SOURCE: “The Libido as Pharmakos, or The Triumph of Love: The Merry Wives of Windsor in the Context of Comedy,” in Orbis Litterarum, Vol. 43, 1988, pp. 195-216.

[In the following essay, Beiner takes a close look at the comedic structure of The Merry Wives of Windsorin order to show that this play is not an anomaly but is instead related in style and theme to the rest of Shakespeare's comedies as well as to other comedies of the era.]

I

The history of the criticism of The Merry Wives of Windsor shows a radical evaluative disparity between a high critical regard and popularity on the stage until the eighteenth century and, on the other hand, romantic hostility and modern neglect.¹ The modern neglect, at least until recently,² is particularly noticeable in the context of the increasing critical interest in Shakespeare's comedies, manifested especially in a number of book-length studies which have greatly contributed to our understanding of the plays, and have rescued some (for instance, Love's Labour's Lost) from previous neglect. From these studies The Merry Wives is usually excluded for varying reasons, and sometimes without a stated reason.³ Since conceptual tools for dealing with the genre of comedy and the corpus of Shakespeare's comedies (tools of which there used to be a great dearth) have been developed, especially since the seminal work of Northrop Frye and C.L. Barber, it is also glaringly obvious that this play has not received proper analytical and conceptual attention. It has simply suffered from neglect, partly because of a persisting prejudice in character evaluation (Falstaff is supposed to show a great falling off in comparison to the aplomb and incisiveness in Henry IV, especially Part One), and partly because generic issues have been obscured by driving a wedge between the other comedies and this one.

Neglecting The Merry Wives is detrimental not only to our understanding of the play. It harms our perception of the development of Shakespearean comedy from Errors to Twelfth Night, of the coordinates of values asserted in the corpus, and of Shakespeare's choice of comic strategies. Much can be learned, for instance, about the comic strategy in Twelfth Night (with its juxtaposition of a main level of errors and resolutions of love with a subplot of exposure and comic punishment) by observing the relationship between the punitive manipulation of Falstaff and the level of Fenton—Anne Page. More generally, in analyzing The Merry Wives closely, we can perceive a great deal about the values which inform Shakespeare's comedies—about what is asserted and what is rejected, what leads to a festive resolution, what is tolerated even when comically exposed, and what is cast out.

One should not place evaluation before elucidation and interpretation, as such an order becomes prejudicial, but rather engage in evaluation only after a meticulous analysis. This is the procedure in the present essay. The analytical work is carried out with the help of generic tools, and an awareness of the relevant traditions of comedy—for the sake of contrast (which reveals Shakespeare's creative originality) as much as for comparison (which shows that he did not create in a void and out of nothing). For the purpose of dealing with exposure/punishment/casting out in comedy, two related terms are particularly useful, and are often invoked in the following analysis of the play. The social/anthropological term ‘pharmakos’ helps to elucidate the dimension of communal solidarity against a threat and an aberration, and the aspect of physical punishment, with its comic echoes of punitive rituals. The specifically comic term ‘alazon’ is directly related to the coordinates of comic values (in this case, the blocking force in the comedy), as is its counterpart ‘eiron’ (the character who exposes the alazon).⁴ The comic dialectic of eiron versus alazon is a central pattern in the traditions of European comedy, and it is used by Shakespeare not only in relation to characters (whom he does not always define strictly as belonging to the negative or to the positive group) but more generally in relation to attitudes (which are positive or negative, ironic or earnest) and to stances. The appropriate definition of the terms for Shakespeare's comedy is given here in the process of analyzing the dynamics of The Merry Wives, and relevant parallels or contrasts from European comedy are adduced.

II

“Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life”

Meredith, The Egoist.

The Merry Wives creates an overall pattern through a number of levels, and through their interactions and juxtapositions. Any analysis of the play, whatever the focus of its interest, has to take into account the existence of the various interconnected levels, and the dependence of the overall meaning of the play upon juxtapositions.⁵ Without the overall pattern, concentrating on one level (the exposure of Falstaff, for instance) is bound to distort.

On one level Falstaff, the would-be seducer who aims at pecuniary gain, devises a campaign designed to combine business with pleasure; he plans to assault the social fortress of marriage. Or, to change the military metaphor for a theatrical one, he devises a play, in which he casts himself in the role of manipulator, successful seducer, and the cuckolder who fleeces the husbands. Falstaff's way, as the opening scene emphasizes in connection with Shallow' complaint, is not to hide his offences against social order. He is no hypocritical Tartuffe, who disguises practical, immoral designs under a cloak of pretended piety and respectability. He is avowedly immoral. Nor does he excuse himself when he is accused. Whether “a fault confessed is half redressed,” as the proverb says, or “if it be confessed, it is not redressed” as Shallow says, is not a relevant issue for him.⁶ He does not aim to redress, and an open admission is only part of his method. When he attempts seduction, he also employs the attack direct: no “courtly love,” and no beating about the bush, but a brazen boarding (II.i.4ff.). “I cannot cog, I cannot prate,” he says (III.iii.42).

Against the foolish Shallow, the “miles gloriosus” of reminiscences, this method is successful: Falstaff is not punished, intimidated, or thrown out of the homes of the citizens of Windsor. But Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page are not Shallow, either in determination or in the ability to punish an offender. All they need in order to be effective against Falstaff is knowledge, and this is conveniently supplied as a result of Falstaff's characteristic thrasonical behaviour. His hyperbolical self-confidence (which is, of course, characteristic of the “miles gloriosus” and is normally either a cause of defeat or a main object of ridicule in connection with this comic type) in duplicating the letters of seduction leads to the wives' knowledge of his double scheme. At the same time, Falstaff's confident and bragging disclosure of his plans to his disgruntled followers, at the moment of antagonizing them, also makes the knowledge of the scheme available to the husbands. The attitudes and behaviour of husbands and wives are juxtaposed from then on, with the wives being clearly superior in awareness and control; but, from the outset, Falstaff is consistently at the bottom of the scale of awareness, at least on the level on which he functions.⁷

With knowledge available to the merry wives, and Falstaff ignorant of their decisions, his campaign, or prospective play, is turned upside-down. The saturnalian figure, who would make fun of moral values and social institutions, is taught a comic lesson which asserts moral norms. The would-be Lord of Misrule pushes himself willingly yet unwittingly (no less than the kill-joy Malvolio does vis-à-vis the festive revellers in Twelfth Night) into the role of pharmakos, in the comedy which the merry and chaste wives engineer. He is not only the resistible force applied to immovable objects—though he thinks he is an irresistible lover. He is manipulated, fooled, punished, and ultimately exposed in a sequence which culminates in a masque—a play in which make-believe is intertwined with the reality of the participants—where the Windsor society unites against the threat represented by the “Prince of Libido.”⁸ Falstaff is punished, like Acteon, for prohiibited desires: he assumes the part of a beast (thinking himself a virile stag and another Joye, only to discover that he is made an ass), and he wears the horns of ridicule he thought he would place on the foreheads of Ford and Page (as Ford reminds him, in Act V, scene v, 110ff.).

Falstaff's fantasy of prowess and success fails before it begins, not just at the end; and his self-confidence and gullibility lead him repeatedly to try once more after each unpleasant lesson. Even as he speaks eloquently of his suffering after each punishment, and decides not to go to the wives any more, he commits the same mistake again in swallowing the old bait thrown to him via Mistress Quickly. Though his intentions are antisocial, Falstaff is not effective even in selfish terms. We find the most delightful verbal exuberance in Falstaff when he complains about his treatment in the course of his most uncourtly love—that is, when he functions as a comic victim. Since he does not learn a lesson from painful experience though he says he does, there is a clear indication that his wit bears no relation to awareness or cleverness. Such dubious verbal triumphs as he has—e.g., over Simple, IV.v.31ff.—do not take him out of the role of comic butt and victim.

Falstaff's aims represent a threat which is directed at a fundamental social value, embodied in marriage. To this we have to add a Shakespearean characteristic, which is found in all the comedies from Errors to Twelfth Night, and which distinguishes them from many a comedy either in the classical or the medieval tradition. Generally, comic values (what is desired, and what constitutes a resolution) need not always be identical with moral/social values. A comedy may relate to such values by saturnalian inversion, and may even challenge and subvert them. Successful seductions by young men of old men's wives, and the willing adulteries of young wives are cases in point—whether we find them in medieval fabliaux (like the Miller's Tale in The Canterbury Tales, and many a tale in the Decameron), or in the erudite plays in the “new comedy” tradition (like Machiavelli's Mandragola). In either tradition, the underlying pattern of the triumph of virile youth over impotent, jealous, obstructive old age emphasizes the saturnalian relationship between comic triumph and conventional comic values. Given such patterns, and their prominence in the traditions of comedy, we need to emphasize that in Shakespeare's comedies the social institution of marriage is used in a way which also embodies comic values—not an opposition between the two. The final resolutions, with the accompanying celebrations, are assertions which indicate a correspondence between social and comic values. Furthermore, in Shakespeare's comedies, the middle phase (of complications, release, and comic exploration) is not a “period of sexual license,”⁹ if that phrase is understood in terms of sexual relations. There are revealing errors, and departures from everyday norms of behaviour (whether in the form of a temporary freedom from conventional restrictions, as with Rosalind in As You Like It, or a “midsummer madness” of emotion, as in A Dream and Twelfth Night); but there is no freedom in sexual relations, which would be in opposition to marriage.

The assertion represented by marriage in Shakespearean comedy is not, of course, absolute and uniform. As there are different levels of perception within Shakespearean comedies, so are there different levels in the comic resolutions. Given what is revealed about Proteus and Claudio, or given the level of sentiment on which Touchstone functions, the respective marriages are considerably less-than-ideal, though they are integral to the resolutions of The Two Gentlemen, Much Ado, and As You Like It. Similarly, the comic exposure directed at the conventional love-game of Lucentio and Bianca comes to a climax (rather than being removed) after the young lovers outwit the parent and the undesirable suitors and get married; but there is no suggestion that an illicit relationship, or no relationship would have been preferable. The ironic point at the end of The Shrew (on the Bianca-Lucentio level) is that marriage based on conventional love-at-first-sight and achieved through conventional comic intrigue is not what the young man supposes it is, or what it should ideally be. To take a further example, the marital problems of Adriana and the Ephesian Antipholus in Errors are not resolved at the end in a way which fully answers all complaints raised by the wife, or which promises perfect stability. But, just as nothing untoward really happens when the wife locks the wrong man with her in the house (no adultery is committed, unlike what happens when Amphytrio's loving wife unwittingly welcomes her husband's divine look-alike in Plautus's play), so the marital reconciliation is, for all its limitations, an integral part of the various reunions (and the one new union) which constitute the resolution in Errors.

Many unions in Shakespearean comedy are less-than-profound (e.g., the young Athenian lovers in A Dream, or Oliver and Celia in As You Like It). We have to emphasize the point in the present context, so as not to convey the misleading impression that Shakespeare is a stuffy moralist whose aim in comedy is to give us moral exempla, to preach, and to show virtue rewarded. His comic resolutions are not emblems of perfection, profundity of sentiment, and total stability. There is a wide range. At the higher end we may put the genuine mutual relationship established after obstructive attitudes are altered (Benedick and Beatrice, and, more one-sidedly, Petruchio and Katherina). These are contrasted with relationships and attitudes which are comically exposed as deficient (Claudio-Hero, Lucentio-Bianca). Also at the highest end of the range are the cases where the woman's loyalty triumphs in spite of the man (Julia, Viola); or where there is a combination of commitment with a vivacious playacting, which produces comic exposure but also comic remedy and resolution (Rosalind). To put the point in a somewhat different way, comic exposure and clarification bring out problems and deficiencies, but Shakespearean comedy also establishes positive norms of values, which are asserted in the resolution—itself the “telos” of the comic movement. Whether the focus of comic exposure is on conventions of declarations and behaviour in love (a recurrent comic motif in Shakespeare's comedies), or on the question of reliability of sentiment, or on misunderstandings and friction—resolutions in Shakespearean comedy are connected with marriage, both as a formal device for creating a “sense of an ending” (in Frank Kermode's phrase) and in terms of an assertion of values. This is one reason why much can be learnt about Shakespearean comedy in general by examining the comic values and comic obstacles in The Merry Wives; and, conversely, much light is cast on this play by placing it in its proper context among Shakespeare's comedies, rather than putting it in quarantine as “- farce,” “citizen comedy,” or “Shakespeare's English comedy.” In this play, there is a multiple assertion, and a final celebration, of values represented by marriage. The comic action (which moves from an initial threat to well-being, via complications, to resolution) and the comic clarification (which exposes values and deficiencies) have to do here with the external threat to marriage (which is punished and cast out), an internal problem within marriage in the form of jealousy (which is eventually remedied), and the obstacle of parental opposition to the young lovers' choice (which is overcome through the initiative of the lovers).

In a simplified distinction, one kind of assertion in The Merry Wives is manifested in the comic “via negativa”; the exposure, punishment, and removal of the opposition to basic values. The other kind may be called positive, in that it shows the triumph, fulfilment, and celebration of the values which the comedy upholds. As we shall see, the distinction is by no means absolute: the process of comic exposure is based on an assertive, normative stand taken by characters in the play; and the usual “new comedy” pattern of the triumph of young love includes, as it often does in Shakespearean comedy (though very briefly here), a querying of the motives and intentions of the young man. However, the basic distinction does exist. It is expressed in the two principal levels in the play, and in their relationship of juxtaposition.

One level involves exposure, a thwarting of designs, and comic punishment which reaches the proportions of a casting out of the pharmakos. Falstaff is at its centre, on the receiving side, and he must have felt—as Northrop Frye puts it—that “after being thrown into the water, dressed up as a witch and beaten out of the house with curses, and finally supplied with a beast's head and singed with candles, he had done all that could reasonably be asked of any fertility spirit.”¹⁰

In fact, Falstaff is not really a fertility spirit. He is an antagonist/alazon, who is basically on the same side of the comic scale as obstructing old men, or old lechers, and other characters in whom libidinal desires are seen as negative and ridiculous. As we can see in two well-known non-Shakespearean comedies, which are typical of a major European tradition—Beaumarchais's Barber of Seville and Molière's L'Avare—such negative traits can be combined in one character, who can be a grouch, a miser, and a lecher, and who is the comic loser. A Bartholo (guardian of the young Rosine, whose rejection of her suitors has to do with his plan to marry her himself), or Harpagon (the old miser, who wants to marry the young woman his son loves, and to match the son with an old widow) are alazones, and occupy the most negative and most obstructive positions in the comic scheme. These examples (which could be multiplied from Menander's Dyskolos and Plautus's Aulalaria almost “ad infinitum”) are typical of a major pattern in the “new comedy” tradition: a conflict between the young and the old on sexual relations—where the old competitors are negative, and are exposed to ridicule and comic punishment. Although Shakespeare shows the triumph of young love in his comedies, he does not usually employ the pattern of young vs. old—and he avoids the father/son competition altogether; though when the superannuated lover (Gremio, the “pantaloon” in The Shrew, Shallow in our play) does appear, he occupies the conventionally ridiculous position. Falstaff is not a competitor against young lovers; Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page are past the holiday time of their beauty (II.i.1), as well as being married. But he is on the same side of the comic scale as old lovers and lechers, and his defeat is juxtaposed with Fenton's triumph. Falstaff's scheme is negative, that of the young lovers positive.

The usual “new comedy” structure, which unfolds from an initial combination of a goal of well-being (what is desired) and obstructions, via complications, to a resolution in which the goal is achieved, may create a contradiction between the comic value defined by the goal and social requirements; often, this is combined with the conflict between generations (with the old people holding the purse strings, as well as having social authority). The parental/social position may be in line with normal social preoccupation with money and status (e.g., when the father objects to his child's choice in love because the prospective mate is poor or socially inferior); or, it may involve a comically perverse competition between the old father and the young son for a young woman; or, and equally negative obstruction from an old man but without the Oedipal dimension of the previous pattern.¹¹ All these major versions place the old man in a comically negative position. As examples we may take Terence's Andria (a young man in love with a girl who does not seem to meet the parental requirements for social rank and money), Plautus's Casina (the father wanting an affair with the girl his son desires), and Plautus's Rudens (where the obstruction and seeming misfortune have to do, not with a father but with an old pimp). “New comedy” resolutions may completely remove the opposition between desires and social norms by making the former acceptable, as a result of fortunate discoveries, in terms of the latter (Andria); or, as a roughly equivalent case, the resolution may provide a fortunate removal of all obstructions (whether connected with status and money, or not) in a way which is both desirable and socially acceptable, as well as moral (Rudens); or, it may defeat the ridiculous and perverse parental competition (Casina), and celebrate a saturnalian triumph of the young over the old (Plautus's Pseudolus, where this is combined with the victory of the slave over the old master). As an even more extreme comic inversion of ordinary social norms, a comedy may push the last-mentioned version to the point where the young man defeats not only the old man but also the institution of marriage (Machiavelli's Mandragola). In short, the comic victory, which is “right” in comic terms, may finally correspond or be opposed to what is right in moral/social terms. If we bear in mind these options, we can see which one Shakespeare chose consistently.

In Shakespearean comedy, the emphases are different from those of ancient, or of Italian Renaissance, “new comedy”—even though he uses the same basic structure. There is no concentration on a conflict of generations (though Egeus in A Dream, Proteus's father and the Duke in The Two Gentlemen, and Baptista in The Shrew are recognizable “senex” figures), and the focus is not simply on the young lovers finally achieving their goal.¹² Shakespeare's comedies explore sentiments, declarations of commitment, the degree of perception of various characters, and the process of finding comic remedies through comic release and testing (in addition, that is, to resolving comic fortune).

The sentiment of love is not a donnee (as it usually is in Roman comedy, where the young woman hardly appears on the stage), a goal which the young man wants to achieve in spite of external obstacles, but an emotion, a commitment, and a relationship which are themselves explored. The goal of achieving a proper and reliable relationship faces inner obstacles (connected with the lovers' attitudes) no less than external/social obstructions. Even when the external obstacles are formidable (as at the beginning of A Dream, with the father's arbitrary opposition and the backing he has from social authority), a Shakespearean comedy proceeds to examine love itself—i.e., the inner, rather than the external, problem—before it brings the resolution.

We have to add, in order to avoid misleading implications, that neither the comic clarification (what is exposed) nor the comic resolution (which confirms what is asserted) in Shakespearean comedies rely on a Petrarchan or a neo-Platonic idealization of love. Here we find one of the distinctive contributions of Shakespearean comedy, both in relation to the dramatic traditions he uses (as we have remarked above) and vis-à-vis the cultural issues he deals with in his comedies. If the focus on love, which is a dominant feature in Renaissance literature, distinguishes these plays from Plautine/Terentian comedy, as well as from medieval farce, the comic perspective on love distinguishes them from Renaissance lyrics, epic poetry dealing with love, philosophical “dialoghi d'amore,” and even romance narrative—in short, from literary works which treat love with a solemn intensity. The conventional and idealizing formulae are themselves explored. But Shakespearean comedy does assert a positive norm, based on a mutual choice free from parental/social tyranny; a norm of constancy of sentiment and of a genuine relationship. It is in relation to this norm that the comedies expose aberrations—such as changing allegiance (e.g., in A Dream), superficiality of sentiment (Claudio in Much Ado), saturnalian errors of emotion (Twelfth Night), a merely conventional love-game (Lucentio in The Shrew), and other problems or comic obstacles. Marital relations are also examined in relation to similar norms (in Errors, in A Dream with the fairy monarchs, in The Shrew when the newlyweds are juxtaposed, and in The Merry Wives): there are obstacles to a proper relationship, which may be removed after, indeed as a result of, being comically exposed. The norm which Shakespeare's comedies assert does not subvert moral/social values (like some of the “new comedy” patterns we have mentioned), though they expose deficiencies—including inadequacies in conventions. There is no difference in principle between those comedies which concentrate on young love and those in which marital relations are an object of comic exploration; in fact, the two topoi are often combined, as is the case in our play.

In The Merry Wives, the exposure and punishment of Falstaff by the chaste wives is juxtaposed with the triumph of Fenton and Anne Page. The young lovers are not so much at the centre as at the climax of the positive comic assertion, which is timed to coincide with the festive ending of the comedy. The casting out of the pharmakos—who threatens marriage, or would if he were effective—is combined with the achievement, acceptance, and celebration of the young lovers' marriage in accordance with their mutual choice. The explicit indication of the appropriateness of the triumph of love is given by the young man, after the marriage is secured. “You,” he says to Anne's parents, “would have married her most shamefully / Where there was no proportion held in love.” “Th' offence is holy that she has committed, / And this deceit loses the name … / Of disobedience, or unduteous title, / Since therein she doth evitate and shun / A thousand irreligious cursed hours / Which forced marriage would have brought upon her” (V.v.221ff.). These words have an almost Blakean force in regarding conventional compulsion as a sacrilegious destruction of human dignity. They certainly convey the comic norm of the triumph of love and mutual choice.

The distinction between levels in the play is not absolutely defined as exposure vs. assertion. In punishing Falstaff, the wives assert values; and there is comic exposure on the level which deals with the competition for the “pretty virginity,” Anne Page. Furthermore, each level has ramifications. The thwarted designs of the “miles gloriosus” of seductions (the external threat) bring out an internal threat in marriage: the husband's jealousy.

Ford's jealousy does not come into existence in the dramatic present, it has been a chronic tendency (II.i.99-103), but it is brought out, comically explored by being pushed “ad absurdum,” and integrated in the overall comic movement—which progresses through release to resolution.¹³ Ford's jealousy, which is juxtaposed with Page's confidence in his wife (while the wives have similar, not contrasted attitudes), is treated in a way which reveals a great deal about the Shakespearean comic perspective.

The jealous husband, like the superannuated lover, the grouch, or the young woman's guardian, is generally an “alazon” figure; and comedy delights in holding him up for ridicule, punishing and defeating him. In the comic scale of values from comic “minus” to comic “plus” (whether moral or not),¹⁴ such figures are emphatically given as a comic “minus”—whatever social claims (as husbands, parents, or guardians) they may have. Even a moralistic poet without a bent for comedy like Spenser could write a rather powerful fabliau piece (or partly fabliau) on the punishment of the jealous husband. The story of Hellenore, Malbecco, and Paridell (The Faerie Queene, III.ix,x)¹⁵ may be said to show a sordid picture of unchastity. The lecherous young wife is in the end no better than a whore, and the lover she runs away with “having filcht her bels, her up he cast / To the wide world” (III.x.35). Nonetheless, the most unequivocally negative figure is the miserly, impotent, and jealous old husband: “all his mind is set on mucky pelf,” and he is “unfit fair ladies service to supply” (III.ix.4,5). He is humiliated and cheated even by the ridiculous Braggadochio, and witnesses how the jolly satyr has fun with his wife (“nine times he heard him come aloft ere day” (III.x.48)). The force of comedy and medieval fabliau comes to the fore even in the moralistic scheme of Spenser's allegory. “Not for nought his wife [the satyrs] loved so well” (III.x.48): there are reasons why a May is faithless to a January, and the old man bears the brunt of the blame. Even when the moral perspective is applied to adultery, the old husband is both negative and ridiculous, in spite of his official claim, which is sanctioned by laws. No wonder that in comedy the January or Malbecco figure (e.g., Harpagon in L'Avare) is negative, as ordinary morality is not the guideline (e.g., in the Mandragola); at least, youthful desires are usually regarded in comedy as normal and seasonable (to use a notion which is mentioned explicitly in Love's Labour's Lost). A lenient treatment of the jealous husband is rare in comedy. An interesting example is The Jealous Old Husband, one of the “entremeses” by Shakespeare's contemporary Cervantes, where the comic pattern of a young wife, a jealous husband, and a young man unfolds in the usual trajectory without reaching the expected point of defeat for the husband. Cervantes parts company with the conventions he uses by being tolerant. Another case in which the well-known comic convention concerning the young wife and the old husband is used with an unconventional focus and conclusion is Garcia Lorca's The Love of Don Perlimplin and Belisa in the Garden. The marriage of the January character (Don Perlimplin) to the young, erotic May figure (Belisa) leads to sexual infidelity. But, in the event, this is not quite the triumph of potent youth over impotent old age—which in traditional comic terms would be a “plus.” At the cost of his life, the husband asserts a depth of emotion which shows that the young wife is as immature as she is sexually vital. Such plays are striking in their departure from comic conventions; or, we may say, they use well-known norms in order to create and express through contrast. If this is one of the general manifestations of the relationship between norm and form in literature—where new forms emerge through the use of old norms—the use, rather than the contravention of existing norms is no less common. In our play, the norm which regards a husband's jealousy as negative is indeed employed, though in a distinctive Shakespearean pattern, and in a Shakespearean spirit.

In The Merry Wives the husband's jealousy is ridiculous, and unquestionably negative (it is an obstacle to well-being), but it exists only temporarily for comic exposure. It is not accompanied by ultimate punishment and defeat: there is comic remedy (connected with the realization of error), and there is a resolution. In part, this is due to the fact that here the opposition between would-be seducer and jealous husband is not the comic pattern of virile youth vs. old age—in which, by comic standards, the former triumphs even when it opposes itself to conventional morality. To a large extent, Shakespeare's remedial pattern is also due to the fact that the wives, who are in control of the comic situation in relation to Falstaff and to Mr. Ford, do not permit the seducer's triumph, and do not keep the husband in the dark for very long. Ford's specific suspicions are an error, which is removable by the disclosure of truth; in other words, as in other comedies of errors, there is a built-in possibility for a resolution, in addition to the possibility given by the existence of controlling figures within the comedy. But, most of all, the logic of the comic pattern which Shakespeare creates here and in his other comedies (a pattern which is quite distinct from satire, even if it employs ridicule, and from farce) is that of temporary release, which exposes underlying problems while complicating the initial situation, terminated eventually so as to produce a constructive and assertive (which is not to say unqualified) resolution. A Shakespearean comedy in its totality (not just one phase in it) is not a saturnalia, though it incorporates a phase which may be termed saturnalian. Within the unfolding comic progression from initial problems via revealing complications to a resolution, the phase of release is eventually superseded by the removal of the obstacles to well-being. The resolution represents and celebrates a norm (which is implicit from the outset in the comic goal of well-being, in what we perceive to be right—or a comic “plus”), though the tolerant Shakespearean comic perspective does not require perfection as a condition for including characters in the resolution. There are comic remedies to problems, errors and deficiencies, but they vary in scope and profundity; and the plays do not include in the final resolutions only the superior, the profound, or the perfect. The norm asserted in Shakespearean comic resolutions is not moralistic, though it is a value relevant for everyday, and not just for saturnalian holiday (to use Barber's terms).

In The Merry Wives, the norm embodied in marriage is asserted both by the punishment of Falstaff (the external threat) and by the eventual removal of the husband's jealousy (the internal threat in marriage). In unfolding the jealousy, comic release brings out a latent tendency in Ford, and pushes it to ridiculous extremes. Extremism is one of comedy's means for exploration, as well as for remedy. With Ford we also have yet another character who pushes himself unwittingly into a comic role through a fantasy which he projects without justification onto reality (as we see with Falstaff). His visions of cuckoldry (II.ii.276ff., III.ii.26ff., III.v.129ff.), and his determination to make a public spectacle of his supposed shame—an attitude condemned even by such imperfect characters as Shallow, Evans, and Caius—push Ford into the ridiculous comic role of jealous husband, though he has no real cause. Initially he aims at a test (which should, in principle, admit a positive or a negative result, II.i.227), but his conviction soon displaces the positive alternative, and loses contact with reality. He is determined to confirm his obsession with cuckoldry, not to investigate the truth. As the audience is well aware, Ford is no more justified in his fears than Falstaff is in the anticipation of triumph.

Ford's imaginary script is inherently self-destructive as well as wrong; he would be the loser if he were right, whereas Falstaff at least imagines success. And yet, Ford is not ultimately the loser, while Falstaff is. The difference is prescribed by the scheme of values in the play. Ford (le malade imaginaire) has to be cured, so that the marital relationship is also remedied; the libidinal Falstaff has to be punished and defeated, in order to secure the same norm of marital relations.

Ford's determination to push Falstaff into assaulting Mrs. Ford's chastity, and his masochistic insistence on making a public spectacle of his search for proof that he is a cuckold, move on a trajectory to destruction; or, rather, they would do so if the play were not a comedy. As usual in Shakespearean comedy, the “contrary valuation” of tragedy¹⁶ (anchored in this case on the sentiment of jealousy, which can be destructive—as Much Ado points out in a comic perspective, and Othello in a fully tragic one) is evident within the comic movement, but serves as a measure of the actual comedy—by contrast to the possible but excluded alternative.¹⁷ Our attention is directed at the exposure of the malady of jealousy, without fear that disaster would ensue; and at the game of lack of awareness played between Falstaff and Brook/Ford, in which the former unwittingly torments the husband, and the latter does not perceive that the would-be seducer can offer only hopes of success and accounts of actual failure.

One of the clearest signs of the would-be trickster's ineffectiveness (in addition to his repeated punishment, and the guaranteed failure) is that he does not benefit from the husband's offer to subsidize the adultery. Such a situation is usually a great comic advantage to the seducer (as we see, for instance, in the Mandragola, or in The Shipman's Tale in The Canterbury Tales), and an added level in ridiculing the husband. Falstaff does not even realize that Brook is Ford, and his actual tormenting of the husband (II.ii.25ff., III.v.64ff.) is unwitting. Since in this play jealousy can be cured in the end (as error is removed, and no irreparable harm is done in the meantime), while attempted seduction remains unacceptable, Falstaff is the loser in the game with Ford—but not because Ford is more perceptive, or better able to get out of the situation his fantasy has created. The decisive point is that what Ford's jealousy represents in the scale of comic values in the play is a removable obstacle, while Falstaff's aims are an intolerable one. We are aware of this scheme of values from an early point, so that we can observe with detachment both Falstaff's schemes, which are doomed to be ineffective, and the spectacle of Ford's jealousy, which does not turn into a real threat.

Given the comic control in the play (which excludes destructive alternatives, and secures solutions) and the comic perspective (which ensures our detachment), we can also delight in the way in which the jealous husband unwittingly steps into the comedy arranged by the wives at Falstaff's expense. He provides the actual justification for treating the would-be seducer as scapegoat, where only an imaginary excuse was to be used; and he does so while insisting on giving a comic exhibition of his obsession. As Mrs. Page says, there is a “double excellency in this” (III.iii.162). Indeed, there is a triple one: Falstaff is punished as he would have been in accordance with the initial script, Ford is allowed to punish himself, and he unwittingly cooperates in punishing the supposed cuckolder. That the alazon Ford is eventually enlightened and cured is not the result of awareness he acquires, or a lesson he learns by himself. On his own, he would be dominated by the “humour” of jealousy. He is an extremist, in being reconciled no less than in jealousy (IV.iv.10ff.), but the comedy accommodates him nonetheless. Indeed, it has to if the marital problems are to be resolved. The only figure who cannot be accommodated—who is the consistent loser, comic butt, and recipient of punishment—is Falstaff. What he represents cannot be corrected, tolerated, or included in the resolution (except in the form of the willingness to let him partake of a meal).

The process of revealing and curing Ford's malady is juxtaposed to Page's confidence in his wife. Page is in a similar situation, but behaves very differently. He even reproaches Ford for his irrational behaviour (III.iii.198). Ford refers to Page as a “secure and wilful Acteon” (III.ii.38), but he is the one who is determined to uncover his supposed horns (though, in the end, the horns are placed on Falstaff). These and other juxtapositions point to the system of values in the comedy, which does not necessarily rely on fixed functions for the characters. The most obvious case in point is that of Page and his wife. In relation to Falstaff's negative designs, they both have a positive function. Unlike Ford, Page has full confidence in his wife's chastity (II.i.173ff.); and Mrs. Page, like Mrs. Ford, proves that she is a chaste wife. However, in relation to Anne Page, both parents have the traditional role of alazon, in conflict with the wishes of the young lovers. They are obstructive, as they scheme separately, but in symmetrical ways, to marry her to one of her ridiculous suitors for the sake of a financial or a social position. As Anne shrewdly observes, “a world of ill-favour'd faults / Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year” (III.iv.31ff.). However, if it looks so to the parents, the comic perspective clearly gives a different valuation; and comic control sees to it that the positive valuation is achieved at the end.

In keeping with the same comic values which justify the punitive exposure of Falstaff and the ridiculous effect of Ford's jealousy, the parental schemes for their daughter are defeated—by the mutual agreement of Anne and Fenton. The young lovers' manoeuvre, which outwits the obstructive parental schemes and the ridiculous competitors, is more than merely successful. Upon being publicly discovered, the triumph of love is socially accepted; ultimately, there is no conflict between love and the parental/social level, and no radical conflict of generations. The communal festive celebration at the end of the play goes well beyond a merely formal resolution resulting from the removal of obstacles as a way of ending the comic game. It is a manifold assertion of principles represented by marriage: the would-be seducer is punished and removed, jealousy is cured, and the young people's marriage is secured on the basis of mutual choice—with subsequent social approval.

On the level of young love, which is more a framework than a major element in the middle phases of the comedy (but becomes prominent towards the end), the young man's aim is momentarily queried about possible mercenary thoughts. When Fenton refers to Page's objections to his rank (which is too high for a bourgeois family), his character, and his motive in wooing (seemingly to gain a fortune)—Anne, who is an alert and spirited young woman, responds by saying “maybe he tells you true” (III.iv.4ff.). There is scope at that point for comic exposure and interplay, as well as for expanding the dramatic role of the young woman. But Fenton is not subjected to the extensive comic exploration we find in other Shakespearean comedies concerning the young men's sentiments, the reliability of their declarations, or the stability of their commitments; nor is Anne's role developed to the proportions of a Rosalind, who can mock and playact while in love. This play focuses on other matters, and does not need to expand the Anne-Fenton level. Fenton's frank admission that his first move was a venture (if we may borrow a suggestive word from The Merchant of Venice), and his declaration that love has superseded the initial pecuniary aim (II.iv. 13ff.) are sufficient. Anne will have him, if possible with the father's permission, if not otherwise. The decisive comic action on this level of the play is not anchored on an exploration of love (which would have to do with errors and remedies), rather, in line with the time-honoured “new comedy” tradition, it shows the triumph of the young lovers' choice over parental authority, and over inappropriate suitors who have parental backing. The irredeemable silliness of Slender and his ridiculous wooing (III.iv.38ff.), and the preposterous irrascibility of Dr. Caius—one of the offenders against the King's English in the play—are comically exposed before their aims are thwarted (assuming we can say Slender has aims). The comedy leaves no room for doubt that the parental selections are wrong.

III

“Nor is the moving of laughter always the end of comedy”

Ben Jonson, Timber.

Slender (the worthy heir to Shallow, and suitably attended by Simple) and Caius are part of a comic gallery, in which we also find Evans, Quickly, and more minor characters like Pistol (whose mind is full of garbled literary bombast and melodramatic clichés). Their various forms of linguistic incompetence are all ridiculous. Some of the humour created by such abuses, and by the duping of those who are ignorant of the English language (e.g., Caius in II.iii.55ff.) is, in my view, of an inferior kind. Like some comedians' gags which rely on nothing more than an accent to create humour without a joke, this type of humour relies on the sheer prejudice against the “foreigner”: the automatic solidarity and sense of superiority which even the illiterate members of a community feel over the incompetence of a foreigner in their language. That is repeatedly the case with Evans and Caius, and this element is not among the achievements in the play. Without defending this kind of humour, I can point to its place in the general pattern in the comedy—which is of a higher order. The play exposes anti-social behaviour or deviations from social norms; linguistic abuses are among them. These range from the lower end of the foreigner's incompetence (Caius) and the exaggerated version of a dialect (Evans), through the mad mixture of supposedly elevated and literary language (Pistol), the bare articulateness and sometimes non-articulateness of the simpleton (Slender), malapropisms with a bawdy slant (Quickly), and jocular superfluity and hyperbole (less an offence against normal usage than a saturnalian departure from it, and found especially in the merry Host). To this list we may add the pseudo-learned school Latin which Evans pumps into his pupil, while the ignorant Quickly finds bawdy meanings in the unknown words, and the equally ignorant mother (the otherwise sharp Mrs. Page) is proud of the boy's education (IV.i). All such deviations centered on the use of language are ridiculed in the play—though without making the use, referentiality, and intelligibility of language the central issue it is in Love's Labour's Lost. None of these characters is a Bottom (whose “reason and love keep little company together” is highly relevant, even if he cannot know the full relevance) or a Dogberry (the shallow fool who brings to light the crucial truths which the wisdom of his social betters does not see)—let alone a Feste or a Touchstone. They exhibit aberrations, not folly as a vehicle for dramatic clarification.

In so far as some of the abusers of the King's English are also involved in negative action, they fail in their schemes. However, unlike Falstaff, whose schemes are a threat which cannot be tolerated or accommodated, these characters are integrated in the final festivities. From the opening scene, and repeatedly in the course of the play, it is evident that there is a community—whatever the points of friction within it—and that Falstaff is an outsider. The climax of this distinction is at the end of the play, where the various characters leave their quarrels and differences and participate in the communal solidarity against the pharmakos. Mistress Quickly, the panderess and mistress of malapropism, can even play the Fairy Queen in the masque of scapegoating; and other characters who have been exposed as foolish, ridiculous, or deceived take part in that masque on the positive side—in opposition to Falstaff. We are not meant to ask at that point how the speech deficiencies of Quickly, Caius, and Evans are cured, and Pistol's style is improved. The comic exposure of their aberrations is simply suspended—without the explanation of a miraculous transformation we get in As You Like it when threatening evil is removed. When the time for a resolution comes, all deficiencies which are not an intolerable threat are remedied, suspended, or bypassed—and the characters concerned can participate in the resolution. Only Falstaff remains unassimilable.

As we see in other Shakespearean comedies, a profound transformation is not a precondition for resolution. A removal of obstacles to well-being, and the achievement of goals which embody comic values, are the fundamental requirements. If, exceptionally, a play insists on a strict test of profound change (as happens at the end of Love's Labour's Lost), the resolution does not take place—and there is a rupture in the comic form. Otherwise there is a comic resolution, and from it are absent (as a result of exclusion or, more commonly, self-exclusion) characters who are incompatible with it and with festive celebration: a melancholy Jacques, a Malvolio whose “amour propre” is hurt, a Don John who flees.¹⁸

The exposing, punitive manipulation of the pharmakos, and the positive and successful manoeuvre arranged by the young lovers are not the only manipulatory actions in the play. From the opening scene to the last there is, on every level and in the links between levels, a multiplicity of schemes and manipulations—some of them doubled-edged. The overall comic clarification relies heavily on a juxtaposition of levels, but, unlike the complex system of reflectors in As You Like It, it is inseparable from a multiple action of intrigue. In addition to the intrigues we have mentioned, which create the central pattern of punishing the pharmakos and securing the triumph of love, the play contains a number of manipulations. Apart from the vindictive scheme carried out by Falstaff's followers against him (which is instrumental to the wider action of exposing and defeating the bulky impostor), we have Mistress Quickly and the merry Host. Quickly is active in a triple game of match-making, while she herself is unaware of the situation. “I know Anne's mind as well as another does” (I.iv.158), she says, but she is wrong; the triumph of Fenton and Anne Page comes about without her services and without her knowledge. She is also the go-between in the double game of the wives with Falstaff—again without being in the known (except in the end, when all Windsor knows), and certainly without controlling the game.

The merry Host, whose verbal ebullience is on occasion more striking than Falstaff's, successfully manipulates Evans and Caius. He extracts as much fun as can be had from the belligerent physician (who gives him potions and motions) and the incensed parson (who gives proverbs and no verbs, III.i.94), while making sure that no physical harm comes from their verbal violence. “Let them keep their limbs whole, and hack our English” (III.i.71), he says. But when he praises himself jocularly for being a subtle Machiavel, who uses policy to prevent combat, the would-be duellists are reconciled only to join forces in a plan of revenge against him. The Host, in his turn, becomes the victim of manipulation, though he does not lose in the end. His losses are made good by Fenton as a reward for helping him with the scheme to marry Anne (IV.vi.3ff.).

If the various comic aberrations, and the schemes and manipulations may be regarded as farcical (or comic stuffing)—the fundamental comic pattern relies on a dual progression. The pharmakos is punished and exposed by an entire community, and in the process there is a catharsis of the anxiety of jealousy; while young love triumphs and is accepted by the community. Like other Shakespearean comedies, The Merry Wives moves through comic release both in order to provide clarification and in order to culminate in a constructive comic resolution, which is accompanied by festive celebration. Without being moralistic, the resolution and cumulative clarification are based on moral values. And moral values require punishment and exclusion, as well as assertion, tolerance, and celebration.

Notes

1. A good critical survey of the history of criticism of The Merry Wives is given by Jeanne Addison Roberts in Shakespeare's English Comedy (Lincoln and London, Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979).

2. Apart from Professor Roberts's book-length study of the play, there is at least one other deliberate attempt to analyze the comedy without negative prejudices, and to place it in relation to Shakespeare's other comedies: Ruth Nevo's Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London, Methuen, 1980). Both books are recent. Two somewhat earlier books on Shakespearean comedy have chapters on The Merry Wives: Bertrand Evans's Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1960), and Ralph Berry's Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1972). Evans's systematic, if somewhat mechanical, application of the concept of discrepant awareness contributes something to our understanding of how the play works, but casts little light on what it says. Ralph Berry dismisses, in effect, the play as a farce which brings out the worst tendencies in an audience, and was supposedly a burden to its creator; he does not tell us how he can support these views. “The revenge motif unleashes much sadism in the audience … the quality of The Merry Wives of Windsor is perfectly expressed in its jokes … the piece is a Public Record Office of graffiti … one imagines that Shakespeare laid down his pen with some relief” (p. 148, p. 149, p. 153). This is a rather extreme example of the prejudice against the play, as well as of the critical impediments, and even patronizing attitude, which this prejudice can create.

3. So, for instance, C.L. Barber does not analyze the play in his important book Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), though he deals with the Falstaff of the history plays. Alexander Leggatt omits The Merry Wives from his good study of the comedies up to Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (London, Methuen, 1974) on the grounds that it is comparable to citizen comedy (and is not a comedy of love).

4. The term ‘alazon’ is, of course, Aristotelian. Aristotle gives it a general ethical value, which need not be related only to comedy, though it happens to be most suggestive when employed both in relation to Old Comedy (with its dialectical structure and agon, as well as the frequent punishment of negative characters) and to New Comedy (with its teleological structure directed at resolution, which involves the need to overcome obstructions). Both comic strategies appear in The Merry Wives (and also in Twelfth Night), as an impostor is exposed and punished on one level, and fulfilment is achieved and celebrated on another level; and both levels are integrated into the overall multiple plot of the comedy.

   For Aristotle's definition of the impostor/boaster (alazon) and of his opposite extreme, the ironical man (eiron), see The Nicomachean Ethics, IV,7. An easily available English translation is that of J.A.K. Thompson (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974; first published 1953), where the directly relevant passage is on page 133.

   The Aristotelian ethical terms are specifically given as types constituting the ethos of comedy in The Tractatus Coislinianus. See Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy … And a Translation of the ‘Tractatus Coislinianus’ (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1924), p. 226. The widest critical application and currency to these terms have been given by Northrop Frye in a number of essays on comedy. See, for instance, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971; first published 1957), p. 171ff. Frye is particularly illuminating in dealing with dramatic function, and the dynamism in which the characters are involved.

   As far as the term ‘pharmakos’ is concerned, I should emphasize that I do not use it in a directly anthropological sense (to refer to an actual ritual of casting out the scapegoat). We are concerned with the comic transposition and echoes of such rituals, the comic structuring of the dialectic of exposure, and the comic values on which this process relies. However, just as the ethical term alazon is useful for dealing with characters and their function in action, so the ritual term pharmakos can throw light on the pattern of punishment, and its significance. As my title suggests, what is cast out in the end is an attitude (the libidinal) more than a character; and, at the same time, there is an assertion of sexuality in the form of young love. Punishment and assertion are given in tandem.

5. For an illuminating study of the interrelationship of plot levels in Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama generally, see Richard Levin, The Multiple Plot in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago and London, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971). Levin does not deal with The Merry Wives in his book, but his general points are most useful for a critical analysis of the play.

   In this connection, see also Leo Salingar's Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), especially p. 228 ff.

6. See I.i.96, and the note on this line, in the Arden Shakespeare edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. H.J. Oliver (London, Methuen, 1971). All textual quotations are from this edition.

7. In this connection, see Evans, op. cit., p. 98ff.

8. See Nevo, op. cit., p. 15.

9. Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965), p. 76.

10. Frye, Anatomy, p. 183.

11. A delightful indication of the traditional comic motif of an Oedipal conflict is Synge's Playboy of the Western World, which also puts it to a good comic use. Like Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, which has fun with the convention of “cognition,” Synge's play both uses a comic tradition and gives a comic perspective on it. One of its effects, which is particularly illuminating for critical purposes, is to remind us that in the “vis comica” the Oedipal conflict, a prominent element in the tradition, is funny—whatever its effect in tragedy.

12. There is, of course, a great difference between classical comedy, where the woman is a desirable object, but hardly a dramatic character, and Renaissance comedy—especially Shakespearean comedy—where the women are at the very least equal to the men, and often markedly superior to them.

13. I am changing here Barber's well-known formula “through release to clarification.” The plot progresses to resolution, and its effect is clarification.

14. The morally neutral terms “plus” and “minus” are defined in terms of what is desirable vs. what is obstructive. They are particularly useful in accommodating an entire relevant range. As I have already indicated, we need terms which do not have an automatically moral connotation, but which can correspond to moral values, when these appear.

15. The edition I use is Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1970 [1912]).

16. I borrow this useful phrase from Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London, Methuen, 1968), ch. 1.

17. In the complex forms of the “problem plays” and “romances,” Shakespeare expanded considerably the stresses which can lead to tragedy, while maintaining the overall comic framework. This combination is not absent in the comedies proper. The point emerges not only when we juxtapose A Dream and Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado and Othello, As You Like It and Lear, but also in the way in which the comedies, from Errors onward, indicate internally the road not taken.

18. For reasons which I cannot pursue here, I would argue that The Merchant of Venice is best understood in the context of the “problem plays,” hence the exclusion of Shylock is not listed here.