[In the following essay, Melchiori examines the textual and historical clues in and surrounding The Merry Wives of Windsor in his attempt to discover the exact date, location, and occasion on which the play was first performed.]

Most recent editions of The Merry Wives of Windsor (with the notable exception of George Hibbard's New Penguin of 1973) accept the date of 23 April 1597 for the first performance of the play, as part of the Garter feast celebrated at Westminster, when George Carey, second Baron Hunsdon, the patron of the company of which Shakespeare was a sharer, was one of the five newly elected knights solemnly invested by Queen Elizabeth with the Order of the Garter. This view was first put forward by Leslie Hotson in his Shakespeare versus Shallow (1931), but the most cogent arguments in favor of it were those advanced in 1962 by William Green, in a painstaking study¹ minutely reconstructing on the basis of contemporary historical documents the ceremonies held on that occasion, to show that the performance of a play containing a celebration of the Order of the Garter would have been most appropriate after the supper held at Westminster in honor of the new knights on the evening of 23 April. In fact, though some kind of entertainment would be in order at such a time, no extant document mentions it or specifies its nature; and, at all events, entertainments offered on such occasions were generally in the form of masques rather than two-hour plays. Was, then, the Garter entertainment a much shorter dramatic piece that only some time later was partly incorporated in a full play for the public theatre?

GARTER PLAY AND/OR GARTER ENTERTAINMENT

The main stumbling block met by the supporters of 1597 as the date of composition of the whole play of The Merry Wives—at a time when Shakespeare might have just completed Henry IV, Part One, and changed the names of Sir John Oldcastle, Rossill, and Harvey into those of Falstaff, Bardolph, and Peto respectively—is the presence in it, in very marginal roles, of characters who had become popular only after their appearance in Histories performed not before but after 1597: Shallow and Pistol in 2 Henry IV (1598), Nym in Henry V (1599). Besides, the role of Sir Hugh Evans is a typical vehicle for an actor specializing in the comic Welshman, and this fits the bill of Robert Armin, who had joined the company only in 1599, “creating” the character of Fluellen;² and the introduction of Doctor Caius can best be explained in terms of exploitation of the comic French linguistic pastiche successfully used in Henry V. There are other incongruities: for instance, how comes it that Shallow, described as a justice of the peace in Gloucestershire in Merry Wives 1.1.5. (but not in the Quarto version of 1602), as well as in 2 Henry IV, has now a deer park in Windsor? And why is so little trace left in the play of the episode of the “Germans” who steal the Host's horses, which has been rightly taken as an allusion (appropriate to the Garter entertainment) to the Mömpelgard affair?³ The only reasonable explanation of these anachronisms and inconsistencies is that Merry Wives was a new play hurriedly put together around 1600, incorporating parts of an earlier Garter entertainment, dating back to 1597.

The main reason for considering Wives a “Garter play” is, of course, the speech of Mistress Quickly impersonating the Fairy Queen at 5.5.58-79—a speech that does not figure in the 1602 Quarto, suggesting that at least on occasion it was not used in public performances, though the rest of the scene was. The speech is a formal celebration of the Order of the Garter, but it does not place the stress on military virtue and valor as attributes of the Garter knights; by quoting the French motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense, it emphasises a different aspect of the virtue expected from the members of the Order. George Hibbard⁴ remarks that this speech, and the part of the scene in which it is included

is singularly masque-like. The Fairy Queen, the fairies, the Satyr, Hobgoblin—all these are exactly the kind of figures that are to be found in several of the royal ‘Entertainments’ that have survived. These entertainments are masque-like shows which were put on for the Queen's amusement when she visited the homes of her more important subjects … [In 1591], at Elvetham in Hampshire, the fourth day's proceedings began with a speech from the Fairy Queen, after which she and her fairy maids danced about Elizabeth, and then sang a song in praise of her.

Hibbard concludes:

It therefore seems a reasonable hypothesis that either Hunsdon or the Queen may well have asked Shakespeare and his company to put together such an entertainment for the Garter celebrations of 1597. It would certainly be something that they could do in a fortnight, and it would fit the occasion. Then later, when it was all long over, Shakespeare, with the economy so characteristic of him, salvaged the entertainment, made the necessary changes to fit Falstaff into it, did not bother to insert indications of Welshness into the Satyr's speeches when they were handed over to Evans, and used it for the denouement of his new comedy. It is not a theory capable of outright proof, but it is more consistent with the play … than is Dennis's story.⁵

FALSTAFF AND THE 1597 GARTER ENTERTAINMENT

My only disagreement with Hibbard's theory concerns the “fitting” of Falstaff into the new play, which implies that the figure of the fat philandering knight was not present in the earlier Garter entertainment. In the following pages I look for new circumstantial evidence in support of the general view expressed by Hibbard (with the proviso just mentioned), and outline the Garter entertainment presented on 23 April 1597 as distinct from the comedy of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

The basic issue, I feel, has been obscured by the fact that, whereas a very great deal of attention has been rightly paid to the relationship between the Shakespearean comedy and the other Falstaff plays, to establish, among other things, their chronological sequence, too little account has been taken of the emergence and development of the character of Falstaff and his companions. In the first place, as Hibbard noted, royal entertainments for particular occasions were generally much shorter than regular plays, and all or mostly in verse. Merry Wives instead has, by far, the lowest percentage of verse (12 percent, including Pistol's doggerel) of any Shakespeare play. The only partially versified scenes in it—apart from the masquelike Garter celebration and the exposure of Falstaff at 5.5.40-105—are those connected with the Fenton-Anne Page love story and parental interference (3.4.1-21 and 67-94), the Pages's and Fords's preparations for the Herne the Hunter's masquerade in Windsor Forest at Falstaff's expense (4.4.6-16, 26-79 and 82-90; Evans's prose interventions in the scene look like later interpolations), Fenton's arrangements with the Host of the Garter for the elopement with Anne Page during the fairies masque (4.6.1-55), and Fenton's and Anne's reappearance after the masque, celebrating their happy union against the miseries of enforced marriage, as part of the final rejoicing and merry making (5.5.216-45).

Hibbard's suggestion that Merry Wives was hastily written (either at the Queen's command or just as a money-making proposition) in 1599-1600 accounts for the presence of these verse passages: together with the “Garter speech,” I take them to be the only parts of the play borrowed and adapted (with changes and insertions of new lines) from the entertainment presented by the Hunsdon Men before the Queen at Westminster Palace on 23 April 1597 for the Feast of the Garter—an appropriate occasion for the company in that one of the five new Knights of the Garter elected that day was their patron, George Carey Lord Hunsdon.

A most suitable central feature of an entertainment devised for such an occasion would be a masque in which the Fairy Queen (an obvious allegorical projection of Queen Elizabeth) ordered her court to make the necessary preparations for the installation ceremony that was to take place a month later in Windsor Castle (see 5.5.56-74). And it was for such a queen to stress, among the duties of the Garter knights, the virtue of chastity.⁶ The latter would suggest the subject matter for the antimasque⁷ that was to complete the day's entertainment. This view is supported by the verse sections from the Garter show incorporated in Merry Wives. The Fenton-Anne story underlines the dangers to married chastity represented by parentally enforced marriage (see 5.5. 218-27), whereas Falstaff is the knight unworthy of the Order of the Garter because he is “corrupt, and tainted in desire.” The general outlines of the Garter entertainment of 1597, then, were based on the honorable deception of the parents practiced by a pair of lovers and the punishment of a corrupt knight unworthy of the Order, culminating in the celebration of the Garter virtues and of the “radiant Queen” who “hates sluts and sluttery” (5.5.46). There was no room in this simple scheme for the “irregular humourists” of the Henry plays: in the original Westminster masque (corresponding to Merry Wives, 5.5.37-102), the speakers were the Fairy Queen and her followers, awkwardly replaced in the later comedy version by Mistress Quickly, Evans, and Pistol utterly deprived of their individual speech mannerisms, whereas Falstaff's prose speech at ll.81-82, detecting the Welsh accent of a “fairy,” is an obvious later interpolation, intruding in a perfect rhymed couplet spoken by the original fairies.⁸ But before attempting an ampler reconstruction of the 1597 entertainment, let us take a closer look at its hero, or rather anti-hero. The question to be asked at this point is: Which Falstaff in Windsor?

There is reason to suspect that not only the unworthy knight, contrary to Hibbard's conclusions, figured already in the 1597 entertainment, but also that his name was from the beginning Sir John Falstaff. The very idea of presenting a knight unworthy of the Order would have suggested that name. The only other occasion in the whole of Shakespeare's work when the Order of the Garter and the duties of its members are mentioned at some length is in 1 Henry VI, 4.1.9-47, the scene in which the English national hero Talbot tears the Garter from Sir John “Falstaffe”'s leg for “Prophaning this most Honourable Order.”⁹

FASTOLF AND FALSTAFF VERSUS OLDCASTLE—AND A GRANT OF ARMS

A difficulty arises at this point. In Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI, the name of the historical character who deserted the battle of Patay “without any stroke stricken,” as Hall and Holinshed put it, though he had been “the same year for his valiantness elected to the order of the garter,” is consistently spelled “Falstaffe”; but in the chronicles from which Shakespeare drew his information it is given as “Fastolf,” “Fastolfe,” or “Fastollfe.” He was actually “disgartered” not by Talbot but by Bedford, the Regent of France, and Shakespeare, though taking a hint from it, decided to ignore the further report by the chroniclers that “Sir John Fastolffe” was able to justify his behavior at Patay, and “was restored to the Order against the mind of the Lord Talbot.” A fact not unknown to the librarian Richard James when, in his epistle to Sir Henry Bourchier,¹⁰ he tried to disentangle both the Oldcastle/Falstaff muddle and the question of how Falstaff could be alive under Henry VI if he had died under Henry V:

In Shakespeare's first shewe of Harrie y^e fift, y^e person with which he vndertook to playe a buffone was not Falstaffe, but S^r Ihon Oldcastle, and … offence beinge worthily taken by personages descended from his [title …], the poet was putt to make an ignorant shifte of abusing S^r Ihon Fastolphe, a man not inferior [of] Vertue though not so famous in pietie as the other.¹¹

The learned librarian simply imputes to Shakespeare's ignorance the confusion of the names and of the characters. Editors of the plays defend him from the accusation by maintaining that he had actually made a clear distinction between the two, later obliterated by a scribe or a compositor of the First Folio. True it is that, though 1 Henry VI was already very successful on the stage in 1592, it appeared in print only posthumously in the 1623 Folio, so that the latest editor of the play, Michael Hattaway, is justified in stating:

Throughout the Folio text and in all editions of the play before that of Theobald he is called ‘Falstaffe’, because, no doubt, of scribal or compositorial confusion with the famous character in 1 and 2 Henry IV.¹²

Perhaps “no doubt” is supererogatory. The question of the name has been amply debated,¹³ and I find far from improbable the suggestion that the altered spelling may be authorial. Because in any case Sir John was meant to be the type of the knight unworthy of the Garter, Shakespeare may well have seen from the beginning, when he first introduced him as such in 1 Henry VI, the allusive possibility offered by a slight variant in the name, from Fastolf to Fall-staff or False-staff, branding him as a false bearer of the emblem of military valor, staff or shaft being synonymous of spear—a notion familiar to the playwright whose grandfather Richard's family name is set down in the Snitterfield court rolls as both Shakeschafte and Shakstaff.¹⁴ The significance of Shakespeare's own surname in connection with the name of Falstaff has been remarked upon by T.W. Herbert and Harry Levin,¹⁵ who detect a suggestion of cowardice both in “Shake-spear” and in “Fall-staff,” to which Roberts,¹⁶ in the second instance, adds that of impotence, appropriate to the final scene of Merry Wives. This is perhaps going too far. Shakespeare was certainly aware of the martial quality of his family name, the very opposite of “Fall-” or “False-staff,” and at all events its full significance was brought home to him by the grant to his father John and to “his children yssue and posterite” of

This shield or cote of Arms, viz. Gould, on a Bend Sables, a Speare of the first steeled argent. And for his creast or cognizaunce a falcon his winges displayed Argent standing on a wrethe of his coullers: supporting a Speare Gould steeled as aforesaid sett vppon a helmett with mantelles & tasselles.¹⁷

The grant by the Garter principal king of Arms is dated 20 October 1596, and it must have amused Shakespeare to include, in an entertainment for a Garter celebration that he was called to devise shortly afterward, the type of the unworthy knight: the derogatory implications of the name borrowed from that of the dishonorable historical character who had put in a brief appearance in 1 Henry VI, suggested for him a coat of arms with a falling spear—in ironical contrast with Shakespeare's own.

It is likely, therefore, that the royal entertainment on 23 April 1597 presented a knight actually called Falstaff, as yet a different person from what we know as the Sir John Falstaff triumphantly appearing in the two parts of Henry IV in 1597-98. But we should recall once again that, when a play on Henry IV was written and possibly performed in 1596, the “villainous abominable misleader of youth” was not called Falstaff but sir John Oldcastle, and that the use of his name was objected to by the powerful Brooke family, connected with that Oldcastle whom John Foxe had celebrated as a protomartyr of the Protestant religion. William Brooker Lord Cobham, Lord Chamberlain from August 1596 till his death in March 1597, was in a particularly strong position to exact the suppression of a play containing a slanderous presentation of his ancestor. I have already illustrated¹⁸ my view that the replacement of the “Oldcastle” version of Henry IV (originally, I believe, a single play) was a fairly laborious task undertaken in late 1596 or early 1597. The Garter entertainment presenting the Sir John Falstaff revived from 1 Henry VI was produced at a time when Shakespeare was busy rewriting with considerable changes and amplifications the role of Oldcastle in the new version of Henry IV, and looking for a new name for the knight. Why not adopt the name used on the occasion of the Garter Feast, which added to Sir John Falstaff's earlier taint of cowardice the further imputation of lechery and corruption?

In other words:

1. The Sir John Falstaff exposed at Windsor in the Garter entertainment of 23 April 1597 was the same as the one even more dishonorably exposed in some brief scenes of 1 Henry VI.

2. The Garter entertainment gave Shakespeare the idea of replacing with “Falstaff” the name of “Oldcastle” that had given offense to his descendants, in the rewriting of Henry IV as a new play or plays in 1597-98.

3. When, for whatever reason, Shakespeare was asked in 1599-1600 to write a comedy about the new Falstaff who had been successful in the two parts of Henry IV, he remembered the earlier Garter entertainment located in Windsor and, fusing together old and new, transferred to Windsor—improbable as it may appear—the irregular humourists that in the Histories had haunted Eastcheap, Gadshill, Gloucestershire, and even the fields of France.

A CHRONOLOGY OF SHAKESPEARE'S WORK ON THE HISTORIES

Here is a detailed prospect of the chronological sequence of the plays and entertainments in which Shakespeare had a hand between 1596 and the end of the century, apart from the romantic comedies and Julius Caesar:

1596

Early in the year Shakespeare writes for the Chamberlain's Men a remake of the first part of The Famous Victories of Henry V, under the title of Henry IV, covering events from the first rebellion in the North to the king's death, stressing the wildness of Prince Hal and his reformation, and developing the characters of his companions, Rossill (Sir John Russell), Harvey, Pointz, and particularly Sir John Oldcastle. The play is successfully staged.

23 July: The Lord Chamberlain, Henry Carey, first Baron Hunsdon, dies. The company passes under the patronage of his son, George Carey, second Baron Hunsdon, and is renamed the Lord Hunsdon's Men.

August: William Brooke, seventh Baron Cobham, is appointed Lord Chamberlain. He objects to the presentation on the public stage of Sir John Oldcastle. The play is withdrawn. Shakespeare undertakes to rewrite it for the next season, developing the role of Oldcastle under a less offensive name.

At about this time Queen Elizabeth decides to fill the next year the vacancies in the Order of the Garter by electing new knights, among whom George Carey, Lord Hunsdon. The latter commissions from his company an entertainment in view of the festivities for the investiture, on Saint George's day 23 April 1597.

1597

5/6 March: William Brooke Lord Cobham dies.

17 April: George Carey Lord Hunsdon is appointed Lord Chamberlain.

23 April: In a solemn ceremony at Westminster Queen Elizabeth invests five new Knights of the Garter: Frederick Duke of Württemberg (formerly Count Mömpelgard) in absentia, Thomas Lord Howard de Walden, George Carey Lord Hunsdon, Charles Blount Lord Mountjoy, Sir Henry Lee. Though there is no record of it, it is likely that, after the supper that followed evensong, the Chamberlain's Men presented an entertainment celebrating the Order and Queen Elizabeth in the person of the Fairy Queen, while the comic antimasque would center on the figure of a knight unworthy of the Order because of his sexual uncleanness (a homage to the cult of chastity promoted by the virgin queen). The knight was named after the infamous Sir John Fastolf (False-staff) disgraced for his cowardice in 1 Henry VI.

At the same time, Shakespeare was busy rewriting the play on Henry IV and looking for new names to replace those used the year before. He gave the main character the name and title that had been revived on the occasion of the Garter entertainment: Sir John Falstaff. The new play—published the next year simply as The History of King Henry IV—was presented successfully on the stage.

1598

In view of this success, the Chamberlain's Men commissioned and presented a sequel to it…, ending with the promise of a third Falstaff play, Henry V, where “Falstaff shall die of a sweat,” and with an apology for calling him Oldcastle in an earlier version.

1599

When it was presented at the newly built Globe, the rewriting of the second part of Famous Victories as Henry V did not keep the promise of showing Falstaff, possibly because Shakespeare had become aware of the historical Fastolf's gallant behavior at Agincourt, but introduced new comic roles: Fluellen the Welshman, suited to Robert Armin, the new Clown of the company; corporal Nym, with his recurring tag “That's the humour of it”;¹⁹ and the French Dauphin.

1599-1600

Presumably for commercial reasons, rather than obeying a Royal command, Shakespeare devised a new comedy centering on the figure of Falstaff, partly incorporating the Garter entertainment of 1597, exploiting some typical situations in Italian and English novels, and reintroducing the most successful comic figures in the recent Histories: Bardolph (1H4), Pistol (2H4), Nym (H5), Shallow (2H4), a new Mistress Quickly that shared only her linguistic oddities with her previous namesake, the well-meaning Welshman (Fluellen = Evans), the pompous Frenchman (Dauphin = Caius).

THE BROOK/BROOME AFFAIR AND THE POOR KNIGHT OF WINDSOR

The result of the process I have summarized was The Merry Wives of Windsor, a dual-purpose comedy, for both court presentation (even if we do not credit the story of the royal command) and the public stage. The Garter masque (albeit the Fairy Queen of the original Garter entertainment was redimensioned as Mistress Quickly, the Satyr as Evans, and Hobgoblin as Pistol) would please both audiences, whereas the “Latin lesson” (4.1) is obviously meant only for the sophisticated court audience rather than for the more general one of the Globe—and on occasion also the Garter speech by the Queen of Fairies might have sounded out of place. This accounts for the two major omissions (the whole of 4.1 and the speech at 5.5.58-76) in the 1602 Quarto of the play, which appears to be a “reconstructed” text based on a public performance. The Folio text reflects instead the full version of the 1599-1600 play, including the substitution of Ford's assumed name “Broome” for the original “Brooke” to avoid any further possible offence to the Cobham family.

The Brooke-Broome change has caused serious difficulties to the supporters of 1597 as the date of composition of the entire comedy, including editors of the play like H.J. Oliver²⁰ and the most recent, T.W. Craik,²¹ as well as Jeanne Addison Roberts.²² If we acknowledge instead that Shakespeare wrote the play, as distinct from the Garter entertainment, in 1599-1600, the use of the assumed name Brooke for the suspicious Ford can be seen as the author's little revenge for having been forced by the earlier Lord Cobham, William Brooke, to substitute the name of Oldcastle, whereas the further change to Broome may well have been caused by the resentment of the surviving Brookes. But the change itself from Brooke to Broome could be a further insult to the Brookes: Ernst Honigmann²³ has shown that in 1595 the wife of a Mr. Broome was, with her husband's consent, under the “protection” of William Brooke. Honigmann comments: “having been ordered to remove the name Brooke from Merry Wives, Shakespeare or his colleagues added insult to injury by dragging in the Broomes. This would have been a clever counterthrust; the Cobham-Mr Broome-Mrs Broome triangle is repeated in the play, with Cobham (i.e. Oldcastle, i.e. Falstaff) offering to cuckold ‘Mr Broome.’”

It is now time to leave the Falstaff of The Merry Wives—a pale reflection of the one appearing in the two Parts of Henry IV—and to go back to the other Falstaff, modeled in the 1597 entertainment not on the Sir John Oldcastle who had been Prince Hal's companion in The Famous Victories of Henry V, but on the cowardly Garter knight who had deserted Talbot at Patay in 1 Henry VI. The lost entertainment can only be reconstructed in its general outlines from hints offered by the later comedy. The first valuable clue is represented by the presence in a secondary role of a new character, the Host of the Garter, and by the choice of the Garter Inn as Falstaff's permanent lodging in Windsor. The satirical intention is obvious. The poor knights of Windsor were a well-known institution: they were commoners who had acquired their title through services rendered as soldiers, but, having no hereditary property, were kept as Crown Pensioners. Falstaff is one of them—not a nobleman but a retired captain. His lodging at the Garter Inn is a sign of both his frustrated ambition of ranking with the top nobility of the Kingdom (the twenty-six Knights of the Order of the Garter), and his gift for equivocation: being a knight and living at the Garter Inn he could be referred to as “the knight of the Garter.”

THE GARTER ENTERTAINMENT OF 1597—A RECONSTRUCTION

From the evidence of the versified parts of the comedy, which were the most likely to have been borrowed and adapted from the earlier Garter Entertainment of 1597, it appears that the latter required a much smaller cast, apart from the fairies in the masque. Granting that the Garter entertainment was built round three main interwoven strands, here are the basic requirements of each of them:

1. Love plot. A young gentleman (= Fenton); a young girl (= Anne Page); the parents of the girl, either one or both of whom wanted her to marry a person of their own choice; the person or persons chosen for her by her parent(s). It is difficult to determine if each of the parents favored a different pretender for the girl (as in Merry Wives) or if only one did so. At all events, the love plot did not need more than six actors.

2. The unworthy knight plot. Only two actors were essential: the knight himself, a poor pensioner of Windsor who aspired to a higher rank and saw himself as an irresistible lady-killer; the Host of the Garter Inn, where the knight lodged. The knight wanted to restore his fortunes by seducing the girl's mother and/or other wives of well-to-do Windsor commoners.

3. The “German Duke” plot, intended as a satire on the behavior of the Duke of Württemberg, formerly Count Mömpelgard (see Wiv., 4.3 and 4.5). In fact, there was hardly any need to present on the stage the three other lodgers in the Garter Inn who, under pretense of attending on a German Duke, cheated the Host of his horses; the episode could as well be reported by the Host's servant or tavern drawer. This would explain why, when some years later Shakespeare wrote his comedy, dragging into it Falstaff's companions, Bardolph is very soon transferred from the knight's service to that of the Host of the Garter (1.3.4-19; Folio, sig. D3):

Fal. Truely mine Host; I must turne away some of my followers. …

Ho[st]. Discard, (bully Hercules) casheere; let them wag; trot, trot. … I will entertaine Bardolfe: he shall draw; he shall tap; said I well (bully Hector?)

Fal. Bardolfe, follow him: a Tapster is a good trade: an old Cloake, makes a new Ierkin: a wither'd Seruingman, a fresh Tapster: goe, adew.

Ba[rdolph]. It is a life that I haue desir'd: I will thriue.²⁴

Bardolph had to replace the presumably anonymous drawer bringing the news of the confidence trick played on the Host.

The entertainment may well have begun by introducing the overbearing knight in conversation with the Host of the Garter Inn, laying his plans for the seduction of rich Windsor wives. Mention might have been made on this occasion of his fellow lodgers, the “three Gentlemen” (Quarto version), or “Germans” (Folio) waiting for the arrival of a Duke, along the lines of the short exchange between the Host and Bardolph at 4.3 (Folio, sig.E4):

Bar. Sir, the Germane desires [Germans desire] to haue three of your horses:²⁵ The Duke himselfe will be to morrow at Court, and they are going to meet him.

Host. What Duke should that be comes so secretly? I heare not of him in the Court: let me speake with the Gentlemen, they speake English?

Bar. I sir? Ile call him to you.²⁶

Host. They shall haue my horses, but Ile make them pay: Ile sauce them, they haue had my houses²⁷ a week at commaund: I haue turn'd away my other guests, they must come off, Ile sawce them, come.

Exeunt

Such a short scene, sandwiched between two much longer ones, the second of which (4.4) begins with exactly the same characters on the stage who were present at the end of the earlier one (4.2), looks like an intrusion inherited and adapted from a version in which the dialogue was part of a different longer scene.

The rest of the Garter entertainment must have interwoven this slender satirical (and topical) strand with the story of the unworthy lodger in the inn attempting to seduce the mother of the heroine of what can be considered the main plot line: the love story of a young girl whose father has different plans for her marriage. The versified parts of 3.4, reproducing the original love scene between Anne and Fenton, suggest that Mistress Page is not so averse to let her daughter have her way: it is Master Page who has other plans for her. Again, the verse sections of 4.4 and 4.6 indicate the further development of this plot: on the one hand, the father plans the punishment of the knight who has designs on his wife (though in the later comedy there is a duplication of the situation, through the introduction of the “Italianate” story of the deception of the jealous husband); on the other hand, the young lover enrolls the help of the Host of the Garter to deceive the father of the heroine. Adding to this the deception of the Host himself by the followers of the “German Duke,” we have the simple comedy of errors that constitutes the antimasque of the Garter entertainment. It should be noted that it dispenses with the Ford/Brooke play of disguises, the hiding of Falstaff and the other episodes that Shakespeare devised later, when he engaged in the writing of a full-fledged comedy, having recourse to new Italian sources and to some of the characters that had become popular by appearing in the Histories he had written in the meantime.

The Garter masque proper, led by the Fairy Queen, with the celebration of the Order, the punishment of the unworthy knight and the triumph of true love against enforced marriage, was the conclusion of the courtly entertainment offered to the Queen and to the old and new Knights of the Order on Saint George's day 23 April 1597.

POSTSCRIPT: THE DUAL CHRONOLOGY OF THE FALSTAFF PLAYS

An imperfect consensus. In spite of the assurance by Jeanne Addison Roberts²⁸ that “we are approaching a consensus on the date” of composition of Merry Wives, i.e., 1596-97, even the supporters of a close connection between the comedy as it stands now and the Garter celebrations of 1597, though dismissing as irrelevant the fact that the play was not mentioned by Francis Meres in his Palladis Tamia (1598), find it difficult to place it within the sequence of the other Falstaff plays. They are forced to push back to 1596, against all known evidence, the date of completion and stage presentation of both Parts of Henry IV. An ingenious compromise is suggested by the editors of the Oxford Complete Works.²⁹ Though accepting Roberts's surmise³⁰ that to write the new Garter comedy, “Shakespeare interrupted his work on 2 Henry IV at 4.3” when he “had already invented Shallow and Pistol,” they doubt that by April 1597 he could have reached this point in the writing of the history, so they advance the opinion that

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 1598). … Merry Wives could … have recollected, rather than anticipated, the Garter ceremonies of spring 1597; the play would still have been written with a court performance in mind, 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. Shakespeare's composition of 2 Henry IV would have been interrupted by the request for Merry Wives, and 2 Henry IV as a consequence would not have been completed until spring or early summer of 1598.³¹

The forest of conditionals and subjunctives is a clear indication of strain in devising a solution that, on the one hand, connects the play with a court occasion, and on the other, suggests acceptable dates for the two Parts of Henry IV. But why recall a Garter celebration and announce an installation ceremony some ten months after the event? And why borrow from the as yet incomplete and unperformed 2 Henry IV the characters of Shallow and Pistol, which the audience would not recognize because they had never appeared before on the stage? Why devise for the occasion of a court play to be performed on 26 February 1598 the new character of Corporal Nym, so obviously intended to satirize the theatrical fashion set by Jonson's comedy of humors—he uses the word humor twenty times in eleven of the twelve speeches allotted him—when the earliest possible date of performance of Every Man in His Humour is July of that year? Roberts³² argues that “Shakespeare invented Nym specifically to fill a plot need in The Merry Wives,” namely, “to balance Pistol”; but that is true of Henry V rather than Merry Wives.

The Humor of It. In his turn, William Green³³ notices that Nym's well-known tag line or “verbal tic,” “that's the humor of it,” appearing six times in the Folio text of Henry V (and eight in the bad quarto), is instead constantly varied in Merry Wives, but in the 1602 bad Quarto of the comedy turns up five times in the form “and there's the humor of it.” This is explained by the fact that the reporter of the bad Quarto text of Merry Wives replaced the imperfectly remembered varied mentions of humors with a constant formula modeled with a slight variant on the one consistently used in the history play. But it is no proof that the comedy had been written two years before the history; it is more likely that Shakespeare, writing Merry Wives shortly after Henry V, would deliberately play variations on the tag line already familiar to the audience from Nym's previous appearance in the history play. Corporal Nym, Bardolph, Pistol, and even Mistress Quickly, are no longer full-blown human characters; they are, one and all, in contrast with their appearances in the histories, presented merely as “humours,” counting exclusively on their linguistic peculiarities. In fact, Merry Wives is Shakespeare's ironical tribute paid to the new theatrical genre of the comedy of humors, and the title page of the 1602 bad Quarto is fully justified in describing it as “Entermixed with sundrie variable and pleasing humours.” Shakespeare could neither adopt nor satirize the genre before 1599, when, thanks to Jonson's comedies, it triumphed on the London stage.

Recurring Characters. Green supports his theory on the sequence of composition of the plays (1 Henry IV, late 1596; 2 Henry IV, January-April 1597, completed if not performed; Merry Wives, April 1597; Henry V, Summer 1599), by producing a “Chart of Military Titles in the Falstaff Plays,” including the characters of Falstaff, Bardolph, Peto, Gadshill, Pistol, Nym.³⁴ Such a chart, which has to acknowledge the disappearance of any military title in the comedy, except in the case of Nym, is further evidence of the wrongness of the sequence suggested. The omission of indications of rank means simply that they were presented no longer as functionally linked to the action of the play, but as stage figures already well known to the audience from their previous appearances, whereas Nym retained his title because he was a recent addition to the group of “irregular humourists,” not yet as familiar as the others. Let us now complete the chart with the designations of the other characters without military rank who figure in more than one Falstaff play, leaving out Gadshill (not a military but merely a “setter,” the robbers' decoy, appearing in only one play) and including instead Mistress Quickly, Poins, Doll, Falstaff's page, and Shallow, and place them in what I consider the correct sequence.

Designations of Recurring Characters in the Falstaff Plays

                                                                                                                                                                                                        1H4                                                                                                                                                                                                        2H4                                                                                                                                                                                                        H5                                                                                                                                            Wiv
FALSTAFF                                                                                                                        knight                                                                                                                                                                          knight                                                                                                                                                                          (mentioned)                                                  knight
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    captain
QUICKLY                                                                                                                                  hostess                                                                                                                                                                hostess                                                                                                                                                                hostess                                                                                          housekeeper
                                                                                                                                                                                                        married                                                                                                                                                                widow                                                                                                                                                                                    remarried                                                                      spinster
BARDOLPH                                                                                                                        no mention of rank                                                  corporal                                                                                                                                                      corporal                                                                                no mention of rank
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                lieutenant
POINS                                                                                                                                                      gentleman                                                                                                                                            gentleman                                                                                                                                            (absent)                                                                                (mentioned)
PETO                                                                                                                                                                lieutenant                                                                                                                                  no mention of
rank                                                  (absent)                                                                                (absent)
PISTOL                                                                                                                                            (absent)                                                                                                                                                      ancient                                                                                                                                                                ancient                                                                                          no mention of rank
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    lieutenant                                                                                                                                  lieutenant
SHALLOW                                                                                                                                  (absent)                                                                                                                                                      justice                                                                                                                                                                (absent)                                                                                justice
DOLL                                                                                                                                                                (absent)                                                                                                                                                      ?gentlewoman                                                                                                              (mentioned)                                                  (absent)
FALST'S PAGE                                                  (absent)                                                                                                                                                      boy,
page                                                                                                                                            boy                                                                                                                                  Robin, boy page
NYM                                                                                                                                                                          (absent)                                                                                                                                                      (absent)                                                                                                                                                      corporal                                                                                corporal

Quickly Metamorphosed. The transformation of Mistress Quickly is the most striking. If we accept any of the theories maintaining that the whole play of Merry Wives was completed by 23 April 1597 (or, according to the Oxford editors, by 26 February 1598) we must accept as well that:

1. Shakespeare created, in the first place, the conventional type of the Hostess, a “most sweet wench” and “an honest man's wife,” who has not much to say for herself in 1 Henry IV (1596-97).

2. When writing the unplanned sequence to that play in 1597-98, he transmuted her into a superannuated widow, a bawd whose delusions of respectability are reflected in her magnificent use of linguistic equivocation.

3. At the same time, in Merry Wives, she figures as the spinsterish housekeeper of a French doctor in Windsor, using the same language for her side-trade of go-between.

4. Finally in Henry V, once again as a hostess, as well as Pistol's wife, “her genius for unintended and unperceived obscenity,” in Gary Taylor's words,³⁵ “helps make her report of Falstaff's death perhaps the most moving … messenger speech in the canon.”

But if Merry Wives postdates Henry V the transition from full-blown character to mere stage type or humor, in her case as in that of the other characters borrowed from the histories, is justified.

The Two Chronologies. The attempts at dating the comedy have confused two distinct sorts of chronology: on the one hand, the actual chronology of composition of the Falstaff plays, and on the other, the fictional chronology of the events represented in those plays.… Shakespeare had decided not to keep the promise of showing Falstaff in the French campaign, as the Epilogue of 2 Henry IV had stated. Mindful of the ten-mile banishment from Westminster of Falstaff and his crew at the end of that play, Shakespeare was careful, in Henry V, not to specify the location of the inn where Mistress Quickly, now married to ancient Pistol, is plying her trade as a hostess, from whence Falstaff is gathered “to Arthur's bosom,” and his followers are summoned to join the French expedition. The mention of Staines at 2.3.2 suggests a place up the Thames to the west of London, at the opposite end from Eastcheap, down the river in the heart of the City. To fit into the play a character meant to mock the growing fashion for “humours” on the stage, Shakespeare created Corporal Nym as the unsuccessful rival of Pistol for the hand of the hostess. Later, though, Nym becomes associated with Bardolph rather than Pistol, because “Nim and Bardolph are sworn Brothers in filching” (3.2.44), which leads to their death, in contrast with Pistol who, as the Boy comments (4.4.69-74), is not a thief simply for lack of courage:

The empty vessel makes the greatest sound, Bardolfe and Nym had tenne times more valour, then this roaring diuell i'th olde play … and they are both hang'd, and so would this be, if hee durst steale any thing aduenturously.

The Boy himself was soon to come to a sad end, cruelly massacred by the French.

Reviving Falstaff. It was Falstaff's absence from Henry V that caused the demand—by public theater audiences rather than by the Queen—for a comedy where he would appear again, to dispel the gloomy impression left not only by the announcement of his death, but also by the fate of his followers, including Corporal Nym, a posthumous addition to them. In improvising, at short notice, the new play, Shakespeare was faced with the same sort of problem that confronted many authors of serials and sequels for the press, the stage, or the large or small screen in the following centuries. To justify the revival of his hero, he could not present, as did Conan Doyle at the end of last century, the death of Falstaff, like that of Sherlock Holmes, as mere pretense, nor could he pretend, as did, in more recent times, the harassed scriptwriters of Dallas, that Henry the Fifth's famous victories in France, like the death of Bobby Ewing, had never taken place, being merely a hallucination. History left Shakespeare no other choice except that of presenting the comedy, hastily put together from Italianate sources and the recollection of the 1597 royal entertainment where a different Sir John Falstaff had appeared, as a marginal episode in the life of the fat knight, at the time of his banishment from London. The clue was given by Henry's rejection speech (2 Henry IV, 5.5.66-70; 1600 Quarto, sig. K4v):

For competence of life, I will allow you,
That lacke of meanes enforce you not to euills,
And as we heare you do reforme your selues,
We will according to your strengths and qualities,
Giue you aduauncement.

What other “competence of life” could be offered a discredited and impecunious knight except a pension and a place among the poor knights of Windsor? His companions (the king is addressing Bardolph, Pistol, and the page, as well as Falstaff) would of course follow him there. To them Shakespeare added his latest creation, Corporal Nym (also to keep up the joke about humors); not Poins: already in 2 Henry IV he is Prince Hal's rather than Falstaff's companion, he is not present at the rejection and does not figure at all in Henry V. In Merry Wives we are slyly reminded of his different role and status in the passing mention (3.2.73) of the fact that the young gentleman Fenton (not the commoners Pistol and Bardolph) “kept companie with the wilde Prince and Pointz.”

Reviving Mistress Quickly. The revival of Mistress Quickly presented a different problem. She had been a hostess in Eastcheap, and in Henry V we had seen her in the same capacity, remarried to Pistol, in an unspecified locality necessarily outside London. It could not be Windsor, because the inn there was emblematically called the Garter Inn, and the personality of its Host had already been firmly established in the Garter entertainment of 1597. Shakespeare had no choice but to imagine that, in the interval between the rejection of Falstaff and the preparations for the French campaign, Mistress Quickly had temporarily changed her trade in order to figure plausibly in Windsor. Hence her role as housekeeper and general busybody, a merry former and future wife. Astutely, Shakespeare drops a hint about her future when Pistol, following her off-stage, exclaims (2.2.137-39):

This Puncke is one of Cupids
Carriers,
Clap on more sailes, pursue: vp with your fights:
Giue fire: she is my prize, or Ocean whelme them all.

The hint is hardly developed in the rest of the play, though Pistol as Hobgoblin partners Quickly as Queen of Fairies in the Folio version of the Windsor forest revels.

In the chronology of “history” Shakespeare has endeavored to insert The Merry Wives of Windsor between the action of the Second Part of Henry IV and that of Henry V. But he could not have done so if, in the chronology of composition, he had actually written the comedy before the last of his “histories” of the Lancastrian cycle.

Notes

1. William Green, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962). Roberts, English Comedy, already mentioned, is a more recent study along the same lines.

2. This appears from Armin's own play, The Two Maids of More-Clacke, see A.S. Liddie's introduction to his critical edition of the play (New York: Garland, 1979). Armin reserved for himself in it the part of a comic Welshman as well as that of the clown. The language of Owen Glendower in 1 Henry IV, written before Armin's advent, counts for comic effect on its grandiloquence, but it shows no trace of the equivocations caused by the Welsh accent, which characterize instead Fluellen and Sir Hugh Evans.

3. The curious intervention of Bardolph in the extremely brief scene 4.3, and the inconsequential scene (4.5.60-86) when the Host of the Garter is informed that three Germans have stolen his horses under pretense of needing them to meet a duke, has been taken to allude to a German nobleman who, when visiting England in 1592 as Frederick Count Mömpelgard, had maneuvred to be elected to the Order of the Garter, but when, having become Duke of Württemberg, the honor was conferred upon him in 1597, did not attend the installation ceremony. William Green (121-76) devotes a whole chapter to “The Duke of Jarmany.”

4. G. Hibbard, ed. The Merry Wives of Windsor (New Penguin Shakespeare, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), introduction 49-50.

5. A reference to Dennis's statement that the comedy was written in a fortnight at the Queen's command, quoted in “The Garter Comedy” section of chapter 4 in Shakespeare’s Garter Plays: Edward III to Merry Wives of Windsor, University of Delaware Press, 1994.

6. On the Elizabethan cult of chastity see Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power (London: Routledge, 1989).

7. Anne Barton, introducing The Merry Wives of Windsor in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 286, remarks that “a comedy concerned, as this one is, with the punishment of a knight whose principles and behaviour contravene all the ideals of his rank would be appropriate, almost as a kind of antimasque, at a Garter feast.”

8. The two lines of the couplet (80 and 83) were spoken alternately by Satyr and Hobgoblin (Folio, p.51, sig. E6):

   [Evan.] But stay, I smell a man of middle earth.

   Pist. Vilde worme, thou wast ore-look'd euen in thy birth.

9. Quotations of 1 Henry VI, … are from the First Folio of 1623, Histories, 110, sig. 13v.

10. See chapter 3, note 24 in Shakespeare’s Garter Plays: Edward III to Merry Wives of Windsor, University of Delaware Press, 1994. Taylor (“Fortunes”) believes that the epistle was written in 1634 rather than about 1625, the date commonly accepted.

11. Quoted by Taylor, “Fortunes,” 86.

12. The First Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 64.

13. George Walton Williams, “Fastolf or Falstaff,” ELR, 5 (1975), 308-12; Robert F. Willson, Jr, “Falstaff in Henry IV: What's in a Name?” SQ 27 (1976), 199-200; Norman Davis, “Falstaff's Name,” SQ 28 (1977), 513-15; G. W. Williams, “Second Thoughts on Falstaff's Name,” SQ 30 (1979), 82-84.

14. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 2.27, and 2.371-75 (“Spelling and Significance of the Name”).

15. T. Walter Herbert, “The Naming of Falstaff,” Emory University Quarterly, 10 (March 1954), 1-11; Harry Levin, “Shakespeare's Nomenclature.” Essays on Shakespeare, ed. G. W. Chapman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 87.

16. Roberts, English Comedy, 48.

17. Chambers, Shakespeare, 2.18-32.

18. See chapter 1, “The Corridors of History: Shakespeare the Remaker.” and chapter 2, “Reconstructing the Ur-Henry IV,” in Shakespeare’s Garter Plays: Edward III to Merry Wives of Windsor, University of Delaware Press, 1994.

19. A likely jocular reference to the new genre of the comedy of humors, established by Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour, a play presented on the stage between July and September 1598, with Shakespeare as one in the cast.…

20. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. J.H. Oliver (New Arden Shakespeare, London: Methuen, 1971).

21. The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. T.W. Craik (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

22. Roberts, English Comedy, 38-40.

23. E.J.A. Honigmann, “Sir John Oldcastle: Shakespeare's Martyr,” in J.W. Mahon and T.A. Pendleton, eds., “Fanned and Winnowed Opinions” Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1987), 118-32.

24. The exchange is practically identical in the earlier version of the play, the 1602 Quarto (sig. B1v), except for Bardolph's last speech that reads: “I will sir, Ile warrant you Ile make a good shift to liue.”

25. In 1602 Quarto, sig.F3: “Syr heere be three Gentlemen come from the Duke the St[r]anger sir, would haue your horse.”

26. 1602 Quarto: “Ile call them to you sir.”

27. 1602 Quarto: “House.”

28. Roberts, English Comedy, 41-50.

29. 1986, text of the play edited by John Jowett, checked by Gary Taylor.

30. Roberts, English Comedy, 45.

31. Textual Companion, 1987, 120.

32. Roberts, English Comedy, 46.

33. Green, Merry Wives, 88-92.

34. Green, Merry Wives, 190-92.

35. Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 63-64.