rhetoric in Ford's dialogue ironically betrays the folly and hypocrisy of the bourgeois husband who, in effect, has sold his wife's honour to the devil. Ford dissembles ingratiatingly before Falstaff (“I am blest in your acquaintance”) but subsequently curses the old reprobate as a “damned Epicurean rascal”, wholly oblivious to the workings of his own demonic logic. The Faustian parody is developed through a series of ironic inversions that deepen this sense of domesticated heresy.

Like Faustus, Ford rationalises his heresies. Not only does he rationalise the promptings of his own jealousy as if they were the work of providence, he compounds this heretical claim with what amounts to blasphemous praise of the green monster: “God be praised for my jealousy.” (2.2.294-5)

While Doctor Faustus depends upon a sense of real danger to the soul of the heretic, it is the comic limitations of this bourgeois heretic that the parodic pattern brings home to an audience. Compared with the profound sense of loss that lies behind Marlowe's image of hell, Ford's deluded outcry—“See the hell of having a false woman”—is a travesty of Mephistophilian anguish.

Much of the comic momentum of the play draws on the process whereby the bourgeois under-reacher is transformed and becomes driven by the self-induced, demonic energies of the overreacher. The structure of Doctor Faustus is determined by the simple fact that at the climax of the action there can be no escape, for the hero, from that fearful moment of final reckoning. The devil will come to claim Faustus's soul at midnight. The clock punctuates the final precious hour of Faustus's life. Marlowe further captures the distraught state of Faustus's consciousness in those final moments through the fragmented rhythm and the disjointed, breathless phrasing of the lines:

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

When Ford obsessively anticipates the fateful hour of his wife's assignation with Falstaff, there is a similar histrionic appeal to the appointed time: “My wife hath sent to him, the hour is fixed, the match is made.” (2.2.278-9) In Ford's feverish imagination his wife's meeting with Falstaff is a Satanic pact. The burlesque of Faustus allows Shakespeare to magnify Ford's fears about cuckoldry. In Ford's final speech of Act II Sc II, the fragmented syntax and barely coherent, paratactic leaps of his tortured consciousness make it clear that cuckoldry is a fate worse than eternal damnation. To a bourgeois husband like Ford, even the term ‘cuckold’ is charged with terrifying potency, more terrifying than the names of any necromancer's devils.

Treating Ford's jealousy as a humour of overreaching has the advantage that it is held firmly within a comic frame of reference. In Act III Sc ii, just as the town clock is about to strike the fateful hour, Ford works himself into a frenzy of paranoia. This jealousy leads to his wildly vindictive claim that the wives “share damnation together”, but, by this stage, there should be little doubt that this bourgeois heretic is possessed by Faustian humours. Once again, the fateful bell, and theatrical tradition, beckons him on: “The clock gives me my cue and my assurance bids me search” (3.2.40-42).

The Falstaff plot is not only interwoven with the Ford plot, it is elaborately crafted as a parodic counterpoint to it. When Mistress Ford first hints at the contents of Falstaff's love-letter, she riddles her friend Mistress Page with allusions to Satanic pacts: “If I should go to hell for an eternal moment or so. I could be knighted.” (2.1.45-6) The Faustian motif reappears in the following scene when Falstaff rebuffs Pistol's attempts to sponge off him by claiming that he has already hazarded enough on his behalf: “I am damned in hell for swearing to gentlemen my friends that you were good soldiers and tall fellows.” (2.2.9-10) Against Pistol's claim that he had his share in the spoils of their cony-catching, Falstaff shrugs off the accusation with a robustly down-market defence of soul-selling: “Reason, you rogue, reason. Thinkst thou I'll endanger my soul gratis?” (2.2.14-15) This dour, devious appropriation, both of the Faustian wager and Faustian philosophising, exemplifies the way in which Shakespeare never allows the comedy to descend into vulgar travesty.

It goes without saying that a fat Faustus is, in tragic terms, a thing of nought. But in comic terms, Falstaff is the antidote to Faustus. It is as if the old pagan reprobate cannot be squeezed into the linguistic corsets of the Faustian morality play. Falstaff collapses what in other contexts would be the moral and religious absolutes of the Faustian universe into the seedy compromises of a poor fellow that would live: “I, I, I myself sometimes leaving the fear of God on the left hand and holding mine honour in my necessity, am fain to shuffle, to hedge, and to lurch.” (2.2.21-24) Falstaff's bedroom may be “painted about with the story of the prodigal” but it is clear that he must put survival before the luxury of morality and “learn the humours of the age”. Unable to compete with Falstaff's lofty spiritual struggles, Pistol throws in the towel (of repentance) with disarming, un-Faustian alacrity: “I do relent. What wouldst thou more of man?” (2.2.28)

Falstaff has no pretensions about aspiring to the Faustian league of sinners. After his second violent ordeal, the beating of the Brainford witch, he displays as flexible an attitude towards repentance as Pistol: “Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent.” (4.5.94-5) This mock-heroic variation is echoed in the wives' conclusion, after the beating episode, that their need for revenge has exhausted itself: “If the devil have him not in fee simple, with fine and recovery, he will never, I think, in the way of waste, attempt us again.” (4.2.8-200)

Although Falstaff is an overreacher in his cony-catching schemes, his wholly pagan, secular strivings are against the grain of the Faustian archetype. Consequently, there is a sense of absurd, comic logic to the way in which the hubris of this superstitious, pagan ruffian (whose ambitions fall far short of muscular, Christian overreachers) is punished with what he feels to be the “pangs of three several deaths” (III.V.99). It is fitting, I think, that the comic climax of his famous description of his Thames ducking suggests that he has suffered an aquatic version of hell's torments:

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 horseshoe. Think of that—hissing hot—think of that, Master Brook!

(3.5.108-12)

The play's burlesque of Marlowe emerges in a more overt fashion when Falstaff attempts to convince the wives of the intensity of his erotic passions. At his first assignation, Falstaff's dialogue betrays the would-be cuckolder as overreacher, straining to sustain a courtly lover mode that relies upon a pastiche of Marlowe and Sidney: “Have I caught thee my heavenly jewel? why, now let me die, for I have lived long enough. This is the period of my ambition. O this blessed hour!” (3.3.40-42) Falstaff may invoke, in the latter phrases, the familiar Marlovian rhetoric about the zenith of the overreacher's ambition but it is equally clear that the old rogue cannot sustain this artificial, verbal potency for long. His efforts to counterfeit erotic infatuation are hilariously inadequate.⁷

The full comic force of counterpointing a ‘pagan’ Faustus against a ‘Christian’ Faustus is realised at the end of the play when Ford's exorcism is followed by Falstaff's exorcism. While the burlesque insists that Falstaff has never been more than an overreacher manqué, it seems fitting that his final exorcism depends upon a mock-pagan ritual which is based upon a folk-tale manqué. The Windsor folk-masque (rather than court masque) of Herne the Hunter is based upon a folk-tale that is said to have been passed on by the “superstitious idle eld”. The burlesque playfulness of the finale allows Shakespeare considerable comic license in teasing the audience with tall stories that promise hugely comic pay-offs. A similar metadramatic contract is at work in the shifting registers of Falstaff's hour of reckoning.

For his final assignation, the superstitious fat knight not only needs to believe that there is “a divinity in odd numbers”, but, also, that he can emulate Jove in terms of sexual prowess: “The Windsor bell hath struck twelve; the minute draws on. Now, the hot-blooded gods assist me!” (5.5.1-3) But Falstaff's invocation of Jove and Jupiter is simultaneously undercut by his over-familiar asides to the gods on the immorality of their courtship practices. In his appeals for aphrodisian aid, the travesty of the hyperbolic line ascends to absurd heights. Equally absurd is the suggestion that the devil cannot be bothered to keep his side of the bargain with this fat Faustus: “I think the devil will not have me damned, lest the oil that's in me should set hell on fire.” (5.5.34-5)

When the cony-catcher recognises that he has been outmanoeuvred, he puts it down to his mind's “gross o'erreaching”, a phrase that points up the parallels between Ford's delusions and Falstaff's fantastic schemes. There is even the suggestion of double heresy as part of the counterpointed plot. For, in his pagan metamorphosis, Falstaff too has been a heretic, a prey to false belief: “I was three or four times in the thought they were not fairies; and yet the guiltiness of my mind, the sudden surprise of my powers, drove the grossness of the foppery into a received belief.” (5.5.121-125) Such well-crafted parallels strengthen the balance of the comic resolution, inviting the audience to view the respective humours of these comic overreachers as fantastic, temporary aberrations.

So far the argument has focused on the double heresy of the Ford / Falstaff plot in order to suggest that Marlowe is the dominant inspiration for the burlesque in the play. However, the play consists of three major actions and two of the most explicit allusions to Marlowe are to be found in the Evans/Dr Caius/Host subplot. There may even be a case for considering a charge of treble heresy in Windsor.

The male rivalry over Ann Page results in the volatile French physician challenging Slender's agent, Sir Hugh Evans, to a duel. The sententious parson cuts a ludicrous figure as a would-be duellist but this is simply part of Shakespeare's treatment of him as a variation on the humour of overreaching. In spite of his age, and rheumatism, he has squeezed himself into doublet and hose. But the attempt to transform himself into a youthful courtier, and duellist, is clearly at odds with his calling. At the start of Act III, he enters with a Bible in one hand and a drawn rapier in the other.⁸ When Simple exits, and Evans is left alone on stage, these conflicting signals that betray Evans's role conflict are augmented by signs of powerful conflicting feelings and ‘trempling of mind’.

An unbalanced or unnatural state of mind was frequently the focus of humours comedy and the comic action of such plays typically leads to the correction of characters's obsessions and fixations.⁹ Evans is one of the characters who is specifically mentioned on the title page of the 1602 First Quarto where “sundrie variable and pleasing humors” are clearly a strong selling point.

A Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Syr John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wiuves of Windsor, Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humors, of Syr Hugh the Welch Knight, Instice Shallow, and his wise Cousin …

When, in Act III, Evans suddenly begins to sing his own garbled version of Marlowe's lyric ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’, few editors go beyond the ‘facts’ demanded by the conventions of editorial procedure. In explaining this bizarre behaviour, H. J. Oliver conjectures that Evans sings snatches of Marlowe in order to “keep up his spirits”¹⁰ and T. W. Craik takes this an inch further with the suggestion that he “sings to cheer himself up, unsuccessfully”.¹¹ It is at this point that actors and directors cry out for the editor-as-performance-critic because the hermeneutic problems that they want to address demand more possibilities, in theatrical terms, than most editors are prepared to offer. There will always be a gap between textual ‘meanings’ and performance ‘meanings’ but the gap can widen significantly with a play that flaunts its lively awareness of other performances, other theatrical rhetorics. Perhaps, burlesque demands performance criticism.

A key question for editors, directors, and actors, is why would Evans use Marlowe's lyric as a way of cheering himself up? It is certainly the case that a strong comic contrast is implied by breaking up the lines of this joyful lyric with the opening plaintive line of psalm 137:

(Sings) To shallow rivers, to whose falls
                              Melodious birds sings madrigals.
                              There will we make our peds of roses,
                              And a thousand fragrant posies.
                              To shallow—
Mercy on me! I have a great dispositions to cry.
(Sings) Melodious birds sing madrigals—
                              Whenas I sat in Pabylon—
                              And a thousand vagrom posies.
                              To shallow, etc.

(3.1.16-25)

However, since Evans is clearly a stranger to the passions celebrated in Marlowe's love lyric there seems to be more at stake than mere ‘cheering up’. Further, there is more room for confusion in conflicting editorial suggestions about how the singing should be performed. G. R. Hibbard thinks that the best comic effect will be achieved by having the love lyric sung to the psalm tune but T. W. Craik claims that this is metrically impossible. Craik assumes that the intended effect is that the line from the psalm is sung to the tune of the love lyric.¹² It seems to me that both proposals are too narrowly focused to be of much help to actors or directors.

A broader concern with the burlesque of humours comedy and Marlovian discourse throughout the play can cast fresh light upon this particular scene. In terms of humours comedy, Evans lurches from choleric to melancholic, from angry, aggressive outbursts to tearful melancholia. Marlowe's lyric is entirely in keeping with the overreacher's fantasy of youthful, assertive courtier (and duellist in a love cause) while the psalm undercuts such pretensions with the glum music of the reality principle. Consequently, if the singing is simply a mode of comic magnification of this alternating, humours rhythm, the clash of secular and sacred musical registers will achieve this effect. Shakespeare's gentle satire of the Windsorites suggests that the bourgeois mind cannot cope with the unruly stuff of the passions. The effort of Windsor is always to re-establish moderation and restraint of the passions. Marlowe's famous lyric was provocatively sensual and passionate and it is for that reason that Shakespeare can use Marlovian discourse as an ironic indicator of breaches of linguistic decorum. Evan's reversion to a melancholy mode is not meant to be seen as idiosyncratic—it is charged with typicality. Ford betrays the same mean-spirited fear of passion at his first entrance. When Pistol attempts to plant the seeds of distrust in Ford's mind, it is the ease with which Ford evades emotional arousal that forms our first impression of the hero. Instead of anger or passionate denial, Ford succumbs to melancholy and, at this stage, his strongest show of feeling is the petulance with which he rebuffs his wife's solicitous enquiries:

MISTRESS Ford
How now, sweet Frank, why art thou melancholy?
FORD
I melancholy? I am not melancholy. Get you home, go.

There is one further explicit allusion to Marlowe's work in Act IV Scene v when we learn that the Host has been out-cozened by “three German devils, three Doctor Faustuses” (4.5.64) who have stolen his horses. It is clear, but not crystal clear, that Caius and Evans have worked their revenge on the Host and the allusion serves to underline the linking motif of the folly of overreaching. It is often claimed that this sub-plot is not fully integrated into the main action although it does seem to have been designed to make good Falstaff's wish that “all the world might be cozened”. Insofar as the whole of Windsor seems to have been possessed by the demonic energies of the overreacher, the episode plays its part in the Faustian burlesque.

There have been a series of speculations about ‘topical reference’ surrounding this horse-stealing episode¹³ but few editors, with the notable exception of H. J. Oliver, take seriously the possibility that the most likely ‘source’ for the incident would have been Doctor Faustus. Marlowe's play does contain scenes like the cozening of the horsecourser, it evokes a world peopled by Germans, and even the allusions to the enigmatic “duke de Jarmany” make sense within that framework. Similarly, the Acteon-like image of Falstaff with a stag's horns upon his head echoes the Acteon-like transformation that Faustus metes out to Benvolio. In a subsequent scene, the joke is compounded by the spectacle of three Acteon-like victims—Benvolio, Frederick, and Martino.¹⁴

From the perspective of Faustian burlesque, the comic structure of Merry Wives does seem to be designed to make good Falstaff's wish that “all the world might be cozened”, for it is a result that answers to the audience's sense of poetic justice. The emphasis upon burlesque also draws attention to one further aspect of the finale and that is the sense of communal exorcism of Marlovian humours. If we consider the similarities between the Ford plot and the Evans subplot then the most important Marlovian humour would appear to be excessive passion and violence of feeling. By the 1590's, Edward Alleyn had established, through his most famous roles (Tamburlaine, Faustus, Hieronymo), an acting tradition based upon violent exaggeration. Passionate overreachers were Marlowe's trademark and in the case of Tamburlaine, as Roy Battenhouse has pointed out, there is a sense of ‘excessive passions punishing the harbourer with a progressive madness and physiological fevers’.¹⁵ Alleyn's histrionics may have become a standing joke to the sophisticated theatregoers of the 1590's, contrasting strongly with the ‘naturall unstrayn'd Action’ of Burbage at the Blackfriars, but they complemented the intense emotionality of Marlowe's drama. Andrew Gurr has suggested that ‘Marlowe's verse was clearly designed to work on the audience's emotions’.¹⁶

Shakespeare's company burlesqued the speech of Tamburlaine through the character of Pistol, in 2 Henry IV, staged in 1598. Pistol's fondness for Tamburlainean humours is a reminder that parody can offer oblique testimony to the popularity of this bombastic tradition. Pistol is possessed by the absurd notion that he is a player king, that his natural element is the Marlovian rhetoric of lofty self-assertion.¹⁷ While Pistol guys some of the most obvious features of the theatrical fare provided by Henslowe's players, in Merry Wives Shakespeare uses burlesqued versions of Marlovian theatrical rhetoric to expose the transgressive behaviours of each of his Windsor heretics.

In strictly theatrical terms, this suggests that the comedy will work best when, for example, the actor playing Ford projects the sense that not only has he been possessed by a theatrical rhetoric of emotional excess but also that it is not his natural element. In Ford's case, thespian excess is synonymous with heresy. By contrast, while Falstaff enters the action as a knight of Misrule with an appetite for transgressive possibilities, his sheer resistance to the tug of the absolute constitutes a Carnival rejection of the high seriousness of the heretic's role. With respect to the Oldcastle controversy, it is surely significant how much of the low burlesque in Merry Wives is focused upon heresy. Given the ideological allegiances of Henslowe's company, Shakespeare may have discovered a different kind of double excellency in his burlesque of Faustus. In conclusion, I want to take a closer look at how far this Marlovian perspective on the play supports readings which foreground the political context.

E. A. J. Honigmann has argued that Shakespeare's presentation of Sir John Oldcastle as a buffoon in 2 Henry IV was a deliberate exercise in debunking the Protestant martyr: an exercise designed to amuse Southampton and Essex but one that resulted in a rapid tactical retreat when Lord Cobham was unexpectedly elevated to Lord Chamberlain.¹⁸ William and Henry Brooke, respectively seventh and eighth Lord Cobham, were the contemporary holders of Oldcastle's title and, apparently, prevented Shakespeare from using the name Oldcastle. The substitution of ‘Falstaff’ for ‘Oldcastle’ must certainly have been the basis for Essex's jocular allusion to Henry Brooke as ‘Sir John Falstaff’ in 1598.¹⁹ The traces of enforced revisions and renamings that are alleged to have resulted from the Oldcastle controversy include the substitution of ‘Broome’ for ‘Brooke’ in the Folio text.

The original Falstaff of I Henry VI was a cowardly, “base knight” from whom Talbot plucked the Garter when his behaviour in battle was felt to be a disgrace to the Order. (2.2) The Falstaff of Merry Wives is a reworking of the archetypal false knight, a comic figure with obvious appeal for a Garter ceremony play. However, the new Falstaff is a composite figure and part of the composite introduces some telling aspects of the Oldcastle stereotype: there is the whole range of religious allusions that are so hypocritically appropriate, the extensive play with the notion of heresy, and final emphasis upon the heretic reformed.

By turning it into a fantastic comedy, in a Windsor with more than its fair share of heretics, Shakespeare makes it very difficult to take offence at his bumbling hypocrite. Falstaff's promises to repent and reform (‘Well, if my wind were but long enough, I would repent’) are a bizarre antithesis to the Faustian archetype but they could also be taken up as a wicked travesty of the trials of the Lollard martyr, Oldcastle.

Falstaff's most serious heresy is that he has been gullible enough to believe in the fairies and treat their existence as a ‘received belief’. The historical Oldcastle had been charged with heresy because he refused to assent to some fundamental received beliefs of the Catholic church. He was allowed forty days to reform and repent. He was hanged and burned for heresy in 1417. At the end of Merry Wives Falstaff escapes with little more than a burnt finger, though there is the fear of being transformed by the Welsh fairy into a piece of toasted cheese. However, this self-confessed heretic is subjected to “trial-fire” when the fairies burn him with their tapers. Falstaff follows Ford's example and publicly recants. Shakespeare's mock folk-ritual manages to be a trial by ordeal of a corrupt knight, and an exorcism of a lustful schemer and his heretical beliefs.

It was Henslowe's playwrights who, in 1599, cobbled together ‘The first part of the true and honourable historie, of the life of Sir John Old-castle, the good Lord Cobham’. This historical pot-boiler was designed to challenge Shakespeare's irreverent lampoon with a reassertion of Oldcastle's significance as Protestant martyr. As an exercise in political rehabilitation it is a reminder that the rival theatres differed not only in aesthetic matters, such as acting styles, but also their factional allegiances. Although Shakespeare's Sir John is a comic character whose vitality cannot be reduced to the political dimensions of the Oldcastle controversy, it seems to me that there is undeniable force in arguments which insist upon the ironic appropriateness of the many religious allusions in the Falstaff plays.

If there was a topical, satiric point to Merry Wives, perhaps it resides, as Gary Taylor has argued, “in Ford's ludicrously exaggerated and unfounded suspicions—suspicions, in particular, associated with the fat knight, Sir John”.²⁰ In such a context, Shakespeare's comic vision of heresy domesticated, may have riddled the Brookes with a fittingly irreverent response to their self-important posturing. It is as if the whole play were one extended, mischievous whisper—‘How now, Mephistophilus?’

Notes

1. Introduction to the new Penguin edition by G. R. Hibbard—The Merry Wives of Windsor (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p. 20.

2. I am particularly indebted to two essays by Gary Taylor, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (Cambridge, 1985), 85-100, and, ‘William Shakespeare, Richard James and the House of Cobham’, RES New Series, Vol xxxviii, No. 151 (Oxford, 1987), 334-54. See also, E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Sir John Oldcastle: Shakespeare's Martyr’ in J. W. Mahon and T. A. Pendleton, eds., Fanned and Winnowed Opinions: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins (Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1988) and the introduction by P. Corbin and D. Sedge, eds., The Oldcastle Controversy. Sir John Oldcastle, Part I and The Famous Victories of Henry V (Revels Plays Companion Library, 1991).

3. Andrew Gurr, ‘Who Strutted And Bellowed?, Shakespeare Survey 16, 1963, 95-101. See also A Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and ‘Intertextuality at Windsor’, Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987), 189-200.

4. Michael Goldman argues that, by comparison with Marlowe, the actor-role relation in Shakespeare “is felt more typically as a gap between character and role” but his discussion is not concerned with the comedies. M. Goldman, ‘Performer and Role in Marlowe and Shakespeare’ in M. and R. Thompson, eds., Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance (Delaware, 1989), p. 100.

5. See Gurr, Playgoing p. 65.

6. Hibbard, p. 14.

7. On this point I agree entirely with H. J. Oliver, in his introduction to the new Arden edition (1973), who argues that Falstaff's erotic intentions are wholly subservient to his conycatching schemes, p. lxviii.

8. Both Arden and New Cambridge editions are inclined to think that this book may not be the bible but one from which he could sing or quote the Marlowe. But if Shallow's remarks are designed to draw attention to the signs of Evans's divided state of mind, theatrical semiotics can meet this condition with bible and rapier.

9. Yumiko Yamada offers a useful overview of Shakespeare's interest in the humour genre in ‘Shakespeare's Humour Plays’, Shakespeare Studies, 21 (1982-3), 35-64. Arthur Kinney argues that in this play Shakespeare is “continually sending up the resources and traditions of late Tudor drama generally”, which includes burlesque of Jonson and humours comedies generally, but he goes on to suggest that the play is, more essentially, “an exercise in self-mockery, self-burlesque” (‘Textual Signs in The Merry Wives of Windsor’, Yearbook in English Studies, 23, 1993, 206-34). Since Jonson's humours comedies began in 1598, some interesting discrepancies arise if it is claimed that Merry Wives was written for the April 1597 Garter ceremony. As H. J. Oliver Points out, the earlier date would seem to suggest that we are dealing with Jonson's emulation of Shakespeare rather than the familiar claim that Shakespeare caricatured Jonson (Arden edition p. lxiv).

10. New Arden edition, p. 70.

11. The Oxford Shakespeare ed. T. W. Craik, p. 145.

12. See Hibbard, p. 181. This was also Peter Seng's suggestion in The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), p. 164. Craik does not consider the possibility that it is the process of alternation, rather than substitution, that will complement the oscillating feelings. See Craik, p. 145.

13. Most notably, deriving from the Quarto's odd phrase ‘three sorts of cosen garmombles’, but one which seemed less odd if assumed to be a punning allusion to Count Mompelgard who in 1597 was elected Knight of the Garter in absentia.

14. Benvolio issues a challenge to Faustus that if he can conjure up Alexander and his paramour for the Emperor's entertainment then he will turn himself into a stag, like Acteon. Faustus promptly obliges and in a later scene, the mud-bespattered trio of Benvolio, Frederick, and Martino, are hunted down by Faustus's devils and emerge, exhausted, with horns upon their heads.

15. Roy Battenhouse, ‘The Relation of Henry V to Tamburlaine’, Shakespeare Survey, 27, p. 78.

16. Gurr, Playgoing, p. 136.

17. L. Hotson, ‘Ancient Pistol’, The Yale Review, 1948, 30, pp. 51-66. Hotson captures Pistol's Pirandello-like fixation when he suggests that Pistol has cast himself as a tragedy king and that he sustains the role “unsupported, and against heavy odds, in a performance continuous, non-stop, round the clock” (p. 55).

18. Honigmann, p. 125.

19. In a letter to Cecil. The same link is made by the Countess of Southampton writing to her husband in 1599. David McKeen, ‘A memory of honour; A study of the House of Cobham of Kent in Elizabeth I's reign’ (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1964), pp. 970-71.

20. Gary Taylor, (1987), p. 352.