SOURCE: Introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor, by William Shakespeare, edited by T.W. Craik, Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 13-25.

[In the following excerpt, Craik provides an overview of The Merry Wives of Windsor, focusing in particular on the plot structure and comparing it to several other works of the Renaissance.]

SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLISH COMEDY: THE SUBSTANCE AND THE DRAMATIC STRUCTURE OF THE PLAY

The Merry Wives of Windsor is unique among Shakespeare's comedies in being set in England, rather than in Ephesus, Athens, France, Italy, Illyria, or ancient Britain. This English setting—a very local one, with its allusions to Windsor, Eton, Frogmore, and Datchet—goes to confirm the play's connection both with the Garter Feast and with the English history plays. Its social world is that of the Gloucestershire scenes of 2 Henry IV, where there are no kings or dukes, and none of the characters is above the rank of a knight. The incidents in which its central character, Falstaff, is discomfited recall the spirit of the Gadshill robbery episode in 1 Henry IV. Everything points to Shakespeare's having intended to write a comedy of which the material should be his English histories with the history left out. Falstaff, already a more important figure in the histories than his subsidiary role required him to be, was now to have a whole play to himself.

For this new Falstaff play Shakespeare needed a plot, a plot involving a succession of comic discomfitures from which Falstaff would emerge defeated but irrepressible, as he had done from the Gadshill robbery. On the face of it, it is not likely that any ready-made plot would serve his purpose, and so it is not surprising that no source for the play as a whole has been found. (That a lost play called The Jealous Comedy, performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1593, was the source is the merest conjecture.)¹ Shakespeare, then, may be assumed to have invented his own plot, drawing upon his memory for suitable incidental material, as he remembered Chaucer's Knight's Tale when inventing the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The most substantial piece of material of this sort is a story from a collection of novelle, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino's Il pecorone.² In this story a student asks a professor to teach him the art of love (that is, of seduction), and duly applies the teaching and reports his progress to the professor; suspecting that the woman is his own wife (as she is), the professor follows the student to the house, but does not find him because the wife has hidden him under a heap of damp washing; next day the student reports his adventure to the professor, who consequently stabs the heap of washing the next time he follows the student to the house; the student, of course, has escaped in a different way, and the professor is treated as a madman by his wife's brothers, whom he has caused to witness his search. Though there are major differences (chiefly that in the novella adultery takes place), there are striking resemblances. The lover's confiding in the husband, the concealment under the washing, and the husband's assault on the washing upon the second occasion, all suggest that Shakespeare knew this story, particularly because another story in Il pecorone is agreed to be the source of the main plot (the bond, the wife disguised as a lawyer, and the business of the ring) of The Merchant of Venice, which he probably wrote in 1596 or 1597. No other proposed source for elements of the play comes anywhere near so close as this, which may be taken to be the point from which Shakespeare's plot grew.³

Ser Giovanni's novella is a simple comedy of ironic situation, satisfying enough within its conventional limits but strictly limited in characters and in incidents.⁴ It would not in itself make a play. Shakespeare seizes on its situational irony and develops round this a humorous comedy of character. He also substitutes for the amoral sexual opportunism of the original a quite different moral spirit, in which ‘wives may be merry and yet honest too’, and in which not only is Falstaff's lechery frustrated but also Ford's jealousy is cured—yet all this without sententious moralizing or undue seriousness. One method by which the mood of the whole play is kept light and cheerful is the multiplying of the dramatic interest. Though Falstaff's first two discomfitures take place at Ford's house and turn upon his attempts to seduce Mistress Ford, the facts that he has also written a love-letter to Mistress Page, that the two women have compared their letters, that Ford and Page have both been told of his intentions by his discarded hangers-on, that Falstaff has been (as he thinks) independently engaged by the supposed Brook to seduce Mistress Ford, and that Ford has Page and two or three eccentrics in tow when he searches his house for Falstaff, all go to confirm that there are to be no unpleasantly lifelike treatments of sexual misconduct or of marital jealousy.

Along with this filling-out of his main plot Shakespeare introduces two subsidiary actions. In the first of these, Page's daughter is courted by three suitors, two of them ridiculous, and is won by Fenton, the young gentleman whom she favours, while her two unwelcome suitors (the respective choices of her father and mother) are ludicrously disappointed, in the final scene. The second subsidiary action centres upon one of Anne Page's two ridiculous suitors, Dr Caius the French physician, and the Welsh parson of the town, Sir Hugh Evans; the former challenges the latter to a duel for intervening to forward Slender's courtship of Anne, the Host of the Garter Inn frustrates the duel by appointing them contrary places, and they combine to revenge themselves on him by arranging for some pretended Germans to run away with his horses. Their revengeful trick is so lightly sketched in that several critics have supposed one or more scenes to have been lost, but there is no necessity for more than a sketch of this very minor element in the plot. Its usefulness, apart from further filling out the play with the humours of Caius, Evans, and the Host, is that it adds the Host to the number of those who suffer reverses in the latter part of it—Page and Slender, Mistress Page and Caius. It is important that Falstaff should not be the only loser.

Shakespeare gives most of the principal characters more than one function in the play's multiple action. Mistress Page, for instance, is both Mistress Ford's confidante and an intriguer on behalf of Caius in his suit to her daughter Anne; Page intrigues on behalf of Slender and is also a foil to the jealous Ford; Mistress Quickly, besides being Caius's housekeeper, acts as go-between in Mistress Ford's dealings with Falstaff; Caius and Evans, besides being absurd would-be duellists, are reasonable spectators of Ford's searches of his house, and Caius is also a suitor and Evans a pedant who conducts a Latin lesson; the Host, in addition to his involvement in the duel and in the duellists' revenge, is an assistant in Fenton's elopement with Anne Page.

It is typical of Shakespeare's method, which the following discussion will explore, to have more than one action afoot in a comedy. The opening scene proclaims the breadth of interest, in event and character, that we are to be offered. The first three persons on stage—Justice Shallow, his nephew Slender, and Sir Hugh Evans—are a trio of notable eccentrics, and presently they are confronted with an equally eccentric quartet in Falstaff and his hangers-on, Bardolph, Pistol, and Nim. The only normal people—Page and his wife, their daughter, and Mistress Ford—are outnumbered, and provide a scale by which the abnormality of the others can be measured. Shallow's complaint against Falstaff, which gives the scene and the play their kick-start, is never heard of again, and the chief business set going is the wooing of Anne Page by (or rather, on behalf of) Slender, which is carried on in the second scene when Sir Hugh sends Slender's servant Simple with a letter to Mistress Quickly asking her to use her influence with Anne. Only then, in Scene 3, do we reach the beginning of the main action, with Falstaff proposing to make Mistress Ford and Mistress Page his East and West Indies, cashiering Pistol and Nim for refusing to deliver his love-letters, and thereby motivating their betrayal of his scheme to Ford and Page. Among Shakespeare's artful touches in these first three scenes Falstaff's one speech to Mistress Ford is to be noted:

Mistress Ford, by my troth, you are very well met. By your leave, good mistress.

Even if general kissing breaks out after the next line, when Page says, ‘Wife, bid these gentlemen welcome’, Falstaff's speech and kiss have made their dramatic point, with their conscious gallantry; consequently his announcement of his scheme in Scene 3, though it has all the impact of novelty, has continuity too. We may also notice that Falstaff has already parted with his third follower, Bardolph, to the Host—in whose employment he will be dramatically useful later—before he breaks with the other two and gives both letters to his page Robin (another minor character who will have his uses: ‘And Falstaff's boy with her!’).⁵

Ford, who grinds out the line just quoted, does not appear until well into the first scene of Act 2. In the mean time, true to Shakespeare's usual method of alternating action, Sir Hugh's letter is delivered to Mistress Quickly, and her employer Dr Caius discovers the messenger, becomes incensed at Sir Hugh's meddling on behalf of a rival suitor, and sends him a challenge. The French doctor is obviously the Welsh parson's equivalent in the play's gallery of eccentrics, though not so obviously as if they were themselves rival suitors, which would be too obvious a device for Shakespeare. Before the scene is over, Fenton—Anne's third suitor, and so evidently the successful one that there is no need, here or later, to spend more than the minimal time in establishing the fact—also appears. Then, in the first scene of Act 2, the main plot is greatly developed: Mistress Page and Mistress Ford compare their letters, Ford and Page are informed of Falstaff's scheme by Pistol and Nim, Mistress Quickly is engaged by the wives as a messenger to Falstaff, and Ford arranges with the Host that he shall be introduced to Falstaff under the assumed name of Brook.

Shakespeare's skill in dramatic construction is so easy that it is the easiest thing in the world to ignore it. In this scene the arrival of the Host, whom Caius has appointed umpire in his duel with Sir Hugh, with Shallow at his heels, allows Ford to come to his arrangement with the former while the latter talks to Page about the duel. And this dialogue with Page allows Shallow to vent his opinions on modern swordsmen and to reflect with satisfaction on his own feats of former days:

'Tis the heart, Master Page; 'tis here, 'tis here. I have seen the time, with my long sword, I would have made you four tall fellows skip like rats.

This is a good instance of how, in this play as in others, Shakespeare gives his scenes room to breathe. Then, with the exits of the Host, Shallow, and Page, Ford is left on stage to reinforce our knowledge of his intention to visit Falstaff in disguise in a very short soliloquy.

Of course, we are eager to see him put his plan in practice, and the sight of Falstaff browbeating a crestfallen Pistol is our assurance that Ford is even now on his way. But first Mistress Quickly must arrive and appoint Falstaff's assignation for next morning. The result is that Ford's arrival finds Falstaff in a hubristic mood of self-gratulation:

Sayst thou so, old Jack? Go thy ways. I'll make more of thy old body than I have done. Will they yet look after thee? Wilt thou, after the expense of so much money, be now a gainer? Good body, I thank thee. Let them say 'tis grossly done, so it be fairly done, no matter.⁶

Master Brook offers Falstaff money for seducing Ford's wife. The oddity of this proposal from one who declares himself in love with her is not lost on Falstaff, so Master Brook has to justify it. The dialogue is conducted, at some length, with great politeness on both sides, which throws into strong relief the contrast in style when Falstaff begins to talk of Ford, ‘the jealous rascally knave her husband’. Every change is rung on the abusive terms—‘poor cuckoldly knave’, ‘jealous wittolly knave’, ‘cuckoldly rogue’—and Falstaff's exuberant invention supplies new ones like ‘mechanical salt-butter rogue’. This serves to work Ford up to the explosive fury of his soliloquy—a long one this time—with which he ends the scene.

The next two scenes show Caius and Evans respectively waiting for their opponents, the Host having appointed them contrary places. These are leisurely scenes—plenty of breathing-room here—and are almost wholly displays of humorous character. Their only consequence, at a long interval, is the stealing of the Host's horses by the pretended Germans.

By the middle of Act 3 we return to the main action with the buck-basket scene, out of which Shakespeare gets full comic value. Especially worth noting, in this scene of so much activity, is the point of rest, when the buck-basket has left by one of the doors (of Shakespeare's stage) on its way to Datchet Mead and the Thames, and Ford and his neighbours have left by the other door to search the upstairs rooms of the house. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page have the whole stage to themselves, and their remarks make sure that the audience has got the comedy in the right moral focus:

Mistress Page Is there not
a double excellency in this?
Mistress Ford I know not which
pleases me better—that my husband is deceived, or Sir John.

What is doubly excellent about this exchange is its combination of moral rightness and artistic rightness: its neat summing-up of the moral situation springs naturally from the symmetry of the stage action. On the occasion of Falstaff's second assignation (4.2) the different stage situation allows a different form of moral comment, when Falstaff has fled upstairs to disguise himself, Mistress Ford has gone to summon the servants to carry the buck-basket, and Mistress Page remains on stage to speak the moral couplets that refer to the play's title:

We'll leave a proof, by that which we will do,
Wives may be merry and yet honest too.
We do not act that often jest and laugh;
'Tis old but true: ‘Still swine eats all the draff.’

Falstaff's three unsuccessful assignations are the chief structural feature of the play, and perhaps no other of Shakespeare's comedies so thoroughly exploits the pleasures of variety-within-repetition. Johnson has a somewhat discontented editorial comment on ‘I spied a great peard under her muffler’ (4.2.179-80):

As the second stratagem, by which Falstaff escapes, is much the grosser of the two, I wish it had been practised first. It is very unlikely that Ford having been so deceived before, and knowing that he had been deceived, would suffer him to escape in so slight a disguise.

But he overlooks the fact that by being practised second this stratagem permits the reappearance of the buck-basket, for the sake of which we willingly turn a blind eye to the alleged improbability.

In the Herne's Oak scene (5.5), the third of Falstaff's assignations, every reader and every spectator must be struck by the way in which this domestic comedy turns fantastical. There is a much greater shift here than at the end of As You Like It when Rosalind, as Ganymede, undertakes to bring Orlando his true Rosalind by magic, and is then led in, in her own person, by one representing Hymen the marriage-god. As You Like It has already developed a lyrical romantic mood bordering on the fantastic: it needs only a touch to steer it to this mythological tableau. Many critics have felt that the last scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor is produced not by a touch in the right direction but by a wrench in the wrong one. Falstaff frightened of fairies is more than they can endure.

It must be admitted that Falstaff is the last person one would expect to believe in fairies, and that he would not easily be persuaded to come to Herne's Oak at midnight wearing a pair of antlers. Still, Shakespeare himself cannot have been unaware of the implausibility of these things, so it is worth trying to understand his purpose in ending The Merry Wives of Windsor in this way.

In the last movement of the play he evidently has two objects in view. The first is to finish off the main plot with the third assignation and Falstaff's final and public discomfiture. The second is to finish off the minor plot with Anne Page's marriage to Master Fenton. This minor plot has hitherto been kept alive rather than developed; it is less a plot than an existing situation. But it has provided one strategically placed scene (3.4) that has brought together Fenton and Anne, Slender and Shallow, Page and Mistress Page, and Mistress Quickly, and has emphasized that Fenton is Anne's own choice, Slender is her father's choice, and Caius is her mother's choice. Much of that scene is in blank verse—not, of course, anything said by Slender, Shallow, or Mistress Quickly—and blank verse, in Shakespearian comedy, is often a gesture towards romance. No more than a gesture here: a touch of Romeo and Juliet would be quite out of keeping. Nevertheless, the blank verse in this scene (the first scene in which it appears in any quantity and with other than burlesque intention) points forward to the next blank verse scene (4.4), between Page, Ford, Mistress Page, Mistress Ford, and Evans. Of these only Sir Hugh is confined to prose throughout the scene. Ford, who opens it, uses blank verse to express his wholehearted conversion from jealousy:

Pardon me, wife. Henceforth do what thou wilt.
I rather will suspect the sun with cold
Than thee with wantonness. Now doth thy honour stand,
In him that was of late an heretic,
As firm as faith.

Page, here as always the reasonable man, approves of Ford's sentiments but cuts short his expression of them and gets down to business:

But let our plot go forward. Let our wives
Yet once again, to make us public sport,
Appoint a meeting with this old fat fellow,
Where we may take him and disgrace him for it.
Ford
There is no better way than that they spoke of.
Page How, to send him word they'll
meet him in the Park at midnight?
Fie, fie, he'll never come.
Evans You say he has been thrown
in the rivers, and has been grievously peaten as an old 'oman. Methinks
there should be terrors in him, that he should not come. Methinks his flesh
is punished; he shall have no desires.
Page So think I too.
Mistress Ford
Devise but how you'll use him when he comes,
And let us two devise to bring him thither.
Mistress Page
There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns …

The dialogue has been quoted at some length to show how Shakespeare anticipates the charge of implausibility by letting Page and Evans voice it in prose, and then meets it with Mistress Ford's confident verse reply, which he follows with Mistress Page's speech reminding them of the legend of Herne the Hunter. As this speech runs on, we yield ourselves to the stream:

Nan Page my daughter, and my little son,
And three or four more of their growth we'll dress
Like urchins, oafs, and fairies, green and white,
With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads …

This is not a matter of convincing us that what will happen is true to life but of persuading us to suspend our disbelief for the sake of enjoying what will happen.

Shakespeare might still have some difficulty in persuading us to do this if the whole scene were devoted to the planning of Falstaff's discomfiture. But the fairy disguise has started a train of thought in Page's mind: hearing that Anne is to be the queen of the fairies, ‘Finely attirèd in a robe of white’, he says

That silk will I go buy. (Aside)
And in that time
Shall Master Slender steal my Nan away
And marry her at Eton.

A few lines later, left alone on the stage, his wife determines that Dr Caius shall have her daughter. The minor plot thus comes right to the foreground, and it is kept there in the next scene, where Fenton (again in verse) confides to the Host that he and Anne mean to elope while Slender and Caius are diversely obeying her parents' different instructions. The effect of this sudden concentration on the marriage of Anne Page is to deflect our attention from the improbability of the device against Falstaff, who, when we next see him, is already persuaded to the assignation, not in process of being persuaded to it.

Shakespeare has a further object besides finishing off his two plots and combining them; he uses the denouement as a vehicle for his compliments to the Queen, to Windsor Castle, and to the Order of the Garter. By setting the last scene in a wood—whether in the Little Park or in the Great Park (Windsor Forest) is left vague⁷—he removes the action further from the commonplace houses, inns, streets, and fields in which it has been taking place. The Merry Wives of Windsor and A Midsummer Night's Dream are as different from each other as any two of his comedies, but there can be no doubt that his earlier fairy play was in his mind when he was planning the end of this one. Perhaps the original connection was his remembering the compliment to the Queen as the ‘fair vestal thronèd by the west’ which he had worked into Oberon's speech about the magic flower (Dream, 2.1.158). In neither play has the Fairy Queen an allegorical, or even allusive, reference to Elizabeth, the Faerie Queene of Spenser's poem, but it would have been impossible to compliment the Queen in the 1590s without having Spenser's immense tribute in mind. Shakespeare's fairies are nothing like the inhabitants of Spenser's Faerie Land, but belong to the popular tradition of playful, mischievous, and punitive immortals who live in the country and sometimes enter mortals' houses. In making them pinch Falstaff he may have remembered Lyly's complimentary court comedy of 1588, Endymion (where Elizabeth is allegorically portrayed as Cynthia), in which they pinch Corsites.⁸ Of course it can never have crossed his mind to bring real fairies into The Merry Wives of Windsor as he had done in A Midsummer Night's Dream; these fairies are William Page and other children of Windsor. Yet in the Fairy Queen's speech the lines in which she invokes an everlasting blessing on Windsor Castle are in the elevated tone in which Theseus's palace is blessed at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is undeniable incongruity here, but anyone who regards the incongruity as a fault is out of tune with the spirit of this final scene. For Shakespeare's original court audience the unexpected complimentary flourish would be a delightful surprise, and even now that the play's occasion is far in the past his ingenuity can still delight us.

There is incongruity of a different kind in Falstaff's interjection, after Sir Hugh's line ‘But stay! I smell a man of middle earth’,

Heavens defend me from that Welsh fairy, lest he transform me to a piece of cheese!

The incongruity lies in Falstaff's joke—for a joke it undeniably is—at the expense of one of the fairies while he is in awe of them collectively:

They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die.
I'll wink and couch; no man their works must eye.

In that speech he is subdued to the couplets of the surrounding verse, but his prose interjection (like ‘Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it’, interjected into the serious blank-verse altercation between the King and Worcester before the battle of Shrewsbury)⁹ shows him in his usual irreverent and irrepressible mood. It is one of Shakespeare's surest artistic touches. It provides us with an escape from the conclusion that Falstaff is filled with craven terror, while at the same time it does not go so far in the other direction as to suggest that he is only pretending to be afraid.¹⁰

The success of the final scene depends on the maintaining of a delicate balance. The sudden development of the Anne Page plot, as has been said, predisposes us to accept Falstaff's comic tormenting by the fairies. In this final scene the elopement of Anne with Fenton, and the carrying-off by Slender and Caius of boys whom they mistake for Anne, acts as a distraction from his plight, which might seem too moralistically presented if it demanded our whole attention. It also provides excellent theatre, especially when, as we anticipate, Slender and Caius return to complain—each in his characteristic style—of how they have been deceived. And it distributes the discomfiture, which is not allowed all to fall on Falstaff's head; Page and his wife, as well as Slender and Caius, whom they respectively favoured, have missed their aim. The return of Fenton and Anne, whom Page and his wife finally congratulate upon their marriage, makes the play end as a comedy of forgiveness and reconciliation and not as one of retribution and satirical exposure. Ford, of course, must have his speech of triumph at Falstaff's expense, and reclaim the money that he paid over as Master Brook. This speech occurs when everyone is uniting to denounce Falstaff, before the reappearance of Slender, Caius, Fenton, and Anne. But at the very end, it is Ford who presses Mistress Page's invitation on Falstaff (‘Let it be so, Sir John’),¹¹ and his final couplet,

To Master Brook you yet shall hold your word,
For he tonight shall lie with Mistress Ford,

is best taken as his happy afterthought, and as a joke which Falstaff can share.

Notes

1. Oliver, H.J., The Merry Wives of Windsor, Arden Shakespeare, p. lx, reviews the arguments that have been brought forward to support this theory.

2. Bullough, Geoffrey, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ii. 19-26, gives a translation of this story (Il pecorone (1558), Giornata I, Novella II).

3. Leo Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge, 1974), pp. 231-2, suggests that the play originated in Plautus' Braggart Soldier (Miles Gloriosus), in which ‘the boaster, inordinately vain about his sexual charm, … is lured into an intrigue with a married woman (a pretended married woman in Plautus), steals into his neighbour's house, is soundly thrashed and is terrified into avowing his fault’.

4. Its denouement is that the student, going to the university as usual next day, learns that the professor is mad and confined to his house. When he pays a sympathetic call, with other students, he recognizes with astonishment that his visits were to the professor's wife, but conceals his surprise and in his turn addresses the professor with commiseration. The professor bids him go away, for he has learned only too well at his teacher's expense. The wife hastily declares that the professor's words are just part of his madness, and the student leaves Bologna and returns home.

5. The order in which Shakespeare worked out his plot cannot, of course, be known; but it seems probable, assuming that the play precedes Henry V and that Nim makes his first appearance here, that he was created because Shakespeare needed two characters, each with a distinctive mannerism of speech, to warn Ford and Page simultaneously—a much better situation than if Pistol warned them both, either simultaneously or consecutively.

6. This is the fat Falstaff's equivalent of the deformed Richard's soliloquy after successfully wooing Lady Anne:

   Upon my life, she finds, although I cannot,
   Myself to be a marv'lous proper man.
   I'll be at charges for a looking-glass,
   And entertain a score or two of tailors
   To study fashions to adorn my body.

   (Richard III, 1.3.240-4)

   Both speakers adopt an ironical tone, but whereas Richard is under no illusion about his looks, Falstaff really does feel complacency.

7. The wives propose to send Falstaff word that ‘they'll meet him in the Park at midnight’ (4.4.16-17). Herne the Hunter is said to have been ‘Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest’ (4.4.26). After making a fool of Falstaff the conspirators will ‘mock him home to Windsor’ (4.4.62). Falstaff says to Ford (as Brook), ‘Be you in the Park about midnight, at Herne's Oak, and you shall see wonders’ (5.1.9-10). Page, Shallow, and Slender go to ‘couch i'th' Castle ditch’ till they see the lights carried by the fairies (5.2.1-2), which suggests that the assignation will be in the Little Park adjoining the Castle. Mistress Page bids Caius ‘Go before into the Park. We two must go together’ (5.3.3-4: implying that she and Mistress Page will also go there). Falstaff calls himself ‘a Windsor stag, and the fattest, I think, i'th' forest’ (5.5.12-13). Mistress Page says that Falstaff's horns ‘Become the forest better than the town’ (5.5.107). The tradition that identified an oak in the Little Park as Herne's Oak (Green, p. 18) probably arose from the play's popularity and is unreliable as evidence either of the location of 5.5 or of the antiquity of the Herne story. More than one tree has been so identified (Roberts, p. 149 n. 59).

8. Bullough, ii. 55-8. In Endymion, as in Shakespeare's play, the pinching is accompanied by a song in trochaic metre.

9. 1 Henry IV, 5.1.28.

10. In a review of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1955 production (Bolton Evening News, 15 July 1955) it was noted that it received not only the usual laughter but ‘even some applause, as if it were extempore’.

11. On the punctuation of Ford's final speech see Commentary, 5.5.236.