The Merry Wives of Windsor is a spin-off: in it, Shakespeare resituates Falstaff in Windsor, where the wellknown scoundrel causes mischief by wooing the wives of two prominent townsmen, Master Ford and Master Page. Perhaps the play's identity as sequel or appendage contributes to its minor reputation; but Merry Wives has also suffered (in the annals of twentieth-century criticism) for being an "occasional" play, trivialized by its connection to a ceremonial occasion—much as Charles Dickens's Christmas Carol has become irreversibly connected to the Christmas theater season in the United States. By historically reconstituting the occasion and establishing its relationship to the play's composition, we can reclaim the interest of Merry Wives, not only as Shakespeare's memorialization of Falstaff within Queen Elizabeth's private theater, but, more generally, as Shakespeare's meditation on the afterlife of dramatic characters.¹ The play reflects on how theatrical events, leaping the boundaries of court performance, penetrate an everyday network of conversation, recollection, and daydream: the "stuff of imaginative interchange on a local level. Merry Wives has much to show us about the interior archaeology of Shakespeare's dramatic canon: about how plays, as well as characters, can live in the minds of an audience, and how, inversely, as a result of that habitation, the audience can find itself situated back inside the canon's imaginative interstices.

According to theater historians, The Merry Wives of Windsor was probably commissioned by George Carey to be performed in 1597 on St. George's Day at a feast honoring Queen Elizabeth and her Garter knights.² To mark the holiday, Shakespeare performed a restaging of Falstaff—relocating the fat rogue from the history plays in the theatrical milieu of civic comedy. Thanks to the Henry plays, Falstaff had become a distinct entity in the imagination of a popular audience, a character sufficiently known that he could cross genres as well as the boundaries of individual plays. Testimony to Falstaff's long and independent afterlife is the eighteenth century's claim—in disagreement with the theory that Carey commissioned the play—that Elizabeth "was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff, in the two parts of Henry the Fourth that she commanded [Shakespeare] to continue it for one play more, and to shew him in love."³ This claim can be traced to several sources, but T.W. Craik, deepening its romantic flavor, warns that any one of the informants "may have invented it."⁴ What is interesting is how the lore spins out, creating a separate drama of cultural recollection. The legend of the Queen's commission aspires not only to give Shakespeare a retrospective motive for eroticizing Falstaff in Merry Wives but to interpret that motive as one of satisfying the Queen's desire, as if in a comic inversion Shakespeare were to pay suit to Elizabeth through a lascivious Falstaff—a Falstaff who, at any rate, had grown more lascivious in his passage from the court of Henry IV to that of the Queen. Thus two historical universes intersect in the context of Elizabeth's holiday, coming together in the plot of Merry Wives and, in particular, Falstaff's wooing of Mistress Ford.

The Queen's Garter ceremony created an occasion to assemble the English nobility, as well as foreign kings and dukes, who had been honored by inclusion in her royal Order. The garter emblem signified each knight's oath to defend the virtue and resplendence of the Queen. André Favyn, in his history of chivalry (The Theater of Honour and Knighthood [1619]), traced the origins of the Order to an anecdote about Edward HI "picking up a lady's garter and reproving the lascivious thoughts of bystanders with the famous words Honi soit qui mal y pense (evil be to him who evil thinks)"⁵—or more precisely, "shame be to him who, with evil motives, thinks on shameful things." This, at any rate, was the popular (as opposed to official) legend, which, in the course of the sixteenth century, spawned a host of fashionable derivatives, many involving Edward Ill's Queen. In Holinshed, for instance, "the Queen drops her garter on the way to her lodging and Edward orders it to be brought to him and vows to make all men reverence it."⁶ Every version of the tale ends with the same chivalric moral—of lust shamed and virtue encircled—not in the knight so much as in the bystanders who imagine that the knight entertains anything but virtuous intentions. That moral is variously communicated through the garter emblem or motto, or both, as in yet another permutation, where the fallen garter, belonging this time to one of the Queen's maids of honor, serves as the model for a blue velvet copy, embroidered with the words "Honi soit. …"⁷

Through the vehicle of the tale, Elizabeth acquires two roles: she is both Edward, royal host of the Order, and the Queen, whose chastity—or, under whose watchful eye, The character the chastity the attending maids—is reverenced.⁸ The character of Falstaff, emerging from the world of Shakespeare's history plays, brims over with lecherous designs, and thus threatens to violate the meaning of the Garter. We need to remember, however, that Falstaff, like Elizabeth, assumes a double role thanks to his insinuation in the Garter holiday. Acting as "lord over men" (Bardolph, Pistol, Nym), he parallels Elizabeth's role as patron.⁹ If Falstaff exploits this role, requiring improper service of his men—in return for which they, once dismissed from his service, "correctly" plot revenge—does he become an image of the anti-patron, serving as a clownish foil to the monarch? I would say no, arguing instead that Falstaff's part is consistently written to "play out" the fantasies of Windsor's (implicitly male) citizens; in other words, to mediate—or entertain—the desires aroused in the occasion's onlookers. Put another way, Falstaff stands in for the Queen, pandering, as it was the clown's business to pander, to the vulgar portion of the audience, or to the lascivious portion of any viewer's mind. Here, at the farther reaches of "hideous imagination," hovered fantasies of violation, of choosing an Order of looting ravishers over one of chaste knights loyal in their service to God and the Queen.¹⁰

Let us return to the question of what it meant for Shakespeare to ignore genre boundaries, introducing a historical Falstaff into a comic Windsor at the same time that he placed this comic Falstaff at the center of the Queen's holiday. Falstaff was not only known to the audience, but known for his role in a play (1 Henry IV) that "remembered" England's historical past. Disengaged from the context of one play and translated to another, Falstaff gained a spiraling momentum. The associations attached to his character migrated into the audience's memory and continued to unfold there, constituting the kernel of a collective fantasy. The one I have sketched out here, of Falstaff's obliquely amorous connection to the Queen, is one among many possible scenarios. Shakespeare himself calls attention to the complexities of audience reception by placing Merry Wives in Windsor, the traditional setting of the Garter celebration. Apprised of the holiday's structure, its workings, and its lore, Shakespeare translated certain of the holiday's elements—such as its anachronistic and memorial character—into the dramatic design of Merry Wives, marking the comedy with his own awareness of what it meant to embed a play, not only in a multilayered celebration, but also in the material structures through which the celebration would be remembered.

Commemorative objects that have survived from Elizabeth's actual Garter Day celebrations include a portrait of the Queen holding a Badge of St. George, a portrait of her knights "in slightly updated medieval cloaks and bonnets," as well as numerous paeans remembering the procession of participants: "O knightly order, clothed in robes with Garter: / The Queen's Grace, thy mother, in the same. / The nobles of thy realm, rich in array, after … ," and so on.¹¹ Roy Strong writes, "Like so much else in the age of Elizabeth … [the holiday's observance] represents a deliberate cult and reinvigoration of archaisms."¹² The pageant of Queen and knights, dressed in fourteenth-century attire, passing by a stand of sixteenth-century onlookers, inspired the type of language we find in this description: "Under the glorious spreading wings of Fame, / I saw a virgin queen, attired in white, / Leading with her a sort of goodly knights, / With garters and with collars of Saint George";¹³ in other words, language that stops at the surface of the pageant, indulging the illusion of a fantastical past, even as it processes (palpably) through the streets of London.

The Order of the Garter, founded in the fourteenth century by Edward III and intermittently resuscitated by certain of his successors, like Edward IV and Henry VII, was maintained in its original trappings during Henry VIII's reign. Garter reform, initiated by Edward VI, was reversed by Mary in 1553, waiting for Elizabeth to use the apparatus of the old Order as a means of in Strong's reconciling readings: Catholic imagery to Protestant readings:¹⁴ in Stong's words, a way of giving visual form to the Queen's "religious ambiguity."¹⁵ While Protestant reforms required using the English Litany in the procession, as well as a vernacular communion service in place of the High Mass,¹⁶ the knights continued to array themselves in the collars of the medieval Order and arrange themselves in tableaux vivants of the archaic Catholic ceremony. Holding the pose for painters and poets to record, the knights became the subject matter for a body of new icons that collapsed the actual occasion into its legendary antecedents. In these representations, contemporary eyes did not peer anachronistically from the peepholes of an ancient scene; rather, the contemporary and ancient were compressed into a single surface, "embodiments of an identical [and timeless] power."¹⁷

Under Edward IV, St. George's Chapel at Windsor was rebuilt and the Garter ceremony resumed there "on a splendid scale.… [As they had in Edward Ill's reign], the Knights sat, like canons, in the choir stalls, each with his achievement hung above him."¹⁸ From 1559 to 1572, the Elizabethan procession and feasts duly took place in Windsor but after 1572 were moved to Whitehall or Greenwich.¹⁹ Nevertheless, an engraving executed by Marcus Gheeraert in 1576 depicts the procession as taking place at Windsor, suggesting that the Windsor site, like the origins of the holiday itself, had already sunk into mythology, becoming part of the repertoire of emblems through which the Elizabethan rituals were played out and afterwards recorded: "[At Whitehall] the Knights descended through the Great Chamber and Hall to the Chapel, which was arranged like the Chapel at Windsor."²⁰ But as the holiday produced an official way of being remembered, the ceremonies themselves, as physically enacted, came more fully into public view. "By 1592 the crush of people was so great that the ceremonies were held up awaiting the arrival of Knights who had failed to penetrate the throng.… [In 1595, the] Chapel Royal was packed with visitors, and the magnificent procession made its way not once but three times around the courtyard so that all might see the Queen."²¹ Although we, scrutinizing the event, cannot see into the ceremony, that is, cannot see past the surface where quotidian rhythms were frozen into ritual formations, we can nonetheless try to imagine the bustle of the crowd at the periphery.

It is here that Shakespeare's play affords an enlarged perspective by placing the Queen's holiday at the periphery of Merry Wives and the holiday onlookers' digressive intrigues at its center. Indeed, as the play opens, the Inn at Windsor is filling up with guests who have come to see the Garter proceedings, a fact that explains the presence of foreign emissaries, like Sir Evans and Doctor Caius.²² A representative of medieval aristocracy shows up in the figure of Anne Page's suitor, Fenton, while imaginary courtiers buzz in the fantasies of Dame Quickly, who describes a fictive procession of noble suitors begging Mistress Ford's attentions: "Yet there has been knights, and lords, and gentlemen, with their coaches—I warrant you, coach after coach, letter after letter, gift after gift—smelling so sweetly, all musk, and so rushling …" (Merry Wives, 2.2.60-63). Metatheatrically, Merry Wives is staged "inside" the Garter holiday, serving to entertain the ceremony's principals, that is, the Queen and her knights, as well as the surrounding ranks of courtiers and clergymen. But the psychology of characters in the play lies at the periphery of the event, with the members of the public audience who watch at a remove, consuming the sights, gossiping about the finery, the gestures, and the secret lives of the courtly participants, in short, employing their imaginative powers to elaborate outlandish scenarios in which members of the court come, as Falstaff does in Merry Wives, to participate in their fantasies.