Ask me no reason why I love you, for though Love use Reason for his precisian, he admits him not for his counsellor. You are not young, no more am I; go to then, there's sympathy. You are merry, so am I; ha, ha! then there's more sympathy. You love sack, and so do I; would you desire better sympathy? Let it suffice thee …—at least if the love of soldier can suffice—that I love thee.…

…John Falstaff.

(Merry Wives, 2.1.4-19)

Mistress Page and Mistress Ford receive identical love letters from Falstaff. The adulterous ambition that the letters announce is menacing, not because it intrudes on an otherwise tranquil domestic order, but because it gives voice to a perverse desire festering already in the civic imagination, epitomized by Ford's desire to see his wife's reputation cheapened:

She dwells so securely on the excellency of her honour that the folly of my soul dares not present itself; she is too bright to be looked against. Now, could I come to her with any detection in my hand, my desires had instance and argument to commend themselves; I could drive her then from the ward of her purity, her reputation, her marriage-vow, and a thousand other her defences which now are too too strongly embattled against me.

(2.2.233-42)

Falstaff's lechery serves not as proof of Mistress Ford's dishonor but, rather, as the articulation of her husband's desire. In the reading Falstaff gives to Mistress Ford's actions, he delivers the lines that Ford himself would like to speak:

I spy entertainment in her: she discourses, she carves, she gives the leer of invitation; I can construe the action of her familiar style.

(1.3.41-43)

The play's comic intrigue derives from Ford's determination to heighten the pleasure of his fantasy by imaginatively switching places with Falstaff: first he disguises himself as a would-be suitor, and then he pays off the knight to make a liaison—under Ford's assumed name—with Mistress Ford:

There is money; spend it, spend it, spend more; spend all I have, only give me so much of your time in exchange of it as to lay an amiable siege to the honesty of this Ford's wife. Use your art of wooing; win her to consent to you; if any man may, you may as soon as any.

(2.2.223-28)

By borrowing material from Shakespeare's history plays and, in particular, building his fantasies around Falstaff, Ford identifies himself not only as a resident of Windsor—the play world—but also as a resident of London—the extradramatic world—and specifically as a member of Shakespeare's audience. If a man like Ford wishes, for whatever reason, to concoct scenarios of being cuckolded, how could he choose a more celebrated cuckolder than Prince Henry's fat knight, whose far-ranging reputation would give the scandal a seductive universality? The choice, moreover, plays on the prodigious body of Will Kemp, the clown who probably played the part of Falstaff: the unnatural proportions of his physique would simultaneously have maximized and minimized the fantasy's danger, giving it, on the one hand, more power to titillate and, on the one hand, more power to titillate and, on the other, more leeway to transform itself into a joke.²³ Now it is Ford, rather than Shakespeare, who ignores genre boundaries, introducing the historical Falstaff into Windsor, indifferent to the transtemporal, translocative nature of his project. By becoming the property of their audience, characters in plays, and by extension the actors who play them, fuel a universe of private daydreams beyond the playwright's power or ken. This range of imaginative products (or "dreams") issues from what Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, calls "the multiform labor of consumption.… The enigma of the consumer-sphynx. His products are scattered in the graphs of … urbanistic production.… They are protean in form, blending in with their surroundings, and liable to disappear."²⁴

Ford sends "Falstaff" (that is, Falstaff playing pander to Ford's illicit desires) to a place where Ford can find him—to a mental image of the Ford household, where everything is known to Ford already: as Mistress Ford says, "Neither press, coffer, chest, trunk, well, vault, but he hath an abstract for the remembrance of such places and goes to them by his note" (4.2.53-56). The catalog of places includes a nook in the upper chambers where Ford, in his vicarious fantasy, has imagined that Falstaff will try to hide himself. As Ford runs along, both on stage and in his own mind, to catch his wife and Falstaff in the act, he collects a party of Page, Caius, and Evans to witness the climax. To them, he cries, "Gentlemen, I have dreamed to-night; I'll tell you my dream. Here, here, here be my keys; ascend my chambers; search, seek, find out. I'll warrant we'll unkennel the fox" (3.3.148-52). When Ford reaches the warren assigned to Falstaff in his "dream," however, he finds it empty and realizes with the force of a gestalt switch that he has broken into the wrong interior, that this is not his fantasy at all, that he has become, in fact, an actor in someone else's imaginative field.

The movement of the scene might be read this way: that Mistress Ford triumphs over her husband by compassing his fantastical construction with another that corresponds point by point to his—with the exception that Falstaff, stuffed the first time around in a "buck-basket," the second time in the woman of Brainford's clothes, has disappeared from the location he was supposed to occupy in Ford's version. The change is invisibly effected so that Ford does not suspect a scheme coterminous with his. That Mistress Ford is rearranging the stuff of his imagination, albeit in material form on stage, is made explicit in the pun on his name, "Brainford," as well as in this exchange:

MRS FORD: Shall we tell our husbands how we have served Falstaff?

MRS PAGE: Yes, by all means—if it be but to scrape the figures out of your husband's brains.

(4.2.200-203)

But something remains to be said about how these imaginative configurations physically overlap in the act of staging them. The plan that Mistress Ford has prearranged with Mistress Page involves the latter arriving, out of breath, to warn Mistress Ford, "Your husband's coming hither, woman, with all the officers in Windsor, to search for a gentleman that he says is here now in the house.… You are undone" (3.3.97-101). Mistress Page's lines are not supposed to signal Ford's actual arrival but merely to serve as a cue for tossing Falstaff ignobly out of the house. Mistress Ford is equally taken by surprise, then, when her husband actually pushes through the door, followed by a train of men, wide-eyed and eager to share in the scandal. Shakespeare illustrates in this scene how plots-within-plots work: how when one person's play pushes through another's, the first (that is, Ford's fantasy of being cuckolded) materializes the imaginative gaps in the other (Mistress Ford's plot to punish Falstaff's desire to cuckold, which never—in its own right—imagined Ford's literal cuckolding). Ford's arrival brings an "extra joke" to the scene, an added physical dimension that gets shuffled into the layers of collective fantasy through which Falstaff in Windsor circulates.

Can we say, returning to the way Shakespeare positions the play with respect to Garter Day, that Falstaff pushes at the seams of the Queen's holiday, giving voice, on the one hand, to lascivious desires, which would otherwise find expression only in the negative ("Honi soit qui mal y pense"), while at the same time deflecting those desires into Merry Wives' spiral of comic intrigues? There is more to it. For if, as I am suggesting, Shakespeare locates the source of these desires at the boundary of court ceremony, in a public audience's voyeuristic impulse to share in the proceedings by borrowing (or taking home) pieces of the event to fit into their daydreams, he points out how such borrowing violates unities of time and place, yielding a train of imaginative associations that might pluck a character from here, insert him there, imagine him now as a fantastical personage, now as the actor who embodies that personage. On one level, then, Merry Wives portrays the construction of a piecemeal popular mythology, as such a mythology might be experienced by a playgoing public. On another level, the play draws a parallel between this activity and that in which the actors putting on Merry Wives are engaged, that is, participating in the construction of a national mythology that, in its own way, inserts contemporary personages into archaic backdrops, squeezes its official meanings into the symbology of a popular legend like the Garter story, and, in sum, pilfers as much from what lies at its periphery as, in turn, it is plucked and borrowed from. Even as I talk about the transactions that pass between these two sectors—the court and the popular stage—it is important to remember that Shakespeare's theater lies in the middle, mediating the commerce. This is because Shakespeare's company had been putting on a version of English history all along (from the Henry VI plays forward) that, in the very portable figure of Falstaff, could be recalled economically to court and public audiences alike without importing the whole history play apparatus. This is where Shakespeare's play most suggestively presses at the boundaries of St. George's Day, taking the work (like Emilia in Othello) "out" of the Queen's embroidered Garter, and stitching the inscription "Honi soit …" back into the moral universe of 1 & 2 Henry IV.