The 1602 Quarto of Merry Wives states that the play was acted '"divers times,' both for the Queen 'and elsewhere.'"³⁰ A public performance would have served as a metatheatrical realization of the relationship implied within the play, of courtiers arriving to attend a Garter ceremony (and by extension the production of Merry Wives embedded in that ceremony) as well as the citizens at the periphery, assembling, in their turn, to watch the arrival of the court, and later, the grand procession of the Queen and her Order. In other words, the popular audience received the play itself as a thing produced for the court and, accordingly, went to the theater to see what the court saw. This factor introduces another extradramatic dimension into the performance history of Merry Wives, in which a popular audience played at being in attendance at an official, court production. The production would have come "smelling so sweetly" from the private hall, carrying the scent of "musk" into the public playhouse. What the public audience shared was the material experience of a production, whose elements—actors, situations, routines—crossed palpably from one performance setting to another. The point was not to reenact the significance of embodied gestures to English history, but to facilitate the appropriation of these embodiments by a public audience.

Notes

I owe my thanks to Paul Alpers, Joel Altman, Daniel Baird, Ben Avner Hecht, and Louis Suarez-Potts among the friends and mentors who have helped this essay evolve into its present form.

¹ For a recent argument retracing the commission of Merry Wives for the occasion of the Garter Feast, see David Wiles, Shakespeare's Almanac (Cambridge, 1993), 19-27. Taken as a whole, the book responds in a comprehensive way to what Wiles terms the "occasionalist" controversy.

² T.W. Craik outlines the dating argument in his introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor (New York, 1989), 1-13; Edmond Malone (1790) inferred a connection to the Garter ceremony from Dame Quickly's order to the fairies (5.5.60) to scour "the several chairs of order" in preparation for the Installation at Windsor Castle; Leslie Hotson (1931) set the date of performance at 23 April 1597, on evidence that rumors were circulating in Elizabeth's court as early as February 1597 that George Carey, patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, would be elected to the Order of the Garter, leaving sufficient time for Carey to commission a play to be performed on St. George's Day "as his special contribution to the festivities"; ibid., 3.

³ Cited from Nicholas Rowe's edition of Merry Wives (1709) by Craik, in ibid., 4-5.

⁴ Ibid., 13; Craik says that the ascription travels from John Dennis back to John Dryden "who may have got it from Davenant." Ibid., 5; that the Queen would wish to see Falstaff "in love" (4-5) is consistent with the legend's assertion that she had already seen 2 Henry IV, the play that most fully realizes Falstaff's erotic character. It is equally possible—if, as critics like H. J. Oliver propose, Shakespeare wrote 2 Henry IV in the following year (1598)—that the legend developed retrospectively after this secondary incarnation had fully entered the social imagination of theatergoers.

⁵ Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1977), 179.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ For an account of the imagery through which Elizabeth managed the transmission of her identity as "king and queen both," see Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1988), 53-66.

⁹ George Carey, whose election to the Garter provided the occasion for the play, had only the previous year succeeded his father as patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Falstaff's transgression raises questions about the proper boundaries of patronage in general; his negative example might be construed as giving merry warning to the company's new patron, counsel rendered safely comic by the enormity of Falstaff's improprieties. The treatment Falstaff receives at the hands of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page inverts the Installation rite (which would take place the following month on 24 May) by calling to mind its antithesis: "the degradation ceremony in which an expelled Knight's heraldic achievements were thrown down from his stall in Saint George's Chapel and kicked into the castle ditch"; Craik, Merry Wives, 28; Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 174. Falstaff fears that he will be mocked if news of his humiliation gets back "to the ear of the court" (4.5.89).

¹⁰ Leah Marcus relates the story of a Catholic conspirator whose intention to assassinate the Queen was by his own report "appalled and perplexed" when he beheld in her female form "the very likeness and image of King Henry the Seventh"; Puzzling Shakespeare, 58. The supernatural shield of the Queen's bi-fold gender could, on the one hand, act like the garter to deflect aggressive desire, or, on the other, inspire perverse fantasies of violation. In "Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture, Representations 2 (1983): 61-94, Louis Montrose points to a diary entry (written 23 January 1597) in which Simon Forman relates a dream in which he is walking with Elizabeth "through lanes and closes," carrying the train of her dress. "I told her she should do me a favor to let me wait on her, and she said I should. Then said I, "I mean to wait upon you and not under you, that I might make this belly a little bigger to carry up this smock and coats out of the dirt'"; A. L. Rowse, The Case Books of Simon Forman (London, 1974), 62-63. In this "familiar" (in the liberty-taking sense) dream of impregnating the Queen, we find a fantasy of violation couched in what would have passed more innocently as a national fantasy of the Queen producing an heir.

¹¹ Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 164-65.

¹² Ibid., 185.

¹³ Ibid., 164.

¹⁴ Ibid., 165-67.

¹⁵ Ibid., 185.

¹⁶ Ibid., 167-68.

¹⁷ Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago, 1980), 224.

¹⁸ Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 165.

¹⁹ According to Craik, the Installation, at which only the newly elected knights were required to be present, continued to be conducted at Windsor by three commissioners specially appointed by the Queen; Craik, Merry Wives, 4.

²⁰ Strong, Cult of Elizabeth, 168, my emphasis.

²¹ Ibid., 172.

²² Craik notes Shakespeare's topical allusion to Frederick, Duke of Wurttemberg, who, although elected to the Order in 1597, failed to attend the proceedings; Craik, Merry Wives, 5-6. Caius says to the Host, "it is tell-a me dat you make grand preparation for a duke de Jarmany. By my trot', dere is no duke that the court is know to come" (4.5.80-81). All citations to Shakespeare texts are from the Arden Shakespeare, ed. Richard Proudfoot (New York).

²³ My argument returns to the question of whether Falstaff's erotic identity was fixed in the social imagination prior to or following his appearance in Merry Wives. Ford's fantasy indicates, in any case, that Shakespeare was interested (as fait accompli or future possibility) in what it would mean for a reputation of sexual conquest to attach itself to the Falstaff character. To determine Will Kemp's "sex appeal," we can look to Nine Daies Wonder (1600) in which the clown, in giving an account of his (in)famous dance from London to Norwich, testifies to having a magnetic pull on "corpulent" women. Having defeated "a lusty tall fellow" in dance, Kemp wins the admiration of a "lusty Country lasse" who says she will dance a mile at his side. "The Drum strucke, forward marcht I with my merry Maydemarian: who shooke her fat sides: and footed it merrily to Melfoord"; G.B. Harrison, ed., Nine Daies Wonder (Edinburgh, 1966), 14. Whether Kemp's claim to "prowess" grows out of his morris dancing or out of his connection to the Falstaff role, his erotic powers are clearly an essential (if self-mocking) part of his professional persona.

²⁴ Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steve Rendali (Berkeley, 1984), 31. While de Certeau's remark is grounded in the metaphors of a twentieth-century consumer culture (and in particular of the television screen "grids" by which images reach into and mingle with the daydreams of contemporary consumers), the question he raises about "imaginative consumership," in other words, the active role played by audience imagination in transforming commercial products, has informed my reading of Shakespeare's Ford. De Certeau places a unique emphasis on consumer production ("Once the images broadcast by television and the time spent in front of the TV set have been analyzed, it remains to be asked what the consumer makes of these images and during these hours"; ibid., (31)] and does not let the fact that such production seldom leaves a concrete trace dissuade him from thinking through its implications. Even if the common Elizabethan "consumer" did not leave a record of what he (or less frequently she) "made" with material "gotten" from plays, the period offers proof that playhouse celebrities enjoyed, in literary representation at least, an afterlife in their public's dreams. In Tarifons Newes Out of Purgatorie, published anonymously in London in 1590, the narrator identifies himself as an avid fan of Richard Tarlton (the clown whose popularity reached "national" levels in the 1580s). After Tarlton's death, the narrator enters a period of mourning, marked by abstinence from playgoing, after which Tarlton visits him in a dream and takes him on a tour of Purgatory. See Jane Belfield and Geoffrey Creigh, eds., Tarlton's Newes Out of Purgatorie (Leiden, 1987), 144-85. The pamphlet collapses two types of consumership (going to plays and reading Boccaccio) together, providing an interesting example of the tendency of consumer production to override genre's boundaries.

²⁵ "The fiction of the oneness of the double body breaks apart. Godhead and manhood … both clearly outlined with a few strokes, stand in contrast to each other." For Ernst Kantorowicz's reading of Richard II, see The King's Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957), 24-41.

²⁶ For another reading of Richard II's manipulation of the crown image, see Harry Berger Jr., Imaginary Audition: Shakespeare on Stage and Page (Berkeley, 1989), 47-48: "[Richard seems] intent on the interpretative tease value of the image, which he manipulates with the same coyness as the crown [itself]" (48).

²⁷ Remember that the sign bars access to the interior of the person who wears it. By buckling on the garter, the knight announces his virtue to onlookers while shaming their suspicion of unchaste designs in him.

²⁸ Roland Barthes, "La métaphore de l'oeil," Critique (August-September 1963): 770-77.

²⁹ For a related discussion of the role of aurality in Shakespeare's written text, see Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare's Ear," Representations 28 (1989): 6-13. Pointing out the "exceptionally pornographic [and vulvalike] ear" embroidered on Elizabeth's robes in the "Rainbow Portrait" (c. 1600), Fineman notes that it falls "over Queen Elizabeth's genitals, in the crease formed where the two folds of her dress fold over on each other" (10). Fineman goes on to say that there are reasons to link the "bifold" erotics of the ear (as icon) "with a specific and historically determinate Renaissance sense of textuality" (11).

³⁰ Craik, Merry Wives, 53.

Source: "The Merry Wives of Windsor: Sharing the Queen's Holiday," in Representations, Vol. 51, Summer, 1995, pp. 77-93.