SOURCE: “The Town of Windsor,” in Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 1-16.

[In the following essay, White asserts that The Merry Wives of Windsor provides a realistic portrayal of sixteenth-century life due to its contemporary English setting.]

It is dangerous, and perhaps impossible, to claim that any work of literature or art is ‘realistic’. All that art can give us is a model of a possible world, and we as spectators locate ourselves either close to or distant from that world. The work of Ernst Gombrich and John Berger in the field of pictorial art, and the developing ideas of semioticians, prove that art works through conventions and codes which we as viewers and readers feel either comfortable with or uneasy in decoding. Moreover, as ‘metatheatrical’ critics (J.L. Calderwood is the main exponent) have insistently shown, Shakespeare in particular rarely allows us to forget that we are watching (or reading) a stage play rather than observing what pretends to be unmediated ‘reality’. Such theatrical consciousness is at work in this play. On several occasions characters use theatrical terms when speaking of their own activities:

Mistress Ford. Mistress Page,
remember you your cue.
Mistress Page. I warrant thee; if
I do not act it, hiss me.

(iii. iii. 34-5)

Falstaff. … after
we had embraced, kissed, protested, and, as it were, spoken the prologue of
our comedy …

(iii. v. 68-9)

The scene in the Forest at the end is presented as a masque by characters who are very conscious of the fictive roles they play. The effects of such ‘metatheatrical’ aspects of presentation can be very problematical (as in Hamlet) and it may even be an open question as to whether the effect is to distance us from the action or, paradoxically, to make us feel it is more naturalistic. Comments such as Mistress Page's can simultaneously make us aware that we are in a theatre watching actors and contribute to the overall sense that the play itself has its distinctive, internally consistent ‘possible world’ with its own norms of what is real and what is not.

In terms of the ‘possible worlds’ given to us by Shakespeare in his plays, some are either more or less remote from what we recognise as a specific ‘locality’ with its own ethos within which we can assume a proximity to a ‘realistic’ setting. His comedies generally give us never-never lands like the dreamy Illyria, the literary Forest of Arden (or Ardennes, as the New Oxford Shakespeare insists), the romantic Belmont or the commercially-minded and vindictive Venice, the madcap forest outside Athens. Such settings take us away from any recognisable day-by-day existence. There is a stratum of such ‘romantic’ conventions in The Merry Wives found in the wooing of Anne Page, the comic disguises of Falstaff as the fat lady of Brainford, of Mistress Quickly as the Fairy Queen, of Slender and Doctor Caius, Anne and Fenton, and indeed all characters except Falstaff in the last scene. In this scene we even have a forest which has its transformative magic, able to bring couples together (and back together, like the Fords).

However, compared with full-blooded romantic comedy, Windsor in our play seems solidly rooted in its specified town planning, its diurnal activities, its local customs. It is, after all, English (the only comedy Shakespeare set in England), and it is a geographically precise location whose central landmark, the pub called the Garter Inn, still exists. The play is also the one and only example by Shakespeare of Citizen Comedy, a genre which was popular in the early seventeenth century, showing the middle class involved to a large extent in believable commercial transactions as well as love, rather than the aristocratic, fantasy milieu of romantic comedy. There may even be a little joke by Shakespeare in all this, since by mentioning Windsor he may have raised audience expectations about seeing the private life of the court, since the town is where the Royal Palace was (and still is), only to disappoint them by scrupulously not showing court life. This is not, however, to say that what Shakespeare does with the town of Windsor is necessarily ‘realistic’, and still less is it to say that the characters are ‘real’, for a more eccentric lot could hardly be imagined. The play is certainly not in the mould of ‘social realism’ as the term is understood today, and the plot is too elaborately crafted in multi-layered fashion to be a ‘slice of life’.

No matter how we need to qualify the statement, it is possible to talk about the Windsor of the play as a small, self-sufficient society which is ‘characterised’ by local references. Early on we get chatter about town life which is inconsequential to the plot but is important in building up a social setting. Mr Page thanks Justice Shallow for a gift of venison, Shallow regrets it is not of the top quality (it was badly killed, perhaps by Falstaff), and he enquires after Mistress Page's health. Slender indulges in gentle banter about Shallow's greyhound which is rumoured to have lost a race at a meeting in the Cotswolds. And then the dialogue returns to the matter in hand, the troubles caused by Falstaff. There are neighbourly meals, one to be held before a sea-coal fire (sea-coal was gathered at Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland and shipped down to the south, thus acquiring something of a status symbol for its price and superior quality). One meal concludes with pippin apples and cheese. When dogs bark, Slender surmises that there are bears in town and he recalls seeing the famous London bear Sackerson ‘loose twenty times’ (i. i. 274). This detail partly fixes Slender as one who enjoys male, violent pursuits (he has bruised his shin at fencing with a sword and dagger, revels in bear-baiting, and will later collude in a duel), and it also helps to characterise the township's men in general.

Geographical references are often particularised. John and Robert, Ford's servants, must take the laundry-basket ‘among the whitsters in Datchet Mead, and there empty it in the muddy ditch close by the Thames side’ (iii. iii. 14-15). The fat woman impersonated by Falstaff is from Brainford (now Brentwood in Essex), and she is well known in Windsor. While the plot moves between the Garter Inn, Mistress Ford's house, the fields and Herne's oak in the Park, there is awareness of the close proximity of Windsor Castle and of the ‘big city’ of London from where some of the characters have come. The events in the forest may be just as fictive as those in the Forest of Arden or the Forest outside Athens, but the name itself would have had a real reference point for a contemporary audience as a semi-provincial, largely agricultural but regally significant town. All these details may simply be the consequence of the play having been commissioned and adapted to be played in Windsor, but since the play does not have to be played there (and usually is not), we can make the point that topical detail builds up a little world with its own rough town-plan, sports, occupations, friendships and rivalries, a rooted locality in which characters ‘live’, some permanently and some temporarily.

Much the same can be said, incidentally, of the settings of most of Shakespeare's comedies, even the most fantastical, for they are all essentially about people interacting in social groups. For example, through the accumulation of apparent and conspicuous irrelevancies of detail, Illyria, in Twelfth Night, is given a strong presence as a social setting which contains and is distinct from its citizens. The same could be said of Messina in Much Ado About Nothing, or the contrasted cities of Belmont and Venice in The Merchant of Venice. This is not just to make a point about atmosphere or background. The ‘characterisation’ of the town of Windsor extends to an underlying value-system, a set of tacit assumptions about the way life is, and should be, led. These attitudes may be espoused and practised by its citizens, but there is a feeling that they have been inherited from generations of Windsor-dwellers. They have the status of customary, unquestioned, and settled routines and beliefs. It is the solidity of these values which are tested and threatened by those who enter from the outside, in the clash which motivates the plot.

CIVILITY AND INCIVILITY

A brief exchange between Slender and Parson Evans reveals something of the underlying attitudes that bind Windsor society together. Slender regrets having become drunk in the company of Falstaff's men, since he has had his pocket picked as a consequence:

Slender. … I'll
ne'er be drunk whilst I live again, but in honest, civil, godly company,
for this trick. If I be drunk, I'll be drunk with those that have the
fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.
Evans. So Got 'udge me, that
is a virtuous mind.

(i. i. 166-71)

Drunkenness is no vice in itself, but takes its colour from the company, as the local vicar confirms. In ‘honest, civil, godly company’ drunkenness may be the activity of a ‘virtuous mind’. Honesty is almost next to godliness, separated only by ‘civility’. The three qualities make one a good citizen, and it is this word that best sums up the ethos of Windsor. Mistress Quickly pays the highest compliment to Mistress Page:

… and, let me tell you in your ear, she's as fartuous a civil modest wife, and one, I tell you, that will not miss your morning nor evening prayer, as any is in Windsor, who'er be the other.

(ii. ii. 93-6)

Windsorites do not seem to have an exact definition of civility, and they apply the concept mainly to keeping good company and attending church regularly. Basically, it is the kind of conduct that keeps the cogs of this society turning harmoniously. Making money may certainly be done ‘in the way of honesty’ as Mistress Quickly says (ii. ii. 70-1), so long as any potential dishonesty is not visible. She herself is receiving money from two suitors to Anne Page, and she claims to be working for both of them, but she does it with ‘discretion’ (another Windsor word, used by Evans five times). Similarly, the Host of the Garter Inn makes money out of his tenants, and although he shows signs of deviousness and even roguish hypocrisy, he is trusted by all as honest and civil. The families that make up Windsor life (Pages, Fords and Shallows in particular) all show signs of being moderately prosperous, landowning and involved in trade or agriculture. Having money is, if anything, a sign of solid virtue. To historicise this aspect of the play, we could interpret the linkage between money-making, relative honesty, churchgoing and civility with the rise at the end of the sixteenth century of protestantism which eventually led to the clash between court and upper bourgeoisie that lay behind the English Revolution in the 1640s. Of course, such tensions are comically contained in this play, but they are latent as part of its ‘world’.

Incivility is that which disrupts town life and significantly it is equated with ungodliness. ‘There is no fear of Got in a riot’ (i. i. 34) warns Parson Evans, commenting upon the nuisances committed by Falstaff and his men in their open ‘coney-catching’ (theft by deception), beating Shallow's men, killing his deer, and breaking open his lodge. Falstaff's men, in one sense or another, are identified with the London court and the aristocracy (as is Fenton) but ironically the real sin is their impecunity, their inability to pay their way. Non-payment of the rent at the Inn is as bad as the more open crimes. Whether Falstaff is down from London for a holiday or for the express purpose of making money, he is forced into deception by the very necessities of having to pay not only his own way but also those of his men, Pistol, Bardolph and Nym and his page Robin. First he lays off Bardolph from his retinue by allowing him to work for the Host as a tapster (barman). Then he gets rid of Nym and Pistol in order to save money and to disassociate himself from their manifest crimes, thus entering into a state of ‘French thrift’ (i. iii. 79) by retaining only his ‘skirted page’, the boy Robin. His plans backfire since they give his former cronies the motive for betrayal and revenge.

It is ‘thrift’ (i. iii. 39), the need to pay one's way and to avoid at all costs ‘waste’ (ibid.) in money-conscious Windsor, that next prompts Falstaff to woo the wives, in a desperate attempt to gain access to their husbands' wealth. Mistress Page is, in his eyes, ‘a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty’ (i. iii. 64). He calls both ‘exchequers’ to him (ibid.) and sends his letters off to ‘golden shores’ (i. iii. 75). The imagery gives away his acquisitive motive. We shall see more evidence of commercial motivation in other characters, but the general point is that every single male character is driven by the need to make or maintain wealth. It is the central fact of (male) Windsor life, and the one that can either cause greatest havoc in society and in marriage, or conversely can keep everything in orderly, civil harmony.

Another quality which arouses the suspicions of people living in Windsor is, again in Parson Evans' word, ‘affectations’ (i. i. 140). He uses the word in reproof of Pistol's language, which is indeed grandiose, mannered (‘He hears with ears’ (i. i. 138)) and hyperbolical. Page, aroused to contempt by Falstaff's letter to his wife, says that he is ‘a fellow frights English out of his wits’, ‘a drawling, affecting rogue’ (ii. i. 129-32, my italics). Suspicion of ‘affectation’ hangs over everybody who is in some way different or new: Fenton's courtly suavity (he speaks in iambic pentameters while Windsorites for the most part speak sober prose), Doctor Caius' Gallic English, as well as Falstaff's raffish and ostentatious crew are examples. Again, there is some irony in this, since some Windsorites speak in very individual ways and there are few examples of ‘the King's English’. Parson Evans unconsciously draws humour from the audience, and from Falstaff who openly ridicules him, for his Welsh accent. Mistress Quickly commits malapropisms and amusing mishearings, the Host speaks with a bluff heartiness that does not carry the ring of sincerity, Shallow is easily sidetracked into irrelevancies and the speech of Simple and Slender is defined by their names. They are, in short, all to some extent at least linguistically eccentric and each could be described as ‘affected’. The difference lies between acceptance and non-acceptance into Windsor. The ethos is fundamentally one that runs on conservativeness and conformity, where the familiar and habitual are considered safe, while the new is intrusively dangerous. So long as the basic rules of civility (godliness, paying one's way, modesty, discretion and thrift) are observed, then all other divergences from a norm of behaviour will be tolerated and even overlooked. Mistress Page, for example, is sympathetic to Caius as a potential ‘naturalised’ Windsorite because he has money. But if these rules are not obeyed, or if outsiders are suspected on these grounds (as is Fenton), then all deviation of conduct will be regarded as ‘affectation’ and, generally speaking, as foreign to Windsor.

CLASS

Windsor is conservative also in its insistence on a stable hierarchy based on status and rank. So much is revealed in the exchange that opens the play:

[Enter Justice Shallow, Slender, and Sir Hugh Evans]

Shallow. Sir Hugh, persuade
me not. I will make a Star-Chamber matter of it. If he were twenty Sir John
Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, Esquire.
Slender. In the county of Gloucester,
justice of peace and Coram.
Shallow. Ay, cousin Slender, and
Custalorum.
Slender. Ay, and Ratolorum too. And
a gentleman born, master parson, who writes himself Armigero—in any
bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, Armigero.
Shallow. Ay, that I do, and have
done any time these three hundred years.
Slender. All his successors gone
before him hath done't; and all his ancestors that come after him may.
They may give the dozen white luces in their coat.
Shallow. It is an old coat.

(i. i. 1-18)

What rankles with Shallow is that Falstaff is theoretically above him on the social scale, for Sir John is a knight while Shallow is an ‘Esquire’ and merely a provincial Justice of the Peace, however time-honoured the position. This inescapable fact is unaffected by the differences in wealth. Falstaff mercilessly uses his rank to defy the jurisdiction of Shallow's over him. The digression about Shallow's ‘old coat’ is fuelled by his impotent rage that although ‘a gentleman born’ and one that stands in a hereditary line, he can be upstaged and flouted by a penniless knight slumming from London.

Below Shallow in social standing are Ford and Page. They are landowners, moneyed citizens who are clearly accustomed to getting their own way in Windsor by working closely with Justice Shallow and dining with him frequently. They respect his authority as he respects their wealth and it is they (or more specifically Page) who set the standards of behaviour in the town. Page warns his daughter about the dangers of being wooed by Fenton because he is a courtly gentleman (although, like Falstaff, he needs money), nobly born and above her status. Page's class-suspiciousness is useful for the plot since he is motivated to act like the comic senex, the patriarchal figure who tries to prevent his daughter from marrying according to her desires. There may even be a parallel history to this situation, for if we may believe Mistress Quickly, Mistress Ford was unsuccessfully wooed by powdered gentlemen from court (ii. iii. 60ff.) in an earlier siege of Windsor, before choosing the other local, landed yeoman, Ford. Page's choice for Anne's husband (and more pertinently the future recipient of his own money and status) is Shallow's nephew, Abraham Slender. Such a marriage would satisfy the men in Windsor, for it joins wealth and status, and keeps everything ‘in the town’. Meanwhile, Mistress Page's choice is Doctor Caius, presumably because he is wealthy (he can pay his way at the Inn and can afford to pay Mistress Quickly and keep his man John Rugby), and also because a physician would have been respectably placed in status close to the parson-schoolmaster, Evans. Caius could also be expected to settle in Windsor, whereas Fenton would undoubtedly take Anne back to court. Both Mistress Page and her husband are able to overlook glaring personality defects in Doctor Caius and Slender respectively, because they place financial and class circumstances above the personal. In a sense Mrs Page is right in one thing at least. She wishes Anne to marry somebody who is in love with her and has no ulterior, fortune-hunting motive, and Caius seems to be sincere in his courtship. Equally, Anne is right in a deeper sense because, as well as not loving Caius, she also avoids the fate of Mistress Ford since the Doctor reveals himself to be as violently jealous as Ford.

Hugh Evans is deftly but unforgettably sketched as the local parson and schoolteacher. So convincing is he as a provincial schoolmaster that biographers scurry to the records to find a Welshman who may have taught Shakespeare in Stratford. His Welsh English is treated with contemptuous amusement by the aloofly metropolitan Falstaff, but he has clearly been fully accepted by Windsor for his professional contributions. Paradoxically for somebody who must once have been an ‘outsider’, Evans has established himself as a very central figure to the town's ethos, and it is he who expresses most overtly the high priority placed upon the god-fearing virtues and upon the sanctity of ‘thrift’.

Some other characters, while definitely lower on the social scale than these, are socially indeterminate. The Host of the Garter Inn and Mistress Quickly need to make money where they can, and the economic imperative leads them to disguise or suppress their own opinions. They are go-betweens, useful to the dramatist for their accessibility to all classes high and low, which makes them ideal ‘plotters’. While seeming trustworthy and even sycophantic to their social superiors, they prove themselves to the audience to be devious and hypocritical. The only judgments they make concern who can pay most. This mercenary quality may superficially appear to be a moral weakness, but before we condemn them we should acknowledge that their stations in life, respectively landlord of an ailing tavern with impecunious tenants and housekeeper to an erratic foreigner with a violent temper, are the least secure of any characters in the play. They must shift as they can to maintain a precarious living. Morals, in a town like Windsor, may be a luxury available only to those privileged with wealth. In a sense the modern equivalents of the Host and Mistress Quickly are the army of people in Britain today who depend on tourists, and who have an ambivalent attitude towards their employers, poised between obsequious flattery and disguised contempt.

Caius. Rugby, come to the
court with me.
[To Mistress Quickly] By gar, if I have not Anne Page, I shall turn
your head out of my door. Follow my heels, Rugby.

[Exeunt Caius and Rugby]

Mistress Quickly. You shall
have—An fool's-head of your own. No, I know Anne's mind for
that. Never a woman in Windsor knows more of Anne's mind than I do, nor
can do more than I do with her, I thank heaven.

(i. iv. 120-6)

Beneath even these characters on the social scale are a bevy of servants, more or less silent like John and Robert who are Ford's servants and carry out the linen-basket containing Falstaff, Jack Rugby who is Doctor Caius' servant, Robin, Falstaff's page and Peter Simple, Slender's servant. In the social hierarchy they are regarded more as embellishments to their respective masters than as characters in their own right. A condition of their service is that they keep quiet about their employers' foibles and vices. If we look at the dramatis personae with an eye to class, we discover that characterisation is not so much a function of individualism and inner identity (as is often assumed with Shakespearian characters), but of economic station. Certainly, this is how people in Windsor view and judge their neighbours.

INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS

The structure of The Merry Wives of Windsor is built upon the coherence of the society which we have just analysed. The values held by Windsorites are tacitly agreed upon and zealously defended. The society has a hierarchy, but there is definitely a sense in which all those who are accepted share the values of thrift, sobriety and social ranking. Justice Shallow and Mr Page between them stand for what they see as sensible qualities that bind them all together in a form of trust. Oddities, eccentrics and even simpletons can be accepted into the circle so long as they prove their tacit agreement with an ethical and economic system. They are the ‘insiders’.

‘Outsiders’ are regarded with mistrust. Fenton is eventually accepted into the society, as, in a more provisional way, is Doctor Caius. Falstaff is the most dangerous of all, because he threatens the stable structure of Windsor values. He is eventually purged in ritualistic fashion, as some sort of germ that must be ejected for the sake of the health of the society. And yet, as germs can be most threatening because their genetic make-up mirrors something in the organism they attack, so Falstaff (and in their different ways the more penitent and corrigible Fenton and Caius) simply clarifies, parodies and exaggerates tendencies already existent in Windsor. Ford is just as culpable as Falstaff in equating love with possession. His jealousy is simply the other side of Falstaff's desire to possess women in both sexual and commercial senses. It is Ford who pays Falstaff to test his wife's fidelity, saying ‘if money go before, all ways do lie open’ (ii, ii. 164), words that are echoed by Falstaff in his own military idiom with ‘Money is a good soldier, sir, and will on’ (ii. ii. 165). The Host of the Garter and Mistress Quickly are just as hypocritical and crafty as Falstaff in their readiness to take money for dubious causes. Anne Page and the ‘merry wives’ are just as devious in their plotting, though they can be seen as more effectively artful and also as more morally justifiable. Even Shallow, Page, Evans and Slender are as commercially-minded and acquisitive as Falstaff, although they, of course, would see their attitudes as prudent. The real danger of Falstaff is that he represents traits that already lie within the society of Windsor and must be kept under close control. His worst crime is to display in a kind of distorting mirror what all are like beneath the carefully maintained façade. This, more than his ‘outsider’ status, leads to his firm ejection from the society, and his final accommodation only at the cost of penitence and humiliation.

Christian values, modest but secure wealth, middling social status, prudent behaviour—these are the qualities which gain social acceptance and even respectability in Windsor. Difference of any kind is regarded as ‘affectation’ until the person is accepted by the community. The agreed values are defined as ‘civil’ and ‘civic’. Gambling is not acceptable, and in a real sense both Falstaff and Fenton are gambling for women and wealth. High status is suspect, for why, the logic runs, would courtiers be in Windsor except to make money out of the town? ‘Riotous’ behaviour is frowned on and any form of excess, even excess in pleasure, is considered disruptive. Falstaff is excessive in body as in behaviour and he arouses most vilification. In such a society change will be resisted, the status quo preserved against all threats. Outsiders of any ilk are considered a risk to the stability of tradition and to the secure, generational rhythms of provincial English town life.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The historically-minded reader will want to draw a different set of conclusions from this analysis of Windsor. Just as the town is seen as a backwater under siege from the London court and Europe, so also can it be seen, in Elizabethan terms, as a bulwark of ‘traditional’ values which were being threatened in the late sixteenth century by the increasing dominance of London, and even by the threat posed by Queen Elizabeth marrying a foreigner in a diplomatically arranged marriage. Windsor is a town representative of a nostalgic concept of the ‘organic community’ based largely on agriculture and ancient status claimed now by a local, family-based hierarchy. It had its glorious past, as Mistress Quickly says, ‘when the court lay at Windsor’ (ii. ii. 60-1), but its significance fell dramatically when the court was transferred to London and Windsor Palace had become something of a holiday-home for the monarchy rather than a political force. (As I have said, the play makes nothing of the Royal Palace except for this one, almost elegiac phrase.) It is a place which time has left behind but, in terms of the play, it is considered by the outside world as a catchment area for finance. Shallow, in his first appearance in 2 Henry IV, is seen as inveterately nostalgic for his lost youth, his wild times at the Inns of Court where he studied Law with Falstaff. ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Justice Shallow’ (2 Henry IV, iii. ii. 228) is Falstaff's weary contribution to the backward-looking mellowness of dimming memory. Even in The Merry Wives (where Falstaff has very clearly outstayed his welcome), Shallow itches to be young again to teach troublemakers a lesson with the sword. At the same time, Falstaff and Fenton are buccaneers, entrepreneurial risk-takers with their assets (Falstaff's rhetoric, Fenton's good looks and status) come to rob the town of its wealth. They are, at least in this respect, prototypes of the new capitalists, men in the sixteenth century forced by inflation into economic insecurity and destined to search for new worlds, to pirate foreign ships (Falstaff's imagery in this respect is telling), or marry into rural families in order to acquire a stronger economic basis. What is happening in Windsor provides a microcosm of what was happening in England in the 1590s in social and economic terms. The play gives a reflection of a tension between ‘old’, ‘civil’ and even feudal virtues and ‘new’, more dangerous but potentially profitable tendencies, the tension between an ‘investment’ and a ‘risk-taking’ mentality.

Shakespeare's insights into such social tensions are acute throughout his works, and in this he must have been helped by his own, socially mobile experience. He grew up in Stratford-upon-Avon, which cannot have been totally unlike Windsor as depicted in the play. He went to London to ‘make his fortune’ as an actor and playwright, and was so successful that he could play before the Queen in the acting company commissioned as The Queen's Men and, if legend is correct, he could even be commissioned to write a play at the request of Elizabeth. He was later to retire to Stratford to buy land and become one of the town's wealthiest men. If there is a ‘moral’ to the tale in the play, it may strike us as a provisional and perhaps suspect one. The older virtues of Windsor are glowingly presented at the end of the play as generous and forgiving ones, for both Fenton and even Falstaff are invited to the feast. If the older community on a cusp with threatening pressures may absorb the voguish—allow a little of the new into the settled verities of the old—it may survive unscathed and need not make major changes. The sardonic mind may see this as a moral which is deeply comforting to those who inherit the wealth of England, deeply unjust and pessimistic to those who do not have a place in the ordered hierarchy created by wealth. It was a complacency to be challenged in succeeding centuries but which might still have its legacy in England today.