SOURCE: “Shakespearean Chronology, Ideological Complicity, and Floating Texts: Something Is Rotten in Windsor,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 2, Summer, 1994, pp. 190-210.

[In the following essay, Freedman suggests that The Merry Wives of Windsor's confusing mixture of dramatic genres, topical references, and historical allusions cast doubt on the argument that the play was written for a single occasion.]

I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names (sure, more!); and these are of the second edition.

(The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.74-77)

I

If at one time the literary scholar's double bind could be summed up by the conflicting imperatives “always deconstruct” and “always historicize,” at present a third command triangulates the critic's desire—always localize.¹ In the context of theory's latest turn of the screw to local history and thick description, a return to Shakespeare's last remaining so-called occasionalist play should prove both timely and unsettling. Widely accepted as Shakespeare's most topical play, The Merry Wives of Windsor boasts the stunning fact of being the only play in the corpus still generally believed to have been composed for a specific court occasion and, even more specifically, as a compliment to Elizabeth. Yet the sheer range and variety of the play's topical references belie the occasionalist argument, since we are no closer to resolving such long-standing intertextual conundrums as the relation of this play to other two-wives comedies, to the dating and characters of the Henriad, or to the elder/younger Cobham's complaints resulting in the Oldcastle/Falstaff, if not Brooke/Broome, censorship. More simply, the play's generous topicality seems to have complicated rather than clarified accounts of its textual and theatrical history, since the more evidence that is brought forward to ballast the occasionalist argument for dating the play, the less convincing that argument appears.

That Merry Wives offers an embarrassment of riches for the topically minded scholar is a problem that has never been squarely faced or followed to its logical conclusions. Part royal compliment and part bedroom farce, best known as a Falstaff play and widely recognized as Shakespeare's only topical satire, part citizen comedy, part city comedy, part humors comedy, and part court comedy, Merry Wives offers so many conflicting leads that to choose one as its source of composition is to err on the side of willful simplicity. How do we account for references to the fairy queen and to Elizabethan diplomatic affairs, as well as to the king and to Cotswald games, to rural and urban life, to April court ceremonies and to country harvest homes? How do we account for the reception in the late 1590s of topical jokes known only in limited circles in the early 1590s? How do we explain references so private and yet so public, so early and then so late? How could a play with so many topical references to Elizabethan diplomatic and Garter court affairs be Shakespeare's only bedroom farce mocking foreigners? Who was or who could be the audience for such a play?

Equally confusing is the play's heavy-handed yet half-hearted efforts to connect itself up to the Henriad. How can this play be considered a commissioned sequel to 1 or even 2 Henry IV when so many of its characters, such as Falstaff and Quickly, not only speak and act differently than their counterparts in the Henriad but actually fail to recognize one another? Why should Merry Wives appear later than 1 and 2 Henry IV and yet seem earlier, promise us a return to Falstaff only to show how easily Falstaff's characteristic trait—the ease with which he avoids pocketing up shame—is so readily and repeatedly abandoned? And, should this caveat be answered, how do we integrate references to him as a “scholar” (2.2.180), a “metamorphised youth” (Allen and Muir, 576), and an “Old, cold, wither'd” fat man (5.5.153)?² Further, why would anyone composing a personal compliment to Elizabeth represent her in the person of Mistress Quickly? Finally, how could this most topical of comedies have led our most reliable scholars to date the play as early as 1592 and as late as 1602 and have led current editors of the play to bicker between dates of composition as early as 1597 and as late as 1601?

Symptomatic of this free-floating topicality is the unabashed presence of two competing conclusions to the play, neither of which has been proven anterior to the other. Despite the obvious superiority of the Folio text, no editor of the play treats either its Folio or Quarto versions as autonomous.³ Yet editors seeking to safely anchor the date of the play's composition often obscure this fragile state of codependency. The occasionalist court-dating of this play, for example, depends on references to a Windsor Garter occasion which appear only in the Folio version; the Quarto lines diverge markedly at this point in ways that suggest to many scholars a link with some as yet undiscovered London comedy:

Where is Pead? go you &
see where Brokers sleep,
And Foxe-eyed Seriants with their mase,
Goe laie the Proctors in the street,
And pinch the lowsie Seriants face.

(Allen and Muir, 576)

Whether or not these lines and other Quarto references to Dr. Caius's “counting house” and “stall” are indeed “pure” London, or whether the writing here is even “pure” Shakespeare is much disputed, and for good reason. But surely the absence of the term proctor from the Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare reminds us once again of the need for more work on the Quarto, for a Quarto concordance, and for discussion of bad quartos appended to the editions of plays we study and teach.

That we are no closer to mapping the play's territorial confines, despite this plethora of topical pointers, suggests that we may inadvertently be confusing revision with source and interpolation with text and pursuing clues that are indeed nothing more than signs of extensive revision. Rather than ignore such leads, we might use them in another context, since they lend substantial weight to recent arguments for a revisionist Shakespeare whose topicality was more inclusive than exclusive.

II

Not surprisingly, the more we overcome the confusion provoked by topical references, the more ideologically inflected appear arguments for dating a play based on them. For example, although there is no dearth of studies exploring the ideological assumptions behind choices of textual variants in Merry Wives, no one has examined how these same assumptions govern the logic used to date the play.⁴ Despite the welcome recent focus on Merry Wives' popular aspects and on its Quarto/Folio variants by scholars such as Steven Urkowitz, Peter Erickson, and Leah Marcus, none challenges the 1597 occasionalist court-dating of the play urged by Leslie Hotson, William Green, H.J. Oliver, and Jeanne Addison Roberts.⁵ Thus the received belief on Merry Wives—that the play was commissioned by Lord Hunsdon to be performed at his 1597 Garter election—still prevails. Loyalty to this argument is surprising given the widespread discrediting of the occasionalist theory of Shakespeare's plays.⁶ But such loyalty is baffling when exhibited by revisionists who are committed to using quarto evidence to rethink our concepts of audience, textual history, topicality, and theatrical history. When the same critics who contest editorial preference for the conclusion in the 1623 Folio Merry Wives over the more popular conclusion in the 1602 Quarto remain undisturbed by the occasionalist court argument and dating, one is left to conclude that something is rotten in Windsor scholarship.⁷

For centuries the question dominating Merry Wives scholarship has been not how to evaluate the evidence of the topical references to Garter ceremonies but which court Garter ceremony offered the most likely conditions for its performance. This questionable line of reasoning alone led Leslie Hotson, in the early 1930s, to redate the play; the same logic governed the scholarly revival and acceptance of Hotson's dating in the 1970s. In his 1971 Arden edition of Merry Wives, Oliver claimed that “easily the most persuasive explanation of the occasion and date of the play is that advanced by Leslie Hotson in his Shakespeare versus Shallow, although unfortunately it falls short of final proof.”⁸ Oliver's endorsement and elaboration of Hotson's thesis, though qualified, was forceful enough to lead a host of scholars, including the general editor of the Riverside Shakespeare, to abandon the standard date of 1600 in favor of 1597.⁹ In a 1976 review of the Arden edition of Merry Wives, Charles Forker both reflected and spread the growing mood of overconfidence: “If Oliver cannot precisely be said to have settled the dating problem beyond dispute, he has at least shifted the burden of proof—a heavy burden—to the shoulders of the opposition.”¹⁰ Most enthusiastic was Jeanne Addison Roberts, whose comprehensive 1979 book on the play set forth the following challenge: “since nothing that is known about the history of The Merry Wives rules out a specifically commissioned performance in April 1596-97, since the main arguments against this date have been answered, since the arguments for it are powerful, and since everyone now seems to agree that the Garter allusions in the final masque support the idea of special commission, we are approaching a consensus on the date of the play.”¹¹

In the twenty years since the Hoston revivalists appeared on the scene, no such consensus has been reached. In fact convincing arguments against the 1597 dating have been lodged by G.R. Hibbard, Gary Taylor, Giorgio Melchiori, and Anne Barton, though their complaints are not being sufficiently heard or integrated into mainstream criticism.¹² The burden of proof shifts back to the Hotson camp when we add to these complaints the arguments that Oliver fails to counter, the conflicts within the occasionalist camp itself, and a number of overlooked sources—including Garter-related diplomatic and trade affairs.¹³ Rather than enshrine Merry Wives as a court play written in 1597 to compliment Elizabeth and the Order of the Garter, I want here to use Garter evidence to undermine that claim, to lend weight to dissenting arguments for other dates of composition, and to liberate a more unsettling textual history from the aristocratic stronghold that for too long has fascinated Shakespeareans.

III

There are any number of ways to call a fixed chronology into question. The easiest way is to emphasize the fact that no decisive proof exists for such a date; the more difficult task is to prove that the assertions on which the argument rests are improbable. One can easily demonstrate the absence of decisive proof in the occasionalist argument. First, no scholar has provided evidence of any topical satire—indeed of any full-length play—performed at any Garter ceremony at any time. Nor has any scholar offered proof that Hunsdon or anyone else ever commissioned a play for either Elizabeth or the Garter. In contrast, there is more than ample evidence that Shakespeare's plays were performed on the public stage before they were considered for court performances. Thus, not only is there no proof that Merry Wives is a commissioned Garter play; the weight of probability actually resists the occasionalist thesis.

The question is not whether Garter references exist in Merry Wives but how to read them. Such references (in Act 5 of the Folio version) have been noted since the eighteenth century.¹⁴ In addition to the Garter motto, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (5.5.69), the play includes commands to the Windsor fairies to scour “The several chairs of order” with balm (l. 61); to bless “Each fair installment, coat, and sev'ral crest, / With loyal blazon” (ll. 63-64); and to “nightly … sing / Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring” (ll. 65-66). These references indeed suggest a nod to the 23 April English Feast of Saint George, when knights of the Order were elected after a feast at Whitehall and, a few weeks later, were invested at Windsor Castle.¹⁵ But in what context that nod was made—when, for whom, and why—remains a mystery.

That Shakespeare's company attended the 1597 Windsor Garter ceremonies is quite probable,¹⁶ though this probability cannot be adduced as evidence for the argument that Merry Wives was composed to be performed during those ceremonies. Not only do we have ample evidence that Shakespeare's patron, Lord Hunsdon, would have needed special permission to avoid the Windsor ceremonies, but records indicate that his servants and retainers would be expected to travel with him. And we possess solid evidence of Garter-related theatrical activities at Windsor, although no 1597 occasionalist has ever referred to it. Charting the moves of the Lord Admiral's Men in the spring of 1600, E. K. Chambers observes: “Apparently the summer season was diversified by a visit to Windsor for the Garter installation of Henry IV of France on 27 April.”¹⁷ Henslowe's diary reads: “Lent vnto the company to goo to winswarth to the installinge the 27 of aprell 1600.”¹⁸

The question is not which Garter ceremony provided the right conditions for the performance of Merry Wives but what proof exists for Garter-related theatrical activities, as opposed to Garter-commissioned compliments, and how the two may be distinguished from one another. Given the choice between a theatrical season diversified by a visit to Windsor and a play commissioned and composed for a Garter feast, all the evidence points toward the former. There is no dearth of information regarding Garter entertainments, including a painstakingly detailed account of the 1595 Garter feast and similar material contained in the Ashmole manuscripts. Yet all describe a type of entertainment similar to Accession Day tilts and royal progresses, which directly fulfilled the diplomatic and ideological aims of these occasions. Garter ceremonial feasts, installations, and investitures would be inappropriate occasions for full-length bedroom farces with jokes about urinals, codpieces, and turds; or for topical satires on those to be inducted; or for mocking treatment of foreign ambassadors' accents and mishaps. In the absence of any record of any play performed at these ceremonies, the occasionalist argument for Merry Wives' dating remains conjectural at best.

Hotson's argument that Hunsdon commissioned this play as a compliment to Elizabeth is equally improbable. Those familiar with the sorts of public compliments that Elizabeth regularly required and elicited at Accession Day tilts, pageant plays, and royal progresses will concede that Merry Wives hardly fits the category of encomium. To cite Dekker's Old Fortunatus: “Some cal her Pandora: some Gloriana; some Cynthia: some Belphoebe, some Astroea: all by seuerall names to expresse seuerall loues”¹⁹—but who to the same end would address her as Mistress Quickly? The late 1590s reveal an Elizabeth especially sensitive to remarks about her age and fading attractiveness. It is doubtful that she would have been flattered by the middle-aged Mistress Page's wise response to a foolish love letter: “What, have [I] scap'd love-letters in the holiday-time of my beauty, and am I now a subject for them?” (2.1.1-3). Nor would the references to Mistress Ford as the “doe with the black scut” (5.5.18) have proven any more welcome an identification, particularly at a diplomatic occasion. Nor would Falstaff's “Ask me no reason why I love you” have been viewed as flattery, given that the most flattering reason he devises is that “You are not young, no more am I; go to then, there's sympathy” (2.1.4, 6-7). Nor would young or old consider it a high honor to be represented in the final scene by that bawd and notorious queen of malapropisms, Mistress Quickly. Granted, her role is sanitized here in comparison to her role in 1 Henry IV but not enough to render her appearance as Fairy Queen at Merry Wives' conclusion a fitting court compliment. The ease with which Shakespeare could have avoided this embarrassment, and his failure to do so, further subverts the compliment thesis. Nor do the play's two lines on the Fairy Queen imply the commendation that Green and others claim; they simply observe that, in the context of a concern with good housewifery and cleanliness, “Our radiant Queen hates sluts and sluttery” (5.5.46).

The Elizabeth-Garter connection is equally suspect. The 1602 Quarto title page advertises the performance of the play “Both before her Maiestie, and else-where.” Combining that information with the Folio Garter references, Green concludes that the play's first performance could have occurred only during a year such as 1597 when Elizabeth attended the Garter ceremony, since it is “hard to believe that the Quarto reference to presentation ‘before her Maiestie’ can apply to aught but the first performance.”²⁰ But there is simply no reason to conclude that the performance for the queen and the Garter ceremony occurred at the same time, especially since presentations before the queen were often received by her representative. For example, at the 1595 Garter Feast, William Brooke represented Elizabeth: “At this table sat Mylord Cobham all alone, who at this festival had to represent the Queen. He was also served and waited upon exactly as if Her Majesty had been present in person.”²¹

The reliance of the occasionalist argument on hearsay further undermines its credibility. John Dennis informed us in 1702 that Elizabeth commanded Shakespeare to write Merry Wives in a fortnight.²² Yet Dennis later revised “fortnight” to “ten days” without explanation, and he had a personal and financial stake in circulating this story; he promulgated the rumor only after the resounding failure of The Comical Gallant, his stage revision of Merry Wives. In a dedication to his play, Dennis writes that his ill-wishers had believed the original “to be so admirable, that nothing ought to be added to it; the others fancied it to be so despicable, that any ones time would be lost on it.”²³ Only in this context does he circulate the news that the play had found favor with Queen Elizabeth. In 1709 Nicholas Rowe embellished the rumor begun by Dennis: according to Rowe, the queen was so pleased with Falstaff in the Henry IV plays that she personally asked Shakespeare to write a play about Falstaff in love.²⁴ Like so many rumors, this one doesn't square with the facts as we know them. No evidence for such personal requests exists, and if it did, one would need to explain why Shakespeare refused to fulfill Elizabeth's demand, since Merry Wives never portrays Falstaff in love. And if Elizabeth so enjoyed the Falstaff of 1 and 2 Henry IV, why would Shakespeare write her a sequel in which both Falstaff and Mistress Quickly have new and different backgrounds and ways of speaking and fail to recognize one another? If Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives before completing 2 Henry IV—as Oliver and Roberts contend—then Rowe's account, which places Elizabeth's request after 2 Henry IV, must be discredited.²⁵

Acceptance of the 1597 argument also requires that we discount a much-respected vehicle for dating Shakespeare's plays, since Francis Meres's 1598 Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury never mentions Merry Wives.²⁶ While a single play might have slipped Meres's attention, court entertainment was news rather than gossip, and thus hard to avoid. If the play had been performed at the 1597 Garter Feast, knowledge of it could only with exceeding difficulty have escaped the attention of someone who resided in London in 1597 and who was composing a list of Shakespearean plays in 1598. Green attributes Merry Wives' absence from this list to Meres's preference for symmetry over accuracy; but surely this argument is strained.²⁷ It is unlikely that a play written and performed for the queen at a public occasion the year before Mere's list was composed would have been omitted from it.

The use of a single topical reference to fix a date of composition is itself suspect, but Green's contention that the Garter lines are extraneous to the action of the play undermines his own argument.²⁸ Further, since most editors believe that both the Quarto and Folio offer later, revised versions of the play, neither can provide decisive evidence for its original date and place of composition. Yet Green treats the occasionalist theory as a matter of fact and continually refers to Merry Wives as “presented as a salute to the Order of the Garter.”²⁹ And scholars continue to treat this fictional event as historical fact, although it is just as fantastic as David Scott's 1840 “portrait” of Elizabeth viewing The Merry Wives of Windsor.…³⁰

IV

Ironically, Green, in his effort to strengthen Hotson's argument, brings forth a considerable body of evidence that actually undermines it. When Green refurbishes Hotson's argument, he deletes those aspects of it that were dependent on the much-disparaged Justice Shallow-satire theory and unearths additional Garter information to situate the play in the context of British politics and trade relations. The diplomatic material he points to offers new evidence against the occasionalists.

Hotson's genius was to connect the play's Garter references with its allusions to a German duke. Three such allusions occur in the play: Bardolph tells the Host that “the [Germans desire] to have three of your horses. The Duke himself will be to-morrow at court”; the Host replies: “What duke should that be comes so secretly? I hear not of him in the court” (4.3.1-5); and Dr. Caius later mockingly informs the Host: “it is tell-a me dat you make grand preparation for a duke de Jamany. By my trot, dere is no duke that the court is know to come” (4.5.86-89). The German duke had already been identified by Charles Knight as Frederick, Count Mompelgard, later duke of Wurtemberg, based on the Quarto's variant “three sorts of cosen garmombles” (TLN 1364) for the Folio's “three cozen-germans” (4.5.79).³¹ Hotson reasoned that since both Count Mompelgard and Lord Hunsdon were elected to the Garter in the spring of 1597, the play must have been written for that occasion.

While the evidence for a connection between Shakespeare's text and Hunsdon's election is unpersuasive,³² the Mompelgard allusions cannot be ignored. Notorious for his efforts to be elected an English Garter Knight, Count Mompelgard was addressed by Elizabeth as “cozen,” and so was at once a “duke de Jamany,” a cousin germane or German relative, and a cozening German with a well-known and particularly outrageous connection to the Garter ceremonies. In 1592, after a visit with Elizabeth, Frederick somehow misconstrued her language as a promise of election to the English Order of the Garter. On his return home he actually had coins struck anticipating his election as a Garter Knight. In vain he yearly sent letters, bribes, and embassies to achieve his goal. The stream of requests ended in October 1597, when the count was informed he had been named a Knight-Elect, but started up again the following year as he sought the official investiture that Elizabeth continued to withhold. James was left to foot the costly bill for Frederick's investiture in 1603 and for his final installation in 1604. Oliver claims: “The theory that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written for the Garter Feast in 1597 … alone makes sense of allusions in the play [to Mompelgard] that were first discussed by Charles Knight.”³³ But since Frederick was annoying the crown over Garter matters from as early as 1592 to as late as 1603, a better argument for a 1597 date needs to be advanced, and the conflicting evidence more closely explored.

The economic and diplomatic basis of Garter elections, and especially of Mompelgard's election in 1597, strongly undermines the hypothesis of a Garter-related satire in 1597. We know that Elizabeth wisely reserved Garter elections for economic purposes and therefore held out as long as possible before each election, investiture, and installation. Less important than the difficulty that Frederick, like others, experienced in waiting for formal Garter ceremonies are the economic conditions that resulted in his election in 1597.³⁴ Green correctly observes that for over a decade Frederick spent considerable sums of money in order to be elected to the Garter. But in February 1597, a letter to Cecil from Dr. Christopher Parkins, Elizabeth's advisor on German relations, requesting that either Frederick or some other German prince be favored for diplomatic reasons achieved the coveted election within two months.³⁵ In 1596 one Garter member had nominated Frederick; in 1597 Frederick was unanimously nominated and elected. The letter seems to have done the trick. Green draws the logical conclusion that “Frederick was elected to the Order out of sheer political expediency,” and he marshals ample evidence to prove this point.³⁶ But if the diplomatic nature of the 1597 Garter election be granted, the real question is why Elizabeth would commission a play that insults Frederick at the very ceremony where she sought to honor him.

Frederick's absence from the 1597 ceremonies is often pointed to by occasionalists to answer this complaint. But since Garter affairs were diplomatic in nature and since news about what happened at these feasts was common knowledge, Frederick's absence by no means licenses the theory that a satire about him was performed at the Garter Feast. Nor does the repeated misreading of “What duke should that be comes so secretly” bolster this argument. Oliver and others contend that this line is an insiders' joke which refers to the fact that Frederick did not arrive—secretly or otherwise—because he was not informed of his election in time to attend the Garter ceremony.³⁷ But a funnier and more convincing reading is offered by his envoy's journal, which reminds us that, on separate occasions more than three years apart, both Frederick and later his envoy Hans Jacob Breuning von Buchenbach did in fact arrive secretly at Elizabeth's court and wreaked much havoc as a result. In 1592, Frederick arrived unannounced at London for lengthy court visits and caused numerous problems, as well as unintended comic entertainment for the court. Three years later Breuning arrived in London not only unannounced but in disguise. Breuning's journal, which neither Oliver nor Roberts uses,³⁸ also clarifies another line misinterpreted by the occasionalists. Quickly's refrain, “Out upon it! what have I forgot?” (1.4.165), need not refer, as is claimed, to Elizabeth's 1597 omission of Frederick's invitation; a more convincing reading connects it to Elizabeth's 1595 statement—reported by an overwrought Breuning—that she had no memory of any promise to Frederick: “It amazes me that you so often, both now and on the last occasion, make mention of my promise. … But to speak truth, I have not the least recollection of ever having made any such promise.”³⁹

Green claims that a “study of each of the Feasts from 1593 to 1601 reveals that not one of them—except that of 1597—offered the proper circumstances for the special composition and presentation of the Merry Wives.”⁴⁰ But the evidence Green finds should have led him to conclude that 1597 was just as unlikely an occasion. In fact the strained state of English-German trade relations that Green uncovers explains precisely why 1597 is an especially unlikely date for a play satirizing the Germans in general and Frederick in particular. On 22 July/1 August 1597, Emperor Rudolph II banned all English merchants from Germany.⁴¹ The ever-politic Elizabeth withheld retaliation until January 1598, at which time she formally banished all German merchants from England.⁴² This further confirms spring 1597 as a time of much-needed foreign diplomacy. During the mid- to late 1590s, a satire on cozening Germans would have been welcome on the public stage; any time after January 1598 would have been ideal; at the spring 1597 Garter ceremonies alone, however, such a performance would have been problematic.

In sum, the Mompelgard argument is indeed convincing, and ample evidence exists to suggest a parallel between Frederick and Falstaff in the public imagination. Both ludicrous, pompous fools are baited by women whose scorn and delay in turn reduce them to objects of public ridicule. But 1597 would have been the only year when this parallel would not have been tenable, since it is the only year when Elizabeth was not fooling Frederick but rewarding him. Between 1592 and 1596 Frederick was baited with election; between 1598 and 1602 he was baited with investiture; and between 1602 and 1603 he was baited with installation. Only in 1597 was he not being baited at all. Given the satirical mode of Merry Wives, then, the weight of probability is against a spring 1597 Garter-commissioned performance.

V

The possibility that Merry Wives was originally composed for a public audience familiar with Garter events has never been entertained, even though it is far more plausible than the court occasionalist argument. Peter Erickson has studied “the double appeal of the Garter ceremony to both elite and public” as “particularly pertinent to the theme of class reconciliation in The Merry Wives of Windsor, for it counters the notion that a popular audience could have no interest in Garter lore pertaining exclusively to aristocratic need and suggests instead a convergence of classes around an all-purpose symbol.” But Erickson does not question the court occasionalist argument, nor does he consider the Garter material to be interpolated.⁴³

Breuning's journal proves that popular knowledge of Merry Wives' topical references extended well beyond Garter affairs. Not only does Breuning describe the popular audience outside the 1595 Garter Feast he attended,⁴⁴ but he describes in detail how his disastrous adventures in London were received by “high and low.” No sooner did Bruening arrive in London to win Frederick's election to the Garter than he discovered, while dining at a local pub, that a fellow German named Stamler had been passing himself off as Frederick's envoy in an attempt to export cloth duty free. Breuning decides to take on the case before negotiating for Frederick's election and writes to Frederick: “I was of the opinion that this unpleasant affair must first of all be settled and removed from our path; the more so because both high and low spoke so contemptuously and derisively of it, and he [Stamler] by his demands had alienated from us the prominent men.” Disguised “in very homely garb and unrecognized,” Breuning met with Stamler at the White Swan tavern. Breuning's efforts to resolve the Stamler affair on his own were notorious; his attempts to resolve the affair with Essex's help further problematized his efforts to bribe courtiers into electing Frederick to the Garter. Breuning complains that the Stamler case “was the daily topic at table, on 'Change, and … talked of at Court with so much contempt, reproach and opprobrium that I was hurt to the quick and could not sleep of nights.”

In the late 1590s Breuning was a more logical choice and a much easier target for a topical satire than was Frederick, who had not visited England since 1592. This stranger to court with the terribly funny name—Buchenbach—daily wrote an unending stream of letters (in triplicate, as did Falstaff) to further his aims. He also outraged many Londoners with his attempts to make purchases and to borrow money and was forced to admit that they perceived him as “a very suspicious character.”⁴⁵ Not only did he travel widely over the English countryside, but he apparently offended the town of Windsor by his unexpected decision not to stay overnight at the local inn where he had dined.⁴⁶ This explains the frustrated response of Merry Wives' Windsor Inn Host, who had made such great preparation in honor of a “duke de Jamany.” Breuning also acted badly at table over precedence. At the 1595 Garter Feast he created havoc by refusing to sit down to dinner unless seated above Count Philip of Solms, envoy to the Landgrave Maurice of Hesse. Yet in his report to Frederick, he proudly recounted each gaffe as a diplomatic triumph: “Before we had risen from table this scene, as I was afterwards reliably informed, was reported to Her Majesty and to all the Knights and bruited about at Court. The English nobles who waited upon us put their heads together and did not know what to make of the whole business. … And so henceforth I was held in higher esteem by the English than ever before, as not only the Court but all London busied itself with the affair” (my emphasis).⁴⁷

Whether or not Breuning's peculiar behavior is later caricatured in Merry Wives' Cousin Slender, who also refuses to sit down to dinner, or in his Uncle Shallow's behavior over precedence and courtesy, need not be answered decisively. Annabel Patterson persuasively argues that it was both more common and certainly a wiser practice for Renaissance dramatists to avoid the one-to-one correspondence of personal satire in favor of a more complex functional ambiguity.⁴⁸ Arguments that Merry Wives cannot be “about” Frederick because it is “about” some other noteworthy figure—whether Breuning, Essex, Brooke, or Monsieur de Chastes—ignore the way in which Elizabethan authors protected themselves from censorship by conflating a variety of sources and incidents. It is far more likely that the “garmombles” who fool a Windsor host conflate caricatures of Frederick, who sought revenge on the Garter; of the French representative de Chastes, who stole post-horses to attend a 1596 Garter celebration; of Breuning, who cozened a Windsor innkeeper; and of Germans in general, who were widely perceived as having duped the British in trade relations. Since “both high and low” knew of these affairs, there is every reason to suppose that Merry Wives was written to be performed on the public stage.

Curiously, Green argues against an April 1600 Garter performance of Merry Wives precisely because Monsieur de Chastes stood in for the French king, Henri IV, at the Windsor installation: “On the surface it may appear that the Merry Wives conceivably could have been part of that great and magnificent entertainment. But Monsieur de Chastes is the same French envoy who became involved in a major post-horse scandal on September 4, 1596. … The circumstances surrounding this incident are so startlingly similar to those described in the fourth act horse-stealing subplot of the Merry Wives that … I believe the affair served as the prototype for the subplot.”⁴⁹ Here Green repeats J. Crofts's argument, peremptorily dismissed by Oliver and Roberts, that Merry Wives' post-horse scene, widely thought to be abridged or censored in both Q and F, played on a well-known post-horse crisis.⁵⁰ In 1596 de Chastes was rushing back to France for a reception for the English, who had just honored his king with a Garter election. Unable to procure a horse, he stole horses belonging to private travelers and took them beyond the appointed posts. News of the affair, which wrought havoc with the English transportation system, spread quickly and was well publicized. Green argues: “that Shakespeare would knowingly mirror an unpleasant incident in the life of an individual of the stature of de Chastes is beyond the wildest imagination.” Yet it is precisely de Chastes's stature, the inappropriateness of this episode, and the texts' confused state, that invites the hypothesis that the scene was censored.⁵¹ That Edmond Tyllney would censor a hit at de Chastes is particularly likely given his own diplomatic and Garter-related work. In Edmond Tyllney, Master of the Revels and Censor of Plays: A Descriptive Index to His Diplomatic Manual on Europe, W.R. Streitberger provides ample proof that Tyllney would be especially sensitive to ambassadors' perceptions of plays and all too aware of who was being mocked and when. Tyllney's Topographical Descriptions, primarily designed as an overview of foreign policy, included much information essential to diplomatic relations. Streitberger points out that the lord chamberlain and his aides entertained foreign ambassadors due to the lack of a master of ceremonies and adds: “No doubt Tyllney was called upon to help in this matter.”⁵² Crofts's argument for the importance of the de Chastes affair thus deserves a new hearing.⁵³

Further indications of a popular audience for Merry Wives emerge from the study of such textual variants as the Quarto's repeated identification of the Folio's wise woman of Brainford as Gillian of Brainford. Robert Copland's Gyl of Brainfords Testament offers a less likely source for this character's popularity and name recognition in the late 1590s than does the title of a play purchased by Henslowe in 1599.⁵⁴ Henslowe's diary entry reads: “Lent vnto Thomas dowton & samwell Redly [Rowley] the 10 of febreary 1598 to bye A boocke called fryer fox & gyllen of branforde.”⁵⁵ The interaction between a citizen wife and one Sir John (a term for a friar) may provide a basis for future study. References to Gyllen of Branford in plays of the early 1600s, such as Dekker and Webster's 1604 Westward Ho!, further underline the probability that this character's currency with popular audiences would have been more likely after 1597.

VI

The most likely direction for further research is provided by the work of Melchiori, Taylor, and Hibbard—all of whom contend, based on the dating of the Henriad, that Merry Wives recycled rather than anticipated the 1597 Garter events.⁵⁶ The most convincing argument to date is Gary Taylor's theory for a February 1598 date of composition and performance:

Hotson's dating of Merry Wives, though plausible, remains conjectural, and by pushing the composition of 1 Henry IV back into 1596 it further cramps the chronology for 1595-6, and leaves 1597-8 by comparison relatively empty. If we abandon the 1597 Garter Feast as the play's origin and occasion, then 1 Henry IV could have been written in 1597 (after the death of William Brooke, Lord Cobham, briefly Lord Chamberlain, whose title descended from Oldcastle), and performed at court early in the Christmas season of 1597-8 (where the Chamberlain's Men played on 26 December, 1 and 6 January). The censorship could have occurred at that time, and Queen Elizabeth's request for a play on Falstaff in love could have been made in anticipation of a later court performance that Whitehall season (on 26 February). The officially instigated publication of 1 Henry IV, in order to advertise the change of Sir John's name, would then have followed very soon after the censorship itself.⁵⁷

A February 1598 date would capitalize on English hostility toward German merchants, who had been expelled from London the month before. It also suggests an intriguing connection with the January 1598 performance of an unidentified comedy performed by Shakespeare's company and reported by the French ambassador, Monsieur de Maisse.⁵⁸ This date confirms Eliot Slater's rare-vocabulary test, which places Merry Wives in close proximity to 2 Henry IV.⁵⁹ Finally, an early 1598 date for Shakespeare's play would provide a more reasonable connection to Henslowe's 10 February 1599 purchase of the book called “fryer fox & gyllen of branforde”; to his 31 January 1599 purchase of “tafetie for ij womones gownes for the ij angrey wemen of abengton”;⁶⁰ and to other dramatists' references to Gyllen of Branford in early 1600.

The consequences of undermining the 1597 occasionalist argument in favor of a 1598 date of composition are more far-reaching than might at first appear. Not only should it demolish the myth of Shakespeare's occasionalist plays, of which Merry Wives is the last remaining example, but it should help to resolve arguments concerning which Brooke family member complained about the use of Oldcastle; could influence current debates on the dating of the Henriad and of Jonson's Every Man in His Humour; and may suggest new areas of research into the tradition of two-wives and humors comedies.⁶¹ For example, the later date undermines the reasoning behind theories that the Brooke/Broome change was made at the same time as the Oldcastle/Falstaff change and that Merry Wives is an attack on the elder Brooke.⁶² “The play would still have been written with a court performance in mind,” Taylor explains, “honouring by allusion the company's patron, and satirizing by contrast Henry Brooke, the new Lord Cobham, who would have been instrumental in the censorship of 1 Henry IV.”⁶³ Since the elder Cobham died on 6 March 1597, it is unlikely that Shakespeare would spoof Brooke for Elizabeth in April, a month after Brooke's death.

A 1598 date for Merry Wives places the conflict between Essex and the younger Brooke, and this context receives further backing given the notorious hostility between the two men.⁶⁴ And Essex's references to the younger Brooke as Falstaff make sense only in this context. Essex adds an amusing postscript in a 1598 letter to Sir Robert Cecil: “I pray you commend me allso to Alex. Ratcliff and tell him for newes his sister is maryed to S^r Jo. Falstaff”; a 1599 letter written by Elizabeth Wriothsley, Countess of Southampton, reads: “Al the nues I can send you that I thinke wil make you mery is that I reade in a letter from London that Sir John Falstaf is by his M^rs Dame Pintpot made father of a godly milers thum, a boye thats all heade and veri litel body; but this is a secrit.”⁶⁵ Hotson has convincingly supported the thesis that these references are to Henry Brooke, the younger Cobham; that it was he who was referred to as Falstaff by Essex; he who was interested in Margaret Ratcliff (much to her brother's concern); and he who, in the spring of 1599, was rumored to have fathered a little cob (since cob, like miller's thumb, also refers to a small fish with a large head). That he was also rumored to have been interested in marrying Sir John Spencer's daughter may be relevant; Hotson considers his interest in the countess of Kildare, daughter to the lord admiral, in terms of the Admiral's Men's Oldcastle play.⁶⁶ That Breuning sought to bribe Brooke and that Essex was the chief officer involved in resolving many of the problems Breuning raised point to a further connection. Finally, if 1 Henry IV were speedily published to advertise the name change from Oldcastle to Falstaff, this might explain Merry Wives' unsuccessful efforts to relate its characters to the Henriad.

What is at least indisputable is that too much of this mess was known to the public, that the Brooke family's sensitivity was itself cause for public gossip and humor, and that Merry Wives inevitably played on popular knowledge of this fiasco. Instead of treating topicality as merely reflecting contemporary incidents, we may consider its power to influence them. Just as the Oldcastle saga continued to plague the Brooke family, confusing and interrelating life and art, so the difficulty we experience in pinning down Merry Wives' date of composition may reflect how the Mompelgard saga served as local humor. With Frederick pestering the court for over a decade, the affair probably became increasingly humorous and outlandish, encouraging further improvisation and revision of the play itself. Merry Wives depended on and contributed to the local knowledge of this affair, and so not only reflected but helped to shape popular Elizabethan culture. Pierre Bourdieu's strategy of “making use of indeterminacy” provides a useful model for making use of topical indeterminacy in this play; it reminds us that the conditions under which a play is performed in turn may become a condition of its performance, as in much ritual action.⁶⁷

For their epigraph to Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, Michael Allen and Kenneth Muir lift a line from the Folio Merry Wives: “I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank space for different names (sure, more!); and these are of the second edition” (2.1.74-77). The tell-tale line accurately glosses what we must surmise of the history of the always already divided text that is Merry Wives. Blank spaces can express both anonymity and particularity, both an emptiness and a determined inclusiveness. Such anticipatory receptivity alone ensures that the local and the specific will survive and flourish. The ability of Merry Wives to withstand alteration and censorship, to append itself to the vogue of humors comedy and to the Henriad alike, to capitalize on local events and to rewrite them suggests that its topicality functions less as a liability than as a survival strategy. By emphasizing the particular, the daily, and the unexpected, this comedy inscribes an improvisational power and topicality not only open but attentive to the restraints and revisions of performance realities. In the face of such evidence, Shakespearean scholars may want to rethink how consensus can drive “the grossness of the foppery into a receiv'd belief, in despite of the teeth of all rhyme and reason” and “how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment!” (5.5.124-29).

Notes

1. Most influential in the return to local readings has been the work of David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1968); and, more recently, Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley, 1988). All recent studies of Shakespeare's multiple-text plays are deeply indebted to Steven Urkowitz's Shakespeare's Revision of King Lear (Princeton, 1980); and to The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare's Two Versions of “King Lear,” Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds. (Oxford, 1983). See also Warren, “Textual Problems, Editorial Assertions in Editions of Shakespeare” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, Jerome J. McGann, ed. (Chicago, 1985), 23-37; Urkowitz, “Reconsidering the Relationship of Quarto and Folio Texts of Richard III,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986): 442-66; and Annabel Patterson, “Back by Popular Demand: The Two Versions of Henry V,” Renaissance Drama 19 (1988): 29-62. For a critique of work in this area, see Richard Knowles's review of Urkowitz in Modern Philology 79 (1981): 197-200, and his review of Warren and Taylor, titled “The Case for two Lears,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 115-20; see also Marion Trousdale, “A Trip Through the Divided Kingdoms,” SQ 37 (1986): 218-23.

2. Quotations of quarto texts are from Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto: A Facsimile Edition of Copies Primarily from the Henry E. Huntington Library, ed. Michael J. B. Allen and Kenneth Muir (Berkeley, 1981); quotations of through-line numbers are from the 1910 edition of the 1602 Quarto Merry Wives, ed. W.W. Greg (Oxford, 1910); other quotations follow the Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

3. In Shakespeare and the Post-Horses: A new study of The Merry Wives of Windsor (University of Bristol Studies 5 [Bristol, 1937]), J. Crofts surveys the history of critical opinion on this matter: “All authorities are therefore agreed that the two texts are derived in some way from a common original” (51). In their introduction to the Cambridge edition of Merry Wives (Cambridge, 1921), Arthur Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson explain that Q is “so eminently a Bad Quarto that every editor finds himself inflexibly driven back upon the Folio version. … And yet he must be constantly collating: since, bad though it so obviously is, at any moment out of the Quarto's chaos some chance line, phrase or word may emerge to fill a gap or correct a misprint in the better text” (xi). In his 1910 edition of the 1602 Quarto Merry Wives, W.W. Greg contends, in regard to a Folio/Quarto line variant in Merry Wives, that “both readings are unquestionably genuine Shakespeare. I think there can be little doubt that we have to do with a case of revision” (67, n. 467). Yet oddly, William Green maintains in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (Princeton, 1962) that “there is no basis for the supposition that both the Q and F texts stem from a common original. The F text is, with minor modifications, the authoritative version of the Merry Wives, and basically represents the script played at the 1597 Feast of the Garter” (102). In “Another Masque for The Merry Wives of Windsor” (SQ 3 [1952]: 39-43), John H. Long argues that Shakespeare wrote both the Q (for Elizabeth) and F (for James) conclusions. For a sustained argument that Q is an abridgment of F, see William Bracy, The Merry Wives of Windsor: The History and Transmission of Shakespeare's Text (Columbia, MO, 1952). The theory that Folio/Quarto variants are the result of authorial revision, possibly in the interests of two separate audiences, goes back at least as far as Alexander Pope.

4. Elizabeth Schafer does, however, touch on this point in “The Date of The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Notes & Queries 38 (1991): 57-60. In this succinct but cogent argument, Schafer contends: “The 1597 dating argument generally depends on speculation rather than proof; it seems to have become orthodoxy mainly because it has been repeated so many times—and certainly the Garter connection and the links with 2 Henry IV offer no solid support for dating Merry Wives 1597” (60).

5. The so-called “consensus” on Leslie Hotson's occasionalist reading of Merry Wives in Shakespeare versus Shallow (London, 1931) has received backing from two separate camps: first, Green's development of Hotson's thesis, in Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Jeanne Addison Roberts's reception of Green's argument, in Shakespeare's English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context (Lincoln NE, and London, 1979); and, second, H.J. Oliver's quite different reception of Hotson in his introduction to the Arden edition of Merry Wives (London, 1971). Peter Erickson's “The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and class-gender tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor” (in Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds. [New York and London, 1987], 116-40) is the first essay to argue persuasively for “the double appeal of the Garter ceremony to both elite and public” (127). Erickson, however, never questions the ideological implications of the 1597 occasionalist dating. Valuable treatments of the Quarto which also fail to challenge the 1597 date include Steven Urkowitz's “Good News about ‘Bad’ Quartos” (in “Bad” Shakespeare: Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, Maurice Charney, ed. [London and Toronto, 1988], 189-206, esp. 193-96), and, more recently, Leah S. Marcus's “Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts” (SQ 42 [1991]: 168-78), where she adopts the 1597 dating for the court version without addressing the question of the dating of the popular version and observes: “I have no quarrel with this account of the Folio's [1597 Garter] occasion” (173).

6. In Tudor Drama and Politics, Bevington explains: “Regular plays … were financed by a theatrical audience. The patron offered nominal protection in return for sporadic services; he did not commission the work. For these reasons it is unsafe to assume that plays like … The Merry Wives of Windsor fostered individual campaigns of flattery and begging on behalf of certain courtiers, as did the courtly entertainment. And in fact no Tudor document exists to demonstrate such a condition of performance” (10). And yet, as Annabel Patterson notes in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (London, 1989), the occasionalist myth persists in scholarly responses to plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream: “Despite the difficulty that critics experience in finding an appropriate marital occasion during 1595-6, and an uneasy recognition that the play seems rather to problematize than celebrate marriage, it is somewhat alarming to see how readily this hypothesis has been absorbed as fact into texts designed for students” (58). Although Patterson points to Wolfgang Clemen's introduction to the Signet edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream (New York, 1963), we might note here that Green's introduction to the Signet edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (New York, 1965) exemplifies the same pattern.

7. In their introduction Quiller-Couch and Wilson correctly describe the Bad Quarto as “one of the most tantalising in the whole canon”; when they later casually refer to its “naughtiness,” they demonstrate how textuality recapitulates morality (vii and xi). In Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Patterson argues that preference for the courtly folio readings of Shakespearean texts over more popular quarto readings constitutes as much as it reflects an ideologically based class preference. Her thesis appears to be borne out by such comments as Oliver's: “Behind the Quarto text, then, there would seem to be The Merry Wives that was designed for an audience not aristocratic and not primarily intellectual, whereas the full Folio text has much that would appeal only to the more sophisticated. Here perhaps lies also the explanation of the main differences between the two forms of the final scene” (xxx). Since the Quarto offers a much funnier, more dramatic, and more drawn-out discovery and punishment of Falstaff, and since the Folio ending is not really intellectual but actually includes more elaborate song and dance, scholarly preference for this “sophisticated,” “aristocratic,” and “intellectual” ending exemplifies the class ideology of textual studies.

8. Oliver, ed., xlv.

9. See, for example, Ralph Berry, Shakespeare's Comedies: Explorations in Form (Princeton, 1972), 146; Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto, 1973), 7; and Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974), 228. In the section on “Chronology and Sources” in the Riverside edition of Merry Wives, Evans describes Merry Wives as composed in 1597 and revised c. 1600-1601 and attributes the redating to Hotson and the support of that redating to Oliver: “Until relatively recently Merry Wives was regularly dated 1601-2, but Hotson's suggestion … [regarding dating] is being more and more strongly supported (see New Arden ed.)” (52). More recently, Yoshiko Kawachi, in A Calendar of English Renaissance Drama 1558-1642 (New York and London, 1986), has also credited Hotson.

10. Review of the Arden The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 419-25, esp. 423.

11. Roberts, 50.

12. See G.R. Hibbard's introduction to the New Penguin edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (Middlesex, UK, 1973), 47-50; Gary Taylor, “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays” in Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), 120; Giorgio Melchiori, “Which Falstaff in Windsor” in KM80: A Birthday Album for Kenneth Muir, comp. Philip Edwards (Liverpool, UK, 1987), 98-100; and Melchiori's introduction to the New Cambridge edition of The Second Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge, 1989), 5. The fact that these arguments have not been integrated is especially disturbing when contradictions occur within the same text. Evans confirms a 1597 date in his section on chronology in the Riverside Shakespeare (52), and yet Anne Barton's introduction to the play in the same volume is noncommittal at best; she summarizes the controversy, raises questions that seem designed to catch the 1597 camp off guard, and concludes: “For some commentators, the idea is palpably absurd; for others, it represents an entirely plausible account of what happened” (287). In the section on chronology in A Textual Companion, Gary Taylor argues for a date of 1598 (120); in the section on the play (approved by Taylor) in the same volume, John Jowett refers to “the recorded court performance of 1597 for which the play was probably commissioned” (341). And the Oxford Shakespeare, also edited by Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells, confirms the 1597 dating (see William Shakespeare: The Complete Works [Oxford, 1986]). In the introduction to his Oxford Shakespeare edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor (Oxford, 1993), T.W. Craik strongly supports the 1597 occasionalist argument. Indeed the paperback edition's back cover enticingly claims: “The Merry Wives of Windsor was almost certainly required at short notice for a court occasion in 1597.” Craik approvingly refers to “the consensus of the majority of scholars that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written for the Garter Feast of 23 April 1597” (27) and states, despite evidence to the contrary (see note 57), that Gary Taylor “accepts the generally agreed date of 23 April 1597 for the first performance” (10).

13. The divided reception of Green's 1962 book is typical of divisions within the occasionalist camp; Oliver concludes that “Green's Shakespeare's ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ tries to build on Hotson's argument but adds little to it” (xlv, n. 3); in contrast Roberts finds “Green's thesis … convincingly defended” (36). For other significant disagreements between Oliver and Roberts, see notes 25 and 61. Other problems with the occasionalist argument are noted by scholars who endorsed 1600 after Hotson and before the 1970s revival of his argument; see W.W. Greg's review of Leslie Hotson's Shakespeare versus Shallow in Modern Language Review 27 (1932): 218-21, esp. 220; Greg, The Shakespeare First Folio: Its Bibliographical and Textual History (Oxford, 1955), 337; The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1936), 63; James G. McManaway, “Recent Studies in Shakespeare's Chronology,” Shakespeare Survey 3 (1950): 22-33, esp. 29; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1951), 1:434; Fredson Bowers's introduction to the Penguin Merry Wives of Windsor (Baltimore, 1963), 17; J. M. Nosworthy, Shakespeare's Occasional Plays: Their Origin and Transmission (London, 1965), 88. Since the 1970s revival, the New Penguin dating remains committed to 1600. See also Schafer's compelling arguments against 1597.

14. Edmond Malone, The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare …, 10 vols. (London, 1790), 1:329.

15. For additional Garter information, see Elias Ashmole, The Institution, Lawes & Ceremonies Of the most Noble Order of the Garter (London, 1672); and Memorials of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, ed. George Frederick Beltz (London, 1841; rpt. New York, 1973), which contains Elizabeth's 1567 decree effectively reserving Windsor for installations rather than for feast days (ciii-civ). For recent work on the Garter, see Roy Strong, “Saint George For England: The Order of the Garter,” The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (Wallop, UK, 1977), 164-86; and Arthur B. Ferguson, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington, DC, 1986).

16. In Shakespeare versus Shallow, Hotson refers to a description of Hunsdon entering the Garter Feast accompanied by three hundred followers (118-19) which was first recorded in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord de L'Isle & Dudley Preserved at Penshurst Place, ed. C.L. Kingsford, 20 vols. (London, 1925-42), 2:265, hereafter cited as HMC Penshurst.

17. The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1923), 2:160.

18. Henslowe's Diary, ed. R.A. Foakes and R.T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), 133.

19. The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. (Cambridge, 1953-61), 1:105-206, esp. 113. For representative works written as compliments to Elizabeth, see The Queen's Garland: Verses Made by her Subjects for Elizabeth I, Queen of England Now Collected in Honour of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, ed. M.C. Bradbrook (London, 1953).

20. Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 42-43.

21. Quoted in Queen Elizabeth and Some Foreigners …, ed. Victor von Klarwill, trans. T.H. Nash (London, 1928), 379.

22. In his dedicatory epistle to The Comical Gallant (London, 1702), Dennis writes: “That this Comedy was not despicable, I guess'd for several Reasons: First, I knew very well, that it had pleas'd one of the greatest Queens that ever was in the World. … This Comedy was written at her Command, and by her direction, and she was so eager to see it Acted, that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days; and was afterwards, as Tradition tells us, very well pleas'd at the Representation” (i). Dennis reduces the time to ten days in his Original Letters, Familiar, Moral and Critical, 2 vols. (London, 1721), 2:232.

23. Dennis, Comical Gallant, i.

24. In his “Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespeare” (prefixed to his edition of The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, 6 vols. [London, 1709]), Rowe reports that Elizabeth “was so well pleas'd with that admirable character of Falstaff, in the two Parts of Henry the Fourth, that she commanded him to continue it for one Play more, and to shew him in Love. This is said to be the Occasion of his Writing The Merry Wives of Windsor” (1:viii-ix).

25. In A New Variorum Edition of the First Part of Henry the Fourth (Philadelphia, 1936), Samuel Hemingway credits H. N. Paul with having first suggested the precise point at which Shakespeare interrupted his work on 2 Henry IV in order to compose Merry Wives (355). Roberts concurs with Paul; Oliver is noncommittal but finds the theory persuasive; and Green disagrees.

26. For Meres's list, see Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, App. C, 4:246.

27. Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 209-13.

28. Green finds the Garter lines “completely extraneous to the plot of the play” (10) and maintains that “not one of the Court-Garter passages is essential to the action of the Merry Wives” (96). For an opposing view, see Erickson, 126, and note 43 below.

29. Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 118.

30. See James Fowler, “David Scott's Queen Elizabeth Viewing the Performance of the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ in the Globe Theatre (1840)” in Shakespeare and the Victorian Stage, Richard Foulkes, ed. (Cambridge, 1986), 23-38. Oliver hypothesizes that “there was an alternative ending to the play for use—probably on the public stage—when, perhaps, the special occasion for which the original text was prepared was simply not relevant” (xxxii).

31. The Standard Edition of the Pictorial Shakespeare, ed. Charles Knight, 7 vols. (London, 1846), 2:143. The Quarto “garmombles” can be read not only as Mompelgard but also as geremombles, a term that signified confusion. Thomas Nashe uses geremumble as a term of abuse in his Strange Newes and his Lenten Stuff; see The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (1904-10; rpt. Oxford, 1958), 1:321 and 3:207. See also J. Douglas Bruce, “Two Notes on ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,”’ MLR 7 (1912): 239-41.

32. If Hunsdon had commissioned the play, we would expect to find the customary dedication or, at the very least, some reference to him in the play. And the mere fact that Hunsdon borrowed money for the occasion of his election is hardly reason to argue that he also commissioned Merry Wives; in fact it raises the question of why he would use those funds to satirize the Garter activities he was so busy promoting.

33. Oliver, ed., xlvi.

34. No less royal a fellow Knight-Elect than France's Henri IV awaited the Garter insignia and investiture a good deal longer; elected in 1590, the king of France was not invested until 1596 and not formally installed at Windsor until 1600. As Green correctly points out, Elizabeth failed to send Henri the insignia until she was negotiating a treaty with France (139).

35. Dr. Christopher Parkins informed Cecil: “advice hath been given that Spain moveth in Denmark and in the Empire to hinder the quiet trade of her Majesty's subjects, wherefore some means is to be thought of for everting this endeavor. … As for the Empire, the Hanses use commonly to be the means for the hindering the trade there. … Yet if her Majesty send a man to Denmark, he may, as it were by the way, give any of the cities occasion to become suitors to her for some their good, giving them hope of good success in reasonable requests. … it seemeth convenient that her Majesty deal with some of the Princes of the Empire to that effect, either by letters, either by the man sent to Denmark, as it were by the way saluting them from her Majesty, which may seem the fitter if there were any other matter wherein they were now especially to be confirmed. The fittest Princes for like occasions are Breame, Magdiburg, Saxon, Rhene, Hassia and Wirtenberg” (Historical Manuscripts Commission: Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honorable the Marquis of Salisbury, 18 vols. [London, 1899], 7:77-78 [my emphasis], hereafter cited as HMC Salisbury).

36. Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 136. Ample additional material can be found in HMC Salisbury; the entire eighteenth volume concerns English foreign policy with France and the Low Countries in the context of the war against Spain. During the spring of 1597, the Spanish were trying to convince the German princes to join with them against the English, and Hanse trade with England was in great danger. Although Parkins is scheming as early as February, by 15 March he urges particular speed since “The merchants of the East country had yesterday intelligence from Denmark that there is a constant purpose to arrest their ships that shall pass by the Sound” (18:114). The clearest statement of a problem appears in the negotiations between Spain and Lubeck on 1 and 25 June 1597: “First. That the King of Spain is willing the Hances shall, without breach or hindrance, enjoy their privileges, for which purposes his ambassador with the Emperor is very instant that the privileges taken from them by the Queen of England by his means may be restored” (18:271).

37. Oliver, ed., xlvii.

38. Although Geoffrey Bullough quotes extensively from Breuning's journal, he offers only an excerpt from the section on Mompelgard's travels, which may be one reason why scholars have neglected its importance as a source for Merry Wives; see Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 8 vols. (New York, 1957-75), 2:13-16 and 44-49.

39. Quoted in von Klarwill, ed., 388, n. 41.

40. Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 38.

41. HMC Salisbury, 7:307-8.

42. See Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Elizabeth, 1598-1601, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green, 13 vols. (London, 1869), 5:5-6.

43. Erickson, 127. He states further: “I contend that the Garter reference is not incidental and anomalous but directly relevant and integral to the play as a whole since the play's concern with courtly forms is part of its overall ambience” (126).

44. Quoted in von Klarwill, ed., 378-79. Roy Strong, citing the official records of the Garter Feast, reports that “by 1592 the crush of people was so great that the ceremonies were held up awaiting the arrival of Knights who had failed to penetrate the throng” (172). In Letters of Philip Gawdy … (ed. Isaac Herbert Jeayes [London, 1906]), Gawdy records a “great press of people” at the 1594 feast (81-82). Of the 1595 feast, Breuning observes: “There was a great crush in the chapel, as many of the common people had thronged thither”; he writes that the queen, followed by her noblemen and ladies, “marched round the yard three times so that everyone could have a good view of them” and notes that the queen “spoke most graciously to everyone, even to those of the vulgar who fell upon their knees in homage” (81-82).

45. For the preceding quotes from Breuning's journal, see von Klarwill, ed., 400-403.

46. For a description of this event, see Bullough, 2:14.

47. Quoted in von Klarwill, ed., 382-83.

48. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, WI, 1984).

49. Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 37.

50. Oliver maintains that Crofts's post-horse theories “have little to recommend them” (xlviii); Roberts terms Crofts's reasoning “inadmissible” (30), and after examining all the theories advanced, she concludes: “One is left with the feeling that the horse-stealing plot is as far as ever from a really satisfactory explanation” (37).

51. Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 37. The vast majority of critics, including Green, believe that the status of the scene is fragmentary and unsatisfactory. In Wells and Taylor's Textual Companion, Jowett observes of the horse-stealing plot that both Q and F have “an almost unintelligible subplot whose deficiencies cannot be attributed to incomplete foul papers” (341). In both The Editorial Problem in Shakespeare: A Survey of the Foundations of the Text (2d ed., [Oxford, 1951]) and in The Shakespeare First Folio, Greg regards censorship as a viable explanation (72 and 336-37, respectively). For an unconvincing effort to explain why the post-horse scene is not censored, as well as for a survey of scholarly argument to the contrary, see Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives, 151-76.

52. (New York, 1986), 14. Although Tyllney was never knighted, “the College of Heralds confirmed his official position with knights on 18 March 1600” (11). Streitberger points out that Tyllney's name was suggested by the ambassador from Spain as a possible envoy to Spain, which further indicates his status in diplomatic circles (10).

53. Contemporary documents support Crofts's position. For example, on 29 February 1600, John Chamberlain writes to Dudley Carleton: “We heare there is some great man comming out of France, in shew about the Kinges installation at Windsore, whatsoever other errand he may have in secret” (Letters Written by John Chamberlain during the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Sarah Williams [Westminster, 1861], 68). The French king, Henri IV, is listed in Memorials of the Most Noble Order of the Garter as follows: “El. 24 April 1590; inv. 10 Oct. 1596; inst. by proxy 28 April 1600” (clxxxii). In a letter to Sir Robert Sidney dated 26 April 1600, Rowland Whyte observes: “The Feast of St. George was solemnised with more then wonted Care, in Regard of Monsieur Le Chates being here. … This morning, Monsieur Le Chatre is gone to Winsor to be for the French King installed” (Letters and Memorials of State … Faithfully Transcribed from the Originals at Penshurst Place …, ed. Arthur Collins, 2 vols. [London, 1746], 2:190); on 4 May, de Chastes returned to London to attend an evening feast given by the lord of Shrewsbury at which the tumbler Peter Bromville performed; on 5 May he left for France (2:193). See also HMC Penshurst, 2:457.

54. Old-style dating marks the new year at 1 March; I refer to new style whenever possible. See Nashe's references to Gyl of Brainfords Testament, Newly Compiled (c. 1560) in McKerrow, ed., 3:235, 314; 4:421; 5:195; and see [Sir John Harrington] Vlysses upon Aiax (London, 1596), sig. B4. In his notes to the Yale Shakespeare edition of The Merry Wives (New Haven, 1922), George van Santvoord claims that the woman of Brainford refers to the “witch of Brentford,” “a well-known personage of Shakespeare's day [who] kept a tavern at Brentford, a town on the Thames about twelve miles directly east of Windsor” (116-17), yet offers no source for this information.

55. Foakes and Rickert, eds., 104.

56. Of the three, only Hibbard argues for the possibility that the play refers to the 1599 Compton-Spencer marriage. According to Hibbard, “the Fenton-Anne Page story reflects the affair between Lord Compton and Elizabeth Spencer” and so “must have been completed after 18 April 1599” (48).

57. “The Canon and Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays” in Wells and Taylor, A Textual Companion, 120.

58. A journal of all that was accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse Ambassador in England from King Henri IV to Queen Elizabeth Anno Domini 1597, trans. and ed. G. B. Harrison and R.A. Jones (London, 1931). De Maisse saw a number of comedies performed before the queen in January 1597/98 (91-92); the editors remind us that “both the Lord Chamberlain's company of players (to which Shakespeare belonged) and the Lord Admiral's acted at Court this Christmas” (145). De Maisse also provides significant information regarding the troubles between England and the German princes at the time, as well as significant Garter-related information.

59. “Word Links with ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor,”’ N&Q 22 (1975): 169-71; reviewed in M.W.A. Smith, “Word-Links and Shakespearian Authorship and Chronology,” N&Q 35 (1988): 57-59.

60. Foakes and Rickert, eds., 104.

61. For arguments on the relation of Merry Wives to other two-wives comedies, see Andrew Gurr, “Intertextuality at Windsor,” SQ 38 (1987): 189-200; see also Roslyn L. Knutson, “Intertextuality at Windsor: A Rejoinder,” and Andrew Gurr, “Intertextuality in Henslowe: A Reply,” both in SQ 39 (1988): 391-93 and 394-98, respectively. The continuing controversy over the play's relation to the Henriad is glossed in Oliver, in Melchiori, and in A.R. Humphrey's introduction to the Arden editions of The First Part of King Henry IV and The Second Part of King Henry IV (London, 1960 and 1965). Gary Taylor has contributed to the Oldcastle/Falstaff controversy in “The Fortunes of Oldcastle,” SS 38 (1985): 85-100; see also “William Shakespeare, Richard James and the House of Cobham,” Review of English Studies 38 (1987): 334-54. For the Brooke/Broome censorship, see Oliver, who adopts the same position taken by Alfred Hart in Stolne and Surreptitious Copies: A Comparative Study of Shakespeare's Bad Quartos (London, 1942) in contending that this change was made as late as 1604 (lvi-lviii); Oliver terms Green's theory of the Brooke/Broome change “desperate” (lvi, n. 2). Jeanne Addison Roberts, on the other hand, agrees with Green's argument that the change was made in 1597 and disagrees with Oliver's claim (38-40).

62. See, for example, Robert J. Fehrenbach, “When Lord Cobham and Edmund Tilney ‘were att odds’: Oldcastle, Falstaff, and the Date of 1 Henry IV,” ShStud 18 (1986): 87-101.

63. Wells and Taylor, Textual Companion, 120.

64. For ample proof of the bad blood between Essex and Henry Brooke, the younger Cobham, see Leslie Hotson, Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated and Other Essays (London, 1949), 147-52. Hotson compiles a good deal of evidence to back up his claim, including a letter from Essex to Sir Robert Sidney which refers to Henry's “base villainies … towards me (which to the world is too well known)” and a letter from Essex which makes clear that he advertised their disputes to other privy councilors: “I made it known unto them that I had just cause to hate the Lord Cobham for his villainous dealing and abusing of me; that he hath been my chief persecutor most unjustly; that in him there is no worth” (151).

65. Hotson, Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated, 147; Chambers, William Shakespeare, 2:198.

66. Hotson, Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated, 147-57.

67. Pierre Bourdieu uses the phrase “making use of indeterminacy” in chapter 3 of his Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard A. Nice (Cambridge, 1977). In Drama of a Nation: Public Theater in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca, NY, 1985), Walter Cohen argues that the material conditions of dramatic production are subject to a peculiar form of ideological reversal: “However aristocratic the explicit message of a play, the conditions of its production introduced alternative effects. The total theatrical process meant more than, and something different from, what the dramatic text itself meant” (183).