A set of poetic associations travels via Falstaff between the world of Windsor and Shakespeare's history plays. Taken together, these associations imagine a fantastical relationship among kingship, theatricality, and lecherous desire. The relationship depends, in turn, on the doubleness that the history cycle invests, beginning with Richard II, in kingship and the crown. Commanding the onstage audience to watch as he uncrowns himself—"With mine own tongue deny my sacred state,/ With mine own breath release all duteous oaths" (4.1.209-10)—Richard strips his earthly body of the arcane mantle of the "body politic."²⁵ This "pompous body," however, belongs to a fiction that Richard himself scarcely believes, having learned already that "a little pin" can collapse that body's claim to inviolability. To defend against this knowledge, the circlet of rule, like the Garter itself, admits neither mortality nor its consort, shame, as intrinsic properties, but, rather, refers them endlessly back into an arena of exchange.

The crown, as Richard composes the sign, contains a mute message of inner purgatory, which it is the wearer's burden to articulate for his audience.²⁶ Thus when Hal is caught at his father's deathbed, in premature possession of the crown, his defense takes the form of a dialogue with the object:

                     Thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: "The care on thee
  depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore thou best of gold art worst of gold.
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in med'cine potable;
But thou, most fine, most honour'd, most
  renown'd,
Hath eat thy bearer up."
                      (2 Henry IV, 4.5.155-64)

The speech recalls its counterpoint in 1 Henry IV when Hal, playing his father in the Boar's Head Tavern scene, describes Falstaff as a disease that "feeds" on the kingdom, and scolds the prince for consorting with him.

Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours, that bolting-hutch of beastliness, that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack, that stuffed cloak-bag of guts, that roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly, that reverend vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years?

(1 Henry IV, 2.4.442-49)

Hal's emphasis on "old" Falstaff, parading at life's outer limits, highlights Falstaff's resemblance to Henry IV. The improvisation of king unbraiding son, "across" Falstaff, turns into a glimpse of son berating father for the father's iniquities: for Richard's murder ("reverend vice") and for Bolingbroke's unlawful seizure of the crown ("father ruffian, … vanity in years"). Falstaff's lifeline is consequently stretched to compass son and father, setting the "old bag" up to inherit the legacy of shame, which properly belongs to Boling-broke and to Bolingbroke's line. Describing the kingdom over which Falstaff is to "monarchize," Hal says, "Thy state is taken for a joint-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown" (2.4.375-77). Falstaff is thus placed in the confines of the morality play that Richard II originally attached to the crown ("and there the antic sits, / Scoffing [the king's] state and grinning at his pomp, / Allowing him a breath, a little scene, / To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks" [Richard II, 3.2.162-65]). But through the manipulation of kingly pretensions into Falstaff, Hal transfers the potentiality of the crown symbol—the crown shape even—into the formal compass of Falstaff's body, which, on the logic of both crown and garter, reads the audience's shameful desire back to itself.²⁷

By risking the volatile circuiting of his desire through a fantasy of Falstaff, Master Ford finds himself spoken through by patterns of situation and speech belonging to this associative maze. When John and Robert, for instance, drag the buck-basket across his path, Ford responds to it as having a magical relevance. As if both he and the buck-basket were part of the Falstaff legend, Ford fixes compulsively on the word "buck," saying it over and over until it seems that his vocal cords themselves have stuck in a place from which accumulated shame cries out.

FORD: HOW now? Whither bear you this?

JOHN: To the laundress, forsooth.

MRS FORD: Why, what have you to do whither they bear it? You were best meddle with buck-washing!

FORD: Buck? I would I could wash myself of the buck! Buck, buck, buck! Ay, buck; I warrant you, buck; and of the season too, it shall appear.

(3.3.140-47)

Reading this scene through the Garter motto ("Honi soit qui mal y pense"), I find that the "y" (or shameful things) marks the snare into which Ford unwittingly steps. By paying a fantastical Falstaff to make love to his wife, Ford aims both to buck and be bucked, unaware of the power of the word "buck" to raise Falstaff, not only as he will appear in the denouement of Merry Wives, crowned with horns, but also, in new and invigorated form, from the death he feigned in the final act of 1 Henry IV.

Going back to the scene at Shrewsbury Field, we find Hal, standing over Falstaff's body, comparing it to Percy's, in an elegy that begins the process of punning conversion:

                 Poor Jack, farewell!…
Death hath not struck so fat a deer today,
Though many dearer, in this bloody fray.
Embowell'd will I see thee by and by,
Till then in blood by noble Percy lie.
          (1 Henry IV, 5.4.102-9, my emphasis)

The speech implies that a dead Falstaff is both "deer" and "dearer" than a living one. The prince has, in fact, been looking forward to this conversion since 2.4:

PRINCE (to Peto): We must all to the wars.… I'll procure this fat rogue a charge of foot, and I know his death will be a march of twelve score.

(2.4.537-40)

PRINCE (to Falstaff): Say thy prayers, and farewell.… thou owest God a death.

(5.1.124-26)

PRINCE (to Falstaff): [Percy is sure] indeed, and living to kill thee.

(5.3.49)

A dead Falstaff can be more easily disembowelled and made hollow; at the same time, he can be removed from the stage and left to settle into public memory and imagination. In both capacities, Hal would use him as a repository for the disrepute of his own past, a strategy revealed at Shrewsbury, where just as the prince intends to absorb the breadth and range of Percy's honors

         I shall make this northern youth exchange
His glorious deeds for my indignities.
Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf.
                               (3.2.145-48)

he also means to embowel and bury the sum of his indignities in Falstaff. The double name (deer/dear) fulfills a certain promise: although it does not conclusively kill Falstaff, it becomes an emblem—like the garter and its motto—of mortal flesh shot through with shame.

This emblem also tinges the tavern escapades of 2 Henry IV. Mingling with the play's erotic Falstaff, it helps explain the mixed signals that emanate from a more mature version of Sir John, whose "day's service at Shrewsbury" has caused him to be decorated with a figurative death's head, an obliquely visible memento mori reflected in Doll Tearsheet's words at 2.4:

DOLL: Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boarpig, when wilt thou leave fighting a-days, and foining a-nights, and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?

FALSTAFF: Peace, good Doll, do not speak like a death's head, do not bid me remember mine end.

(2.4.227-32)

But Doll's grisly endearments are mixed with kisses that come from "a most constant heart" (267, my emphasis), and as Falstaff leaves a second time for the wars, she says, "I cannot speak; if my heart be not ready to burst" (376, my emphasis). By evoking Falstaff's "dearness" in terms of "heart," she generates a different pun, "hart/heart," which signals the capacity of 2 Henry IV to absorb the indignities of "deer/dear" (as if steering intentionally clear of it) and to push its morbid flavor around until Falstaff is reestablished in his hart-like prime. In the tavern ambience, the nostalgia of "twenty-nine years, come peascod-time" sweetens the eroticism and makes the approach of death ("Come it grows late.… Thou't forget me when I am gone" [273-74]), like so many other moments in the play, into an occasion for reminiscence. The Hostess's parting words, "but an honester and truer-hearted man" (380-81, my emphasis), replace Falstaff with a name that restores him to the relatively shameless youth of the Eastcheap community. In its likeness to a death token, the "deer's head" becomes an aural alternative to Shakespeare's visual pun on Richard II's crown: "For within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court" (3.2.160-62). That the crown is no more than a circlet to shame any mortal's aspiration "to monarchize" is a message that Richard has embedded already in the shape of the object, making it into a constrictive band and perpetual reminder to Bolingbroke of his kingly—not to mention usurper's—vanity. In Bolingbroke's seizure of Richard's crown, there is a taint of political cuckoldry—a whiff of illegitimate ascension—that plays out the morphological pun, elaborated above, connecting crowns and garters across the plays.

This is to say that when Ford reads his fantasy of cuckoldry (couched in the popular imagery of horns) into Falstaff, he figuratively assumes the antlers of Falstaff's emblematic shame. In other words, Ford's fantasy of local scandal is consumed in a mire of national shame, a kingly purgatory obliquely embedded, through the vehicle of Falstaff, in the Garter Day/ Windsor imagery of sexual appetite and violation. Not only does Ford become the object of his own ridicule ('"Tis my fault, Master Page, I suffer for it" [202]) and Page's mockery ("Let's go in gentlemen—[aside] but, trust me, we'll mock him" [212-13]) but, charged with an "excess" of shame, he becomes "crowned" with the pinching, burning phantoms of Shakespeare's English histories. Put in the form of a more general thesis, Shakespeare's plays are constructed to remember each other: by incorporating parts of one another—fragments, echoes, or maturations of poetic imagery—individual plays in the canon spur a recollective process shared by the audience. In Merry Wives, the playwright sets forth the hypothesis, what if a sector of that audience, raised on his history plays, borrowed one of the more memorable characters and wrote that character into a chapter of its own local history, or, better yet, into a fantasy of scandal and intrigue on the local level? Could the local drama defend itself from incorporating, or rather being incorporated by, the "background" system of associations structuring the national history? If not, at what point would the local drama begin to remember, or be remembered by, the other history? Shakespeare's answer seems to be that the usurpation—or consumption—of one history by the other happens at the level of poetic image or device: where sixteenth-century knights strap on fourteenth-century garters, and citizens in a fantastical Windsor are cuckolded by characters from history; where Edwards turn into Elizabeths, and deer are resurrected as bucks; where time, in short, ceases to unfold linear plots, but moves, as images in language do, through metaphoric declension, or what Roland Barthes has called "flexional forms."²⁸

What interests me is how the product created by Shakespeare's hypothesis, the play put on, differs from the artifacts or souvenirs generated by and around the official Garter Day ceremony, whose surfaces are made to deflect the gaze of onlookers. For one thing, the fluid connection running from Merry Wives back to Shakespeare's history plays travels by way of the punning name, a signifying sound that catches in the ear or throat, fixing identity only momentarily, and then at the place where imaginative worlds aurally overlap. Shakespeare's icons—if word pairs like dear/deer, heart/ hart, buck/bucked can be thought of as constituting an aural iconography²⁹—dissolve into the dramatic characters whom, like coats of arms, they name, tinging how those characters act on an audience's desire, and determining how, when members of the audience take them home, those characters will reshape private fantasy or local legend. To enter a role, even mentally—as Ford imagines himself to act through Falstaff's lust—involves entering an interiority that, like the circlet of the garter, instantly inverts itself, becoming a condition that compasses the actor, determining him from an external point of view as a name might. "Putting on" Falstaff, then, as opposed to "putting on" the Queen's garter, involves an act of playing for an audience, that is, obliging as well as putting off or shaming its desire.

In the final scene of Merry Wives, the men and women of Windsor commune to cast out what Falstaff, not to mention his host of iconic nicknames, officially stands for. To this end, they "put Falstaff together again," this time out of found materials—a chain, a pair of horns, a host of fairies—seeking to transform Prince Hal's deer into an effigy of Heme (half man, half deer; a hybrid of hunter and quarry), the closest that folk tradition comes to approximating Hal's intimately imagined rogue. The final act of Merry Wives is not unlike a rite of exorcism that tries to draw the spirit of Falstaff out of its historical dispersion into concrete form. What is compelling about this final ceremony, though, is its resemblance to a court masque, or rather how, built into a play of comic urges, it "slurs" over courtly conventions and almost instantly pulls the expurgated figure back into its circle:

PAGE: Yet be cheerful, knight. Thou shalt eat a posset to-night at my house, where I will desire thee to laugh at my wife, that now laughs at thee. Tell her Master Slender hath married her daughter.

(5.5.171-74)

By this time, Page has forgotten Falstaff's crimes, giddy in an oblique plot to "punish" his wife by marrying their daughter off, against Mistress Page's wishes, to Slender, who has his directions that Anne Page "shall be [at the masque] in white" (4.6.34). Mistress Page is equally preoccupied with taking revenge on her husband, by marrying their daughter to Caius, who, in turn, believes that Anne "in green … shall be … enrob'd" (4.6.40). In the course of the masque, Slender trips away with a boy-actor dressed in white, Caius with a boy in green, while Fenton takes Anne, dressed in neither white nor green, and marries her against the will of either parent. Like Master Ford's arrival, erupting with corporeal vigor into the frame of Mistress Ford's plot, the physical presence of the boy-actors, planted as decoys, provides the extra joke in the finale. They shame the expectation of male lust, or, rather, fill its imaginative gap by showing that a boy-actor's body always fleshes out the robes of the female stage character. Insides are once again turned out, in the form of a leftover laugh. Likewise, Dame Quickly's folk ceremony, which claims, through the vehicle of emblematic, floral script to "write out" the characters of the Garter motto:

                 Meadow fairies, look you sing,
Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring…
And "Honi soit qui mal y pense" write
In em'rald tuffs, flow'rs purple, blue, and
  white,
Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood's bending
  knee:
Fairies use flow'rs for their charactery.
                                    (5.5.66-74)

Thus embodied, the motto is swallowed up in a turmoil of actors in petally costumes, dissolving altogether when, at the sound of the deer horn, the dancers disperse, leaving "nothing" inscribed on the empty stage. Like the body of Richard's king undecked, the pompous body of court ceremony fades into a blank surface, making the platform itself into a memento mori of the court holiday.