[In the essay below, Berry maintains that the Falstaff of the Henry IV plays is linked to the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor through the issues of poaching and social rebellion. Berry explores Falstaff's role within The Merry Wives of Windsor, demonstrating the ways in which Falstaff, as a poacher and a fallen knight, poses a threat to society and emphasizes the conflict between the court and the Windsor bourgeois society.]

In act 5 scene 4 of 1 Henry IV Prince Hal kills Hotspur in single combat on the field at Shrewsbury. While doing what he calls “fair rites of tenderness” (98) to honor Hotspur's corpse, Hal spies Falstaff on the ground, dead. He responds with a speech filled with wordplay. He calls Falstaff an “old” acquaintance. He muses on the incongruity of Falstaff's bulk: “Could not all this flesh / Keep in a little life?” He salutes Falstaff as “poor Jack,” the name both a familiar and affectionate substitute for “John” and a synonym for “knave.” He weighs his loss both morally and emotionally: “I could have better spar'd a better man” (102-4). The wit of the lines brings together affection and moral judgment, playfulness and regret, crystallizing Hal's complex relationship to his companion throughout the play.

As his speech draws to a close, Hal introduces a novel metaphor for Falstaff, transforming him from a man into a deer:

Death hath not strook so fat a deer to-day,
Though many dearer, in this bloody fray.
Embowell'd will I see thee by and by,
Till then in blood by noble Percy lie.

(5.4.107-10)

For a brief moment, the bodies on the field at Shrewsbury become a quarry of deer and Falstaff the fattest among them. The metaphor triggers off yet another pun—“though many dearer”—and sustains its force in the word “embowell'd” and the phrase “in blood.” Emboweling in preparation for salting or cooking was the inevitable fate of a dead deer, especially a fat one in the prime of life, one “in blood.”¹ To compare Falstaff to a deer “in blood” is to subject him to a triple thrust of wit. As a man, Falstaff is ignoble, and therefore not “in blood.” The chief mark of his ignobility at this moment, moreover, which Hal himself does not perceive, is his retention of his blood: he does not lie in blood but is “in,” or full of, blood. As a deer, finally, Falstaff is hardly “in blood”; although old and fat, he is by no means in his prime, and Hal's irony acknowledges that fact.

The appropriate metaphor for Falstaff is not that of a deer “in blood” but a “rascal.” Although the term is often used in the period in a general sense, to mean a “rogue” or “knave,” it also carried a technical meaning, as “the young, lean, or inferior deer of a herd, distinguished from the full-grown antlered bucks or stags” (OED). Shakespeare plays on both meanings of the term earlier in the play when Hal calls Falstaff a “fat-kidney'd rascal” (2.2.5-6), an “oily rascal” who is “known as well as Paul's” (2.4.526), and an “impudent, emboss'd rascal” (3.3.157). The latter phrase, “emboss'd rascal,” captures both Falstaff's swollen girth and breathlessness, for the word “embossed” refers not only to something molded or carved in relief but to a hunted animal, in this case a “rascal,” foaming at the mouth from exhaustion.² As a deer, then, Falstaff is as paradoxical as he is as a man. He is a rascal, an inferior specimen, but neither young nor lean; he is an old fat rascal. He himself notes the incongruity of the metaphor in 2 Henry IV when Doll Tearsheet calls him a “muddy rascal.” He replies, “You make fat rascals, Mistress Doll” (2.4.39-41).

Because they are inferior specimens, rascals are less likely to be killed than deer “in blood.” Hotspur dies at the end of 1 Henry IV, but Falstaff, the rascal, feigns death, wounds Hotspur, and gains honor. Arising from the ground after Hal's exit, he gasps in outrage at the implications of Hal's metaphor: “Embowell'd! if thou embowel me to-day, I'll give you leave to powder me and eat me too tomorrow” (5.4.111-13). Hal's fat rascal comes back to life, desperate to prevent the emboweling and salting that would lead to his being eaten. The dead Percy becomes food “for worms” (87), but the live Falstaff refuses to become venison. As has often been observed, the “resurrection” of Falstaff is reminiscent of the ritualistic English folk drama, in which a challenger is first killed by the hero and then resurrected by a doctor. The metamorphosis of Falstaff into a deer at this point accentuates the ritualistic quality of the moment, for the participants in such folk-plays often wear or carry parts of animals, such as skins or tails. In the horn dance of Abbots Bromley, indeed, the dancers carry the horns of reindeer.³

Although Falstaff is called a “rascal” several times in the play, the metaphor is hardly significant enough to warrant its centrality in the “death” of Falstaff at Shrewsbury. As John Dover Wilson has shown, Falstaff is characterized throughout 1 Henry IV primarily through the language of the taverns, and particularly that of feasting on meat.⁴ Falstaff is Sir Loin-of-Beef. “Call in ribs, call in tallow” (2.4.111), says Hal of the man he later calls “my sweet beef” (3.3.177). He is also “that roasted manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly” (2.4.452-53). As befits the lord of the Boar's Head Tavern, moreover, he is the boar himself: “guts” (2.4.452), “chops” (1.2.136), “brawn” (2.4.110). In 2 Henry IV Hal asks, “doth the old boar feed in the old frank?” (2.2.146-47), and Doll calls him her “whoreson little tidy bartholomew boar-pig” (2.4.231). All of these metaphors associate Falstaff with domesticated meat, not venison. Elizabethan social custom, indeed, makes venison a somewhat unlikely choice for Falstaff. Although the numerous complaints about the marketing of poached deer make clear that venison would have been available at least occasionally in the tavern world of London, it could not easily be made into a symbol of that world or of the traditional holidays that the play exploits. Venison connoted a higher social world than the one we customarily associate with Falstaff; the meat was normally reserved for gifts among the gentry and for formal occasions such as the Lord Mayor's feast.⁵ Given these associations, it is not surprising that Hal's reference to Falstaff as a deer at the end of 1 Henry IV is the only significant instance of its kind in either the Henry IV plays or in Henry V.

Why, then, should the metaphor of Falstaff as deer engage Shakespeare's imagination at this climactic moment in 1 Henry IV? One answer, I suspect, lies in a poem that could well be a submerged source for the play, the ballad “The Hunting of the Cheviot,” more commonly known as “Chevy Chase.” The ballad was of ancient origin and was well known throughout the Elizabethan period. Sidney, for example, praises it in the Defence of Poetry as an example of the power of primitive lyric poetry: “Certainly, I must confess my own barbarousness, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet is it sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style …”⁶ Although the evidence is only circumstantial, both the overall plot of the ballad and certain details suggest that it might have been in Shakespeare's mind when conceiving the battle of Shrewsbury.

“Chevy Chase” recounts in fictitious form the battle of Otterburn. The ballad account is historically anomalous in a manner suggestive for the Henry IV plays, for it sets the battle not in the reign of Richard II where it belongs but in that of Henry IV. The plot of the ballad has little relationship to Shakespeare's play, but mysterious echoes of names and events make it seem a fantasy on the themes of the Henriad. The protagonists of “Chevy Chase” are Percy and Douglas. The battle is initiated when Percy crosses the Scottish border to hunt deer, hoping to encounter his enemy Douglas on the other side. Percy and his men hunt all morning, and by noon a hundred fat harts have been killed. When Percy goes to see the breaking of the deer, Douglas appears and challenges him. Percy answers his challenge with defiance, and Douglas replies in turn with an offer of single combat. When one of Percy's men refuses to sit by and watch, a general battle breaks forth, and Douglas is killed by an arrow as he fights with Percy. Percy honors him in death and is then killed himself. The ballad ends with both armies virtually destroyed and with Henry IV vowing to avenge Percy's death at Holmedon. In this brief and ancient ballad, then, we find a kaleidoscope of elements that appear in 1 Henry IV: a border raid, a challenge of single combat between two heroic protagonists, a refusal of one soldier to allow single combat to proceed, opposition between characters called Percy and Douglas, and a victor honoring his dead opponent. The ballad ends, moreover, with Henry IV looking forward to avenging his dead hero at the battle of Holmedon, the very battle with which Shakespeare's play begins.

Even more curious are certain verbal echoes that link ballad to play. Three times in the ballad the fatness of the harts is emphasized. They are the “fattiste hartes in all Cheviat” (st. 2).⁷ By noontime “a hondrith fat hartës ded ther lay” (st. 7). Percy taunts Douglas by saying, “The fattiste hartës in all Chyviat / we have kyld, and cast to carry them away” (st. 17). The imagery of fat harts dead on the field is oddly close to Hal's “Death hath not strook so fat a deer to-day” (5.4.107). In honoring Douglas in death, moreover, Percy uses words that recall Hal's of Falstaff. Holding the dead man's hand, Percy comments, “For a better man, of hart nare of hande, / was nat in all the north contrë” (st. 39); Hal's words are “I could have better spar'd a better man” (5.4.104). In the ballad, finally, when Henry IV vows to avenge Percy's death, his use of the word “brook” links his speech to Hotspur's own dying words in Shakespeare's play. Henry IV says, “But Persë, and I brook my lyffe, / thy deth well quyte shall be” (st. 62). Hotspur, also thinking of whether his death has been well recompensed, says, “I better brook the loss of brittle life / Than those proud titles thou has won of me” (5.4.78-79).⁸

Although probably inadequate to establish “Chevy Chase” as a definite source for 1 Henry IV, the many resemblances between the two works seem more than coincidental. The sheer arbitrariness and obliquity of the echoes, however, if that is what they are, forestall any attempt to explain them as conscious allusions. If the ballad was in Shakespeare's mind as he composed his play, it was likely to have been present at a barely conscious level, with fragments of the narrative, setting, and language reassembling themselves by a process of association. If such a scenario seems plausible, we may ask why these memories should have been triggered off by Falstaff's mock-death at the battle of Shrewsbury.

Part of the answer, of course, is provided by the detailed resemblances we have already examined: the names of the characters, the battlefield setting, the situation of two great heroes fighting in single combat. At a deeper and perhaps less conscious level, however, the two episodes are linked in a way that will eventually lead to the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor. The link is that between hunting and war, and, more precisely, between poaching and social rebellion.

In the ballad of “Chevy Chase,” Percy's hunting raid has as its object not merely the killing of deer but the humiliation of Douglas, the chief ranger of the parks and chases of Scotland, under whose protection the deer exist. “Who gave youe leave to hunte in this Chyviat chays,” asks Douglas when he accosts Percy, “in the spyt of myn and of me” (st. 15). The poem as a whole, moreover, treats the hunting raid and the battle as symbolic equivalents. The battle itself is introduced as a continuation of the hunt (st. 24), and is identified with the hunt in the final stanza:

Ihesue Crist our balys [torments] bete [assuage],
                    and to the blys us brynge!
Thus was the hountynge of the Chivyat:
                    God send us alle good endyng!

(st. 68)

The ballad, in short, depends upon the same symbolism that underlies Elizabethan poaching. In slaughtering his deer, Percy is destroying Douglas's honor, thereby symbolically slaughtering both him and his army. As Roger B. Manning's account of the ballad makes clear, the action is both a literal instigator of war and its symbolic equivalent.⁹

Shakespeare's imagination works in a similar manner. In an Elizabethan context, the field of battle, unlike the world of the taverns, does not evoke images of boar or beef; it evokes images of the hunt. The field of a hunt, like the field of a battle, was often filled with corpses, and with the victors surveying the nobility of those that had been killed. The hunt was not merely associated with war but was even conducted as a kind of war itself.¹⁰ For Hal, the battlefield at Shrewsbury, littered with corpses, becomes a quarry of deer and the “dead” Falstaff the fattest of the lot.

Although both Hal and Hotspur aspire to elevate the battle of Shrewsbury into chivalric warfare, the conflict actually pits rebels against a rebel-king who peoples the field with counterfeits wearing his own armor. The men killed at Shrewsbury, like the deer killed at Chevy Chase, are not ceremoniously hunted but poached. Rebellion is to chivalric warfare what poaching is to the ceremonial hunt. In this sense, Falstaff may be considered a poacher, since he steals from Hal the honor of killing Hotspur. From this perspective, Hal's fat rascal avenges himself upon the “hunt” of war by stabbing the noblest hunter in the thigh and carrying him home as a trophy. Falstaff will not be eaten. The hunted becomes the hunter, and sheer animal vitality triumphs. The fat rascal survives and prospers.

Although the man Falstaff gets his comeuppance at the end of 2 Henry IV, when the newly crowned Henry V rejects and banishes him, the fate of the fat rascal Falstaff, the dear deer of Shrewsbury, is suspended until he meets the wives of Windsor. In The Merry Wives, the metaphor that surfaces momentarily upon Falstaff's “death” at Shrewsbury appears throughout the play. In Windsor, the rascal Falstaff plays the roles of a literal poacher of deer, a metaphoric poacher of wives, Herne the Hunter, and a Windsor stag. To appreciate the significance of these roles, it is necessary to consider not merely the figure of Falstaff but his place within the play as a whole.

The Merry Wives poses special problems for critics. The date of composition, the occasion for which the play might have been written, the relationship between the Quarto and Folio texts are all uncertain and the subject of continuing controversy.¹¹ The anomalous position of the play among Shakespeare's comedies, moreover, has encouraged a kind of disparagement by exclusion: The Merry Wives, it seems, offers neither the delights of the romantic comedies, with their exotic locales, their vibrant heroines, or their marvelous plots, nor the wit, energy, and gritty realism of the Falstaffian history plays. A recent interest in local history and local readings of plays, however, has begun to provide a context within which to appreciate the play's most distinctive qualities, the most important of which is its depiction of Elizabethan town life. The Windsor of the play, as R. S. White observes, is “solidly rooted in its specified town planning, its diurnal activities, its local customs.”¹² In a lively and insightful essay, “Falstaff and the Comic Community,” Anne Barton stresses the dramatic significance of that distinctive world, observing that “Windsor itself, as a corporate entity, is the true protagonist of the comedy, not Falstaff, the shadowy lovers, or even the merry wives themselves, who uphold its values so well.”¹³

Although I shall later want to qualify Barton's characterization of the wives as mere upholders of Windsor's values, I believe she captures the single quality that makes this play most distinctive and is most important to its critical appreciation: The Merry Wives is the one Shakespearean comedy that represents the social dynamics of Elizabethan town life. In placing a generalized “Windsor” at the center of the play, moreover, Shakespeare not only achieves a high degree of comic realism but subjects the very social practices he imitates to comic scrutiny. In this way the play provides not only a representative image of an Elizabethan community, “Windsor,” but a comic meditation on some of the forces that drive Elizabethan communal life, forces for which poaching becomes a central metaphor. In so doing, the play also turns our gaze upon its own form—upon the capacity of comedy to resolve social tensions of the kind it imitates. The play thus reflects the customs of Elizabethan town life, reflects upon them, and probes their adaptability to traditional comic form.

The most important fact about Windsor is conflict. The opening words of the play, Shallow's “I will make a Star chamber matter of it” (1.1.1-2), are only the first of many demands for retribution—so many that, as Linda Anderson observes, the play seems “not merely concerned with revenge” but “obsessed with it.”¹⁴ Each plot of the play develops a different kind of social conflict and a different mode of attempted resolution. Shallow wants to bring Falstaff to the Star Chamber for poaching his deer, although he still hankers after the sword-fights of his youth. Slender accuses Falstaff's men of stealing his purse. Evans and Caius attempt to fight a duel over Anne Page, but are thwarted by the jocular peacemaking of the Host, who becomes in turn the victim of their revenge, the “theft” of his horses. Mistress Page and her husband compete against each other as matchmakers for Anne, both attempting to arrange a secret marriage, a legal but strongly anti-social bit of trickery. Falstaff arouses the wrath of Pistol and Bardolph by dismissing them, the wrath of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page by insulting them, and the wrath of Master Ford by threatening to cuckold him—all actions that precipitate counter-plots of revenge. Pistol and Bardolph become informers against Falstaff, while Master Ford attempts to entrap him, using his own wife as bait and, according to Mistress Quickly, beating her “black and blue” (4.5.112) when his efforts fail. The merry wives, finally, devise a series of informal punishments which climax in Falstaff's humiliation before the entire community. In the range and variety of conflicts and attempted resolutions, the play provides a casebook of conflict in an Elizabethan town. Local and national law, the private code of the duel, trickery, neighborly intervention, and public humiliation are all part of the social repertory of the citizens of Windsor.

From a modern perspective, what is most striking about the various attempts to resolve conflict is their dependence upon informal and communal methods of “justice.” Although Shallow and Slender threaten the use of the national and local legal system, they are thwarted in their designs, and social peace is essentially left in the hands of the community itself. To resolve disputes, the citizens of Windsor take the “law” into their own collective hands. Since the play opens with Shallow's ineffectual attempt to bring Falstaff before the Star Chamber and ends with Falstaff punished by the community, we might say that the plot itself replaces legalistic with informal and communal methods of achieving peace.

Keeping order in Windsor is both a local and a highly collaborative activity. Evans attempts to settle Slender's complaint against Falstaff's men with a panel of “three umpires”—Page, the host of the Garter, and himself (1.1.137). Page holds a dinner of venison pasty in hopes that Shallow, Slender, Falstaff, and his men will “drink down all unkindness” (1.1.196-97). Mistress Page and Mistress Ford band together in their punishments of Falstaff. Page, Shallow, and Slender join the Host in preventing the duel between Caius and Evans. In her indiscriminate good will as a match-maker, Mistress Quickly scrambles to keep everyone happy, parodying the role of peacemaker. In his efforts to catch Falstaff in the act of courting his wife, Ford brings Page, Caius, and Evans as witnesses, hoping to transform the shame of cuckoldry into communal applause: “to these violent proceedings all my neighbors shall cry aim” (3.2.43-44). The erstwhile opponents, Caius and Evans, join forces to revenge themselves against the Host. And the play climaxes in a scene that shows almost the entire community united against Falstaff. In a society that seems as obsessively driven by the bourgeois motive of economic gain as that of revenge, it is worth observing that the resolution of conflict involves the whole community in ways that largely transcend differences in wealth and social status.

When placed against the backdrop of what we know about Elizabethan town life in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the play's preoccupation with conflict, and with informal, communal modes of conflict resolution, sharpens in focus. In the 1590s most Elizabethan towns experienced serious social and economic disorder, brought on by a wide variety of causes, among them harvest failure, plague, and overseas war. In the early seventeenth century demographic change, enclosure, and an increase in class divisions accentuated by Puritanism continued this destabilizing trend. Partly in response to these social tensions, the civic authorities and moralists of the period seem almost obsessed with fears of civil disorder.¹⁵

In a way that is difficult for moderns to appreciate, this anxiety about civic order was expressed within a social system that had few legal and institutional resources. The national system of law enforcement and local administration, for example, depended upon “the diligence and cooperation of essentially amateur, unpaid local officers,”¹⁶ such as Justice Shallow. For this and other reasons—including the desire for independence and local control—informal, local mediation of disputes was usually preferred to legal means: “Local gentlemen, clergymen and prominent neighbors were commonly involved in mediation of this kind and local officers could also take a hand.”¹⁷ At the level of the town and village, according to Keith Wrightson, “‘order’ meant little more than conformity to a fairly malleable local custom which was considerably more flexible than statute law.”¹⁸ In cases not amenable to informal mediation, the community had available numerous traditional sanctions, ranging from the relatively benign method of gossip to more violent methods, such as the charivari.

In order to be effective, these communal methods of conflict resolution depended upon the small size of the towns, which fostered among individuals, for better and worse, close involvement in each other's affairs. Informal peacemaking also required a reasonable consensus about the nature of social relations in the community. Central to this consensus, according to Mildred Campbell, was an ideal of “good neighborhood”: “Neighborliness stands perhaps first in the criteria by which the social and ethical standing of an individual in a country community was measured.”¹⁹ Keith Wrightson offers a definition of this social ideal, which he sees as complementary with two other social norms, paternalism and deference. Neighborliness, he observes, “involved a mutual recognition of reciprocal obligations of a practical kind and a degree of normative consensus as to the nature of proper behaviour between neighbors … it was essentially a horizontal relationship, one which implied a degree of equality and mutuality between partners to the relationship, irrespective of distinctions of wealth or social standing.”²⁰ In general, neighborliness was manifested in a willingness, among other things, to lend implements or money (without interest), to share in parish administration, to help at shearing or harvest time, to assist the needy, to engage in genial social relations, to mediate disputes, and to promote harmonious social relations.²¹

Such a social ideal, of course, was commonly much diluted when put into practice, and the informal power and responsibility it conferred on individuals and groups could have negative and sometimes dangerous implications. A good example of the equivocal nature of “good neighborhood,” as we shall see in some detail later, is the charivari, an informal method of social punishment that could be coercive not only to offenders but to those in the community who might have prevented the offense. In some charivaris, for example, a neighbor served as a surrogate victim, as if the neighborhood itself were somehow implicated in the offense.²² Neighborliness was thus not a matter of choice but an obligation, involving, in some cases, both the offender and the peacemaker in a network of socially coercive behavior. In cases of extreme conflict, “good neighborhood” might be difficult to distinguish from social violence.

A comic representation of the way in which “good neighborhood” might have worked in Elizabethan towns is provided in the opening scene of The Merry Wives, which serves as an overture to the play as a whole. The scene begins with Justice Shallow's threat to make a Star Chamber matter out of Falstaff's poaching of his deer. Sir Hugh Evans, as a good neighbor and cleric, attempts to mediate—“I am of the church, and will be glad to do my benevolence to make atonements and compremises between you” (1.1.32-34)—but Shallow insists that “the Council shall hear it, it is a riot” (35), and then sputters that if he were only young again, “the sword should end it” (40-41). Evans's reply to this threat gives us, in a thick Welsh accent, the cryptic insight of the fool, an insight, as we shall see, that the remainder of the play explores: “It is petter that friends is the sword, and end it” (42-43). The opening moments of the play thus outline three potential modes of conflict resolution: the socially (and personally) anachronistic method of the duel, the law, and the informal mediation of neighbors.

Shallow is too old for sword-fights and, initially, too stubborn for informal mediation. He is Justice of the Peace and Coram, and Custa-lorum, too, and he wants the law. His opening confrontation with Falstaff, however, demonstrates the limitations of this approach. Falstaff knows the law and how to evade it. This becomes most obviously clear in Slender's accusations against Bardolph, Nym and Pistol for stealing his purse. Because he was too drunk at the time to make a positive identification, Slender's charge cannot hold up, and Falstaff can conclude, triumphantly, “You hear all these matters denied, gentlemen; you hear it” (186-87). Slender's only recourse at this point is to restrict himself henceforth to getting drunk in “honest, civil, godly company” (182). The law will do him no good.

Shallow's charge of poaching involves subtler matters of law and a subtler evasiveness. Since the nature of Falstaff's triumph in this matter tends to escape critical notice, it is worth special attention. The chief theatrical question raised by the episode is why, after so insistent a demand for a trial in the Star Chamber, Shallow (or Shakespeare) lets the matter drop. Although the issue is not resolved in this scene, it is never referred to again. The image of Falstaff as a poacher is obviously important, however, for it reappears in his disguise as Herne the hunter at the end of the play.

To understand the significance of the episode, one must consider the legal treatment of poaching in the period. In its most destructive and dangerous form, the offense had nothing to do with the occasional desire of a commoner for meat; it constituted instead both a symbolic and real assault by one member of the gentry against another and often involved serious injury, destruction of property, and loss of honor, or what Evans calls “disparagements” (31). For such offenses, usually treated as a form of riot in the courts, recourse to the Court of Star Chamber was fairly common and appropriate.²³ In the case of Falstaff, the motive for the poaching is unclear. Both the theatrical and social contexts imply that drunken sport was the most likely motive, with perhaps the addition of a riotous challenge to Shallow and the social order in general. Since Falstaff needs money, however, the motive might also have been economic. Commercial poaching became a major problem at the turn of the century, and inns and alehouses were well-known distribution points in the illicit trade; speaking in Star Chamber in 1616, James I complained “of Ale-houses, for receipt of Stealers of my Deer.”²⁴ Much of the venison sold illegally in London, moreover, came from the grounds of Windsor Castle.²⁵ Whatever Falstaff's motives, it is clear that Falstaff has not only “beaten” Shallow's men, “kill'd” his deer, and “broke open” his lodge (111-12), but assaulted his dignity: “If he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire” (2-4). The raid, in short, constitutes a symbolic assault.²⁶

Why, then, does Shallow let the matter drop? Because Falstaff out-maneuvers him procedurally by admitting his crime outright. When Shallow demands “this shall be answer'd,” Falstaff's replies give him little choice but to allow Page's efforts at informal mediation:

FAL.
I will answer it straight: I have done all this. That is now answered.
SHAL.
The Council shall know this.
FAL.
'Twere better for you if it were known in counsel. You'll be laugh'd at.

(114-19)

Implicit in this exchange is not only the recognition of both men that Falstaff might have influence at court but that Shallow would disgrace himself by invoking the Star Chamber for a relatively minor offense. Crucial to the legal process in cases of poaching was a distinction between those who admitted the crime and those who did not. Admission downgraded the offense from a felony, at least technically punishable by death, to a misdemeanor, an offense with less severe consequences.²⁷ By admitting the offense, Falstaff has reduced its severity significantly. Since the Court of the Star Chamber was seriously overburdened with litigation during this period, and since Justices of the Peace like Shallow were under the Court's authority and had numerous formal and informal means to settle such disputes, the likelihood of the Court looking sympathetically upon such a case would have been very small indeed.²⁸ In such circumstances, Shallow would be well advised to follow Falstaff's advice and keep his own counsel. In his quest for justice, Shallow is thus driven back upon his own and the community's resources.

The scene concludes, therefore, not with a summons to the Star Chamber but with an invitation to a dinner of venison pasty. “Come,” says Page, having taken over the peacemaker's role from Evans, “we have a hot venison pasty to dinner. Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness” (195-97). Shakespeare does not stage this dinner, but it seems a very curious affair. Conventionally in Shakespearean comedy, as in Elizabethan society, feasting marks the resolution of conflict and binds society together in a rite of incorporation; in this case, however, the feast seems at best premature, for Falstaff's conflict with Shallow and Slender has not been resolved. This feast, one might say, includes hostility within the festive form itself, as if eating together might bring the kind of peace that a feast would ordinarily celebrate.

Even more curious is the meal itself, which consists of venison. Where did it come from? Literally, the deer is a gift from Shallow to Page, presumably a neighborly gesture intended to foster their proposed family alliance; metaphorically, however, it might be called an inadvertent gift from Falstaff, for, as Shallow's apology to Page makes clear, the deer is one that Falstaff poached: “I wish'd your venison better, it was ill kill'd” (82-83). Shallow's statement probably applies in two senses: the deer was killed illegally and, as a consequence, not properly drained of blood. So the very food itself symbolizes the conflict it is meant to resolve. In a precisely literal way, conflict feeds the community, suggesting that Falstaff's relationship with the community is less parasitic than symbiotic. Instead of marking the end of conflict, the festive form “contains” it, in both senses of the word: conflict is both included and kept in check by the feast. That conflict is not ended by such events becomes clear later, when Ford cites his wife's behavior at the dinner to bolster his suspicions against Falstaff (2.1.234-36).

Perhaps the best gloss on this paradoxical interdependency between peace and conflict, order and disorder is Evans's cryptic response to Shallow's threat of the sword, alluded to earlier: “it is petter that friends is the sword, and end it.” The statement captures the essence of “good neighborhood” as depicted in the play. It suggests, on the one hand, that the best way to resolve conflict of this kind is not through the sword, or even the Star Chamber, as Shallow proposes, but through members of the community, through friends. Evans's peculiar turn of phrase, however, suggests a deeper meaning, establishing an identity between “friends” and “the sword,” as if in taking the place of a duel, the friends themselves were engaged in a surrogate act of violence: “the friends is the sword.” As we have seen, this paradoxical identification of peace and violence occurs implicitly at Page's dinner of venison pasty; it recurs throughout the play, moreover, in ways that challenge conventional distinctions between order and disorder, harmony and conflict. Evans himself, ironically, the cleric and man of peace who offers to “make atonements and compremises” (1.1.33-34) between Shallow and Falstaff, will later enact the paradox when he prepares to meet Caius in a duel. In its linkage of friendship and force, and more broadly, festivity and violence, the play mirrors in comic form the dynamics of conflict in Elizabethan towns. As Keith Wrightson observes, “such equilibrium as local society possessed was the product of a constant dynamism in its social relations and the impetus of this dynamic came, as often as not, from conflict.”²⁹

Falstaff poses a special threat to Windsor society because he is an alien, displaced both geographically and socially. A fallen knight, a former frequenter of the world of the court, he resides temporarily in the Garter Inn, the name of which, like the allusion to the Garter ceremonies at the end of the play, casts an ironic shadow on his present condition. His counterpart as an alien threat to the social order of Windsor is Fenton, who also represents the foreign values of the court. Although the comparison may seem strange at first, the two interlopers are curiously alike. Both do not belong in Windsor. Both have squandered their money and, as Page says of Fenton, have “kept company with the wild Prince and Poins” (3.2.72-73). Both are attracted to the women of Windsor for economic reasons. Both become “lovers,” and, as such, become involved in intrigues to fulfill their desires. Once they take on the role of lover, moreover, their initial economic motivation becomes complicated by sexual and romantic inclinations: disguised as Herne the Hunter, Falstaff revels at the prospect of bedding both of the merry wives, while Fenton eventually persuades Anne that his love is genuinely disinterested and that he would wed her without dowry, which he does. The Host's appreciation of Fenton—“he speaks holiday, he smells April and May” (3.2.68-69)—suggests that the young wooer represents a benign reincarnation of the old Falstaff, just as Anne represents a more admirable and radical independence even than that manifested by her mother, who is said by Mistress Quickly to have the freedom of her house (2.2.116-20). Falstaff's comment on the couple's successful elopement at the end of the play makes Fenton himself a poacher: “When night-dogs run, all sorts of deer are chas'd” (5.5.238). While Falstaff gets fairy pinches for his poaching, Fenton gets Anne, the blessing of her parents, and the money his elopement had put at risk.

Antagonism between the aristocratic world of the court and the bourgeois world of Windsor runs throughout the play; given the proximity of the castle to the town, the tension probably had a basis in social fact. The local patriotism of Windsorites might have been accentuated at the turn of the century, moreover, because of their concerted but unsuccessful effort to persuade the Queen to renew their charter.³⁰ As disruptive agents from the court, both Falstaff and Fenton might be said to turn the bourgeois world of Windsor upside down. “He is of too high a region,” says Page of Fenton, “he knows too much” (3.2.73-74). It is important to recognize, however, that the society of Windsor actually needs the two wily intruders, in much the same way that the little circle of feasters at Page's house needs Falstaff's poaching. Without Fenton, after all, Anne Page would be doomed to marry Evans or Caius, either prospect a fate worse than being “set quick i'th'earth, / And bowl'd to death with turnips!” (3.4.86-87). Without Falstaff, Ford's obsessive jealousy, for which he is already famous, would doubtless seek out other victims, to the misery of his long-suffering wife. The courtly interlopers do not so much turn the world of Windsor upside down as release disorders already simmering within it; they are catalysts for existing social and personal tensions.

As “foreigners,” both Fenton and Falstaff have something in common with two other characters—Evans, the Welsh preacher, and Caius, the French physician. Although to some degree accepted by Windsor society, they remain outsiders, to be treated as comic butts partly for their bizarre behavior, but more consistently for their linguistic deficiencies. Joan Rees's observation about Evans might serve for both characters: “[he] is absorbed into his small town community, certainly, but without honour, dignity or even language, save for a ridiculous version of the tongue of his masters.”³¹ Although both characters are relatively simple as comic types, they occupy complex social positions. Vocationally they are important to the community: Evans is a “curer of souls,” as Shallow observes, Caius a “curer of bodies” (2.3.39). As would have been true in the world outside the play, however, their social status is ambiguous. They are on good terms with the village notables, for example, and Caius has connections at court, but at the same time Shallow, Page, and the Host feel free to make fools of them. The aborted duel provides yet another example of the linkage between festivity and social coercion in the play, for it combines well-meaning merriment, aggression, and public humiliation. Even the Host's act of “good neighborhood” in ordering the combatants disarmed contains an image of violence: “Disarm them, and let them question. Let them keep their limbs whole and hack our English” (3.1.76-78). Like Falstaff's deer, the English language becomes a sacrificial victim, to be hacked and hewn in the interest of social peace. As in Page's dinner of venison pasty, there is no thought here of ending conflict, merely of diverting it into less destructive social forms. As hackers of English, moreover, the two men serve as perpetual outlets for the festive aggression of the community as a whole. They too are “contained” by the community.

The play's most striking instance of trickery as an informal means of social control is provided by the titular heroines of the play, the merry wives. In basing the Falstaff plot upon their witty stratagems, Shakespeare adapts to comic purposes, and subjects to implicit comic scrutiny, a popular form of social control that goes by many names—“rough music,” riding, skimmington, and charivari being the most common.³² Although the charivari took extremely varied forms throughout Europe and England, its essential feature was the public humiliation, by means of raucous noise and symbolic action, of individuals considered guilty of violating social norms. A charivari licensed both festive and derisive laughter, and often included such ritualistic features as processions of armed men, the wearing or display of animals' horns or heads, and mock proclamations, songs, and other kinds of verbal horseplay. The victim or a surrogate was often paraded through the streets on a horse or a wooden pole called a “stang,” and subjected to verbal and physical abuse. The social offenses punished in this manner were almost invariably domestic, and in sixteenth-century England the majority occurred because a wife had physically assaulted or dominated her husband, a situation that almost invariably implied cuckoldry. In such cases the victim might vary: sometimes it was the wife, sometimes the husband, sometimes a surrogate, such as, in one instance, “the next nearest neighbour to the church”³³—the latter choice implying, as we have already observed, the coercive nature of the notion of good neighborliness that underlies the entire custom.

Although the forms of charivari are too varied to allow a single instance to stand as a typical example, one cited by Martin Ingram captures some of the essential features. The event took place on 27 May, 1618, in the small market town of Calne, Wiltshire. Thomas Mills, a cutler, and his wife Agnes, the object of the attack, deposed that, after an earlier and smaller group of men and boys was turned away,

about noon came again from Calne to Quemerford another drummer named William Wiatt, and with him three or four hundred men, some like soldiers armed with pieces and other weapons, and a man riding upon a horse, having a white night cap upon his head, two shoeing horns hanging by his ears, a counterfeit beard upon his chin made of a deer's tail, a smock upon the top of his garments, and he rode upon a red horse with a pair of pots under him, and in them some quantity of brewing grains, which he used to cast upon the press of people, rushing over thick upon him in the way as he passed; and he and all his company made a stand when they came just against this examinate's house, and then the gunners shot off their pieces, pipes and horns were sounded, together with lowbells and other smaller bells which the company had amongst them, and rams' horns and bucks' horns, carried upon forks, were then and there lifted up and shown …

“Stones were thrown at the windows,” continues Ingram, “an entry forced, and Agnes Mills was dragged out of the house, thrown into a wet hole, trampled, beaten, and covered with mud and filth. Her tormentors, however, failed in their final object of riding her behind the horseman to Calne to ‘wash her in the cucking stool.’”³⁴ Agnes's crime, it seems, was having beaten her husband, a crime common enough for Ingram to observe that “the great majority” of such events “in early modern England took place because a wife had physically assaulted her husband or otherwise dominated him.”³⁵

From this description it is possible to imagine something of the social and psychological impulses behind this potentially dangerous form of social control. Raucous, festive, derisive—the event combines festivity and punishment, creating group solidarity through the expression of righteous aggression. Ingram notes that the custom could range from mild satire to vicious assault, with the individuals sometimes reintegrated into the society and sometimes forced to leave. The basic method, a public humiliation symbolically appropriate to the offense involved, was by no means restricted to popular forms of “justice” but was a popular expression of a pattern already employed in the official punishments of church and state, as in the carting of criminals, the shaming of penitents, and the staging of public executions. As E. P. Thompson observes, “until the early nineteenth century, publicity was of the essence of punishment.”³⁶

The social significance of any given charivari would depend upon the specific nature of the occasion and its participants. During the sixteenth century the civic authorities seem to have encouraged and sometimes participated in such events, presumably because they were under local control and seen to complement the work of the legal and church hierarchies. By their very nature, however, charivaris were dangerously unstable and could lead to flagrant abuse, not only by causing serious harm to the victim, but, through riotous behavior and the destruction of property, by inciting further social conflict. Individuals, moreover, could subvert such events to their own purposes, using them to settle old scores either against the victim or other neighbors, or merely to vent lawless and destructive energies. It is even possible that such events were inadvertently subversive of their own apparent ends, by creating among women, the usual victims, oppositional attitudes towards patriarchal authority.³⁷ In the seventeenth century moralistic opposition to charivaris increased, and by 1700 they were declared illegal, although they persisted until the twentieth century.

The equivocal status of such events, which were part festivity and part violent assault, is suggested by the fact that participants commonly referred to them as “sports.”³⁸ Shakespeare's Windsor resonates with a similar use of the term, which is used repeatedly to characterize acts of festive social control that involve public humiliation. Shallow tempts Page to join in the mockery of Evans and Caius with “we have sport in hand” (2.1.197). When Ford invites Page home with him, in hopes of entrapping his unfaithful wife, he promises “you shall have sport” (3.2.80-81); later he assures his witnesses that they may “make sport” at him if his suspicions are wrong (3.3.150), a promise he reiterates during the second search: “If I find not what I seek … let me be forever your table-sport” (4.2.161-62). The most evocative use of the term occurs in relation to the charivari against Falstaff: Page calls the event a “public sport” (4.4.13), and asks later that “Heaven prosper our sport!” (5.2.12); Mistress Page, perhaps usurping the role of peacemaker played by her husband in the opening scene, brings the charivari and play to an end by inviting all the participants to “laugh this sport o'er by a country fire” (5.5.242).

Although many details of the charivari are absent from Shakespeare's play, the essence of the form has been preserved in the structure of Falstaff's experience. Falstaff offends against the domestic and social order by attempting to seduce Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, thereby cuckolding their husbands, and in return the society as a whole subjects him to public and symbolically appropriate humiliation. It is important to note, however, as will become clear later, that Falstaff's charivari proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, he is subjected to two symbolic punishments of a relatively private sort, under the exclusive control of the wives: he is first hidden in a buck basket and dumped into the Thames, and then disguised as the old woman of Brainford and beaten. Taken by themselves, these episodes hardly require consideration of the charivari, for such revenge-tricks appear in many plays. In the second stage, however, which takes place under Herne's oak at midnight, Falstaff is subjected to symbolic punishment and public humiliation at the hands of the entire community, children included. This climactic episode, with its mixture of festive and derisive laughter, its use of disguise (including the wearing of the antlers of a stag), its mocking songs and wordplay, its physical abuse, and its raucous noise, adapts the social custom of the charivari to comic theater.

By invoking the charivari, Shakespeare not only brings into the drama the social resonances of a customary popular form; he subjects the form itself to the critique of comedy. For a contemporary Elizabethan audience, Shakespeare's most dramatic departure from social convention would have been the reversal of gender roles in the relationship between punisher and punished. Although the vast majority of charivaris were directed at aggressive and sexually threatening women, the victim in this play is a man. The agents of social justice that undo him, moreover, are strong, aggressive, and sexually secure women. In adapting the charivari, then, Shakespeare has taken a ritual form that threatened women with patriarchal punishment and inverted it, making it a means whereby women achieve their comic revenge. In this sense, the play confers upon married women some of the license of the unmarried and disguised heroines of the romantic comedies. In the Merry Wives, the women are subject to the patriarchy, as wives, yet they find in what Mistress Page calls the “sport” (5.5.242) of the charivari a form that enables them to assert a temporary power and freedom. The clash between comic and social form, between matriarchal license and patriarchal restraint, invites among audiences critical reflections upon popular forms of social justice.

The comic revenge inflicted upon Falstaff by the wives is developed in such a way as to accentuate its anti-patriarchal implications. The motives for the revenge, for one thing, are distinctly personal, an expression of the individuality and friendship of the two women; neither woman responds to Falstaff's overtures as an assault upon the good name of her husband, or upon the domestic order. Their outrage springs from his assault upon themselves. Their revenge, moreover, cuts a wide swath. In the first instance, it is directed against Falstaff alone. Falstaff, however, is also a surrogate for Ford; he is not only a potential cuckoldmaker but a salaried representative of the potential cuckold himself. In serving the will of a man named Ford, Falstaff is dumped in a “ford”—“I have my belly full of ford” (3.5.36-37), he laments—beaten as someone from “Brainford,” and forced to wear the horns that Ford sees upon his own head.³⁹ He is also hidden in a “buck” basket, which Ford punningly identifies with his own cuckolding: “Buck! I would I could wash myself of the buck! Buck, buck, buck!” (3.3.157-58). The wives make clear, in addition, that behind the individual targets of both the seducer and the jealous husband lies the patriarchy. “Heaven forgive me!” shouts Mistress Page as she reads Falstaff's letter of seduction, “Why, I'll exhibit a bill in the parliament for the putting down of men” (2.1.28-30). This modulation from the particular threat to the general is itself characteristic of the charivari, which can attack either the offender or a surrogate, and which in practice treats the offender as a representative of womankind.

Falstaff's misadventures at the hands of the women, therefore, are appropriately gendered. His first punishment is to be taken out of Ford's house in a buck basket and dumped into a muddy ditch. In 1618, we recall, Agnes Mills was “thrown into a wet hole, trampled, beaten, and covered with mud and filth.” In Agnes's case the symbolic intent, it seems, was to cover her with filth that represented her crime, filth being closely allied to sexual misbehavior, and then to cleanse her symbolically “in the cucking stool.” Something of the same motif seems embedded in Falstaff's punishment, for although Mistress Ford directs that he be dumped into “the muddy ditch close by the Thames side” (3.3.15-16), the punishment is also linked to the bleaching of sheets, and the victim actually ends up in the Thames itself, as he reports later, drenched and with a bellyfull of water.

The episode is comical for many reasons, not the least of which is its feminist attack on domesticity. Cleanliness is next to godliness, and Falstaff's soul needs whitening as much as Mistress Ford's dirty linen. The comedy is heightened by Falstaff's unaccustomed prissiness as a wooer. In his overtures to Mistress Ford he assumes the role of an effete courtier, and his Sidneyan posturing—“Have I caught thee, my heavenly jewel?” (3.3.43)—bespeaks a fastidiousness that will be severely tested by a buck basket of foul linen. The messy business of dealing with soiled linen is women's work, of course, as Mistress Ford reminds her husband in the midst of his questioning about the destination of the buck basket: “Why, what have you to do whither they bear it? You were best meddle with buck-washing” (3.3.154-56). Falstaff is forced to meddle with buck-washing, and one result, as he tells Ford, is an assault upon his olfactory senses—“the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril” (3.5.92-93).

Falstaff's second punishment is just as clearly conceived as a woman's revenge. This time he is disguised, says Mistress Ford, as “my maid's aunt, the fat woman of Brainford” (4.2.75-76). This woman is not merely fat, having a gown large enough to fit Falstaff, but she is old and detested by Master Ford, who believes she is a witch: “He cannot abide the old woman of Brainford. He swears she's a witch, forbade her my house, and hath threat'ned to beat her” (4.2.85-87). And Ford is as good as his word. He beats the disguised Falstaff out the door while hurling insults: “you witch, you rag, you baggage, you poulcat, you runnion! out, out! I'll conjure you, I'll fortune-tell you!” (4.2.184-86). In this instance, Falstaff is not merely dirtied by contact with woman's work; he is beaten by taking on the role of a woman who is in some ways a female counterpart. She is old; she is fat; she is unmarried; she is not of the town of Windsor. Whereas Falstaff can overcome these limitations, after a fashion, the woman of Brainford is victimized by them, as Falstaff discovers feelingly. Simple, whose name suggests his capacity as a speaker of unconscious truth, calls the woman “the wise woman of Brainford” (4.5.26-27), and Slender enters the inn later to seek out her advice. Falstaff admits to the Host that there was a wise woman with him, and “one that hath taught me more wit than ever I learn'd before in my life” (4.5.59-61).

Falstaff's words are belied by the rapidity with which he accepts another assignation, and his failure to learn justifies the escalation of private trick into the public ritual with which the play concludes. The modulation between specifically female and more generally communal sanctions occurs when the wives, having satisfied their desire for private revenge, decide to inform their husbands of their actions and to defer to them for any further vengeance. “If they can find in their hearts the poor unvirtuous fat knight shall be any further afflicted,” says Mistress Page, “we two will still be the ministers” (4.2.216-19). Mistress Ford anticipates the likely response of their husbands, and accepts its merit: “I'll warrant they'll have him publicly sham'd, and methinks there would be no period to the jest, should he not be publicly shamed” (4.2.220-22). What Master Page later calls a “public sport” (4.4.13) no longer expresses the individuality of the wives but the outrage of the husbands and the community as a whole. As in the romantic comedies, the female protagonists of this play willingly relinquish the power of their own festive liberty in the interest of traditional community values. It is important to recognize, however, that in doing so they take on the untraditional role of “ministers” of the charivari, and that the charivari itself remains untraditional in being directed against a male. While one cannot call this theatrical gesture revolutionary, it suggests the possibility of progressive social change within the patriarchy, as it both absorbs and is modified by potentially rebellious female energies. As elsewhere in the play's vision of social harmony, the final situation of the wives implies an unstable equilibrium, a continuing social tension that has both destructive and creative potential.

The “public sport” directed against Falstaff at the end of the play is designed to chasten rebellious energies at their most dangerously antisocial. The sport combines the two forms of symbolic assault embodied in the charivari and poaching. As a man, in disguise as Herne the Hunter, Falstaff is subjected to the raucous humiliation of the charivari. As a deer, he is poached. If he is a “Windsor stag” (5.5.12-13), as he says he is, and if, as has been argued, the scene is set in the Little Park of Windsor Castle, then the townsfolk are “poaching” the Queen's deer.⁴⁰ When the townsfolk conduct their hunt, they resemble a band of poachers: they assemble at night, they wear disguise, they blow hunting horns, they chase their chosen victim, and they encircle him in preparation for the “kill.” Their motive, as in poaching, is not venison but punishment and humiliation. As he kneels in abject terror, Falstaff embodies in a single image the fate of the butchered deer and the dishonored landowner in a poaching raid. The play begins with Falstaff poaching Shallow's deer and ends with the townsfolk poaching the rascal Falstaff.

Shakespeare's merger of the charivari with poaching is not surprising. As forms of extra-legal social control, they both have much in common. They bring together bands of people acting in festive and punitive consort; they feature raucous behavior and noise; they attack their victims often through surrogates—deer, neighbors, or spouses. Some instances of poaching were themselves designed as charivari, as when the inhabitants of seven villages in Nottinghamshire, including a bailiff, parson, and schoolmaster, joined in a raucous and festive massacre of George Wastnes's deer, in retaliation for his allowing deer to damage tenants' crops and the manorial woods.⁴¹ The form of charivari that has most in common with Falstaff's punishment, indeed, enacts symbolically a hunt. In the Devon stag-hunt, a surrogate figure disguised as a deer is chased through the streets and symbolically but realistically “killed” on the victim's doorstep.⁴²

Falstaff's disguise, however, makes of him a complex and equivocal symbol.⁴³ On the one hand, he is associated with the destructive energies of nature. He wears the costume of Herne the hunter, an image that links him not only to his own activities as a poacher of deer and women but to the folklore of Windsor, which tells of a hunter who hanged himself on Windsor oak and haunts the place, and to the legendary figure of Herne, the savage Celtic god who leads wild hunts at night. The antlers he wears also link him to Actaeon, who, as John M. Steadman has shown, had become a conventional emblem of lust.⁴⁴ Falstaff himself glories in the role of the stag, whose sexual prowess he emulates: “For me, I am here a Windsor stag, and the fattest, I think, i' th' forest. Send me a cool ruttime, Jove, or who can blame me to piss my tallow?” (5.5.12-15).

Although the symbolism of Falstaff's disguise centers upon destructive sexuality, the horns he wears are deeply equivocal, for they represent not only sexual potency but, in relation to the cuckold, emasculation. The horns are thus paradoxically a symbol of sexual power and weakness, just as Falstaff is both a potential cuckold-maker and a surrogate for the potential cuckold, Ford. In one disguise, then, Falstaff plays the role of both male victimizer and male victim. By making Falstaff so obviously a surrogate for Ford, Shakespeare calls attention to the ways in which the victims of the charivari, even if guilty of breaching social norms themselves, may well be scapegoats for social tensions that lie outside their control.

When measured against reports of charivaris, the treatment of Falstaff is relatively benign. Nonetheless, he is burnt with tapers, pinched by “fairies,” made the butt of derisive laughter, and exposed as a fool before the entire community. It is difficult to imagine a stage representation of the event that would not create sympathy for Falstaff, especially since the action mimics the form of the hunt, with horns sounding offstage, the antlered Falstaff hurling himself face-down on the ground, and the “fairies” encircling, pinching, and burning him with tapers. In that sense the central image of the punishment is the ritual killing of the hart or stag, an image that Shakespeare always treats with pathos, most notably in the death of Caesar in Julius Caesar. Having begun the play as an “ill-killer” of deer, Falstaff ends it as a deer himself, the poacher brought down by another extra-legal “sport.” The pathos is tinged with irony, however. Falstaff's mock-death parodies that of the heroic Talbot in 1 Henry VI, who rallies his encircled troops to act like “English deer … in blood, / Not rascal-like, to fall down with a pinch” (4.2.48-49). Although he sees himself as a Windsor stag in blood, Falstaff falls down even before he is pinched.

Of the two possible ways to end this charivari against Falstaff—expulsion from the community or reintegration—Shakespeare chose the latter. In keeping with the realistic tone of the play, however, and the nature of his comic victim, Shakespeare provides no gestures towards conversion on Falstaff's part and no feast as a ritual of social communion, merely a “posset” by a “country fire” (5.5.171, 242). Although nonplussed by his experience, which includes a barrage of taunts from the wives, husbands, and Evans, Falstaff remains resilient, able to vent his frustration by assaults upon the Welsh preacher, whose linguistic infelicities make him a safe and enduring object of attack: “Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English? This is enough to be the decay of lust and late-walking through the realm” (5.5.142-45). Falstaff draws strength not only from the thrusts of his wit but from the image of virility that his escapade has somewhat unexpectedly thrust upon him. The discovery of the marriage of Anne and Fenton, moreover, affords him a final laugh at his tormentors. His quip at their expense precipitates not only Mistress Page's neighborly invitation to “laugh this sport o'er by a country fire” (5.5.242) but the comical swaggering of Master Ford, whose final taunt ends the play: “Sir John, / To Master [Brook] you yet shall hold your word, / For he to-night shall lie with Mistress Ford” (5.5.244-45). The allusion to honor, and the sardonic use of the title, “Sir John,” highlight the degree to which Falstaff continues to threaten both Ford's sexual and social status.

Charivaris, the civic authorities feared, could have unforeseen consequences. In the midst of the well-designed plot against Falstaff, Anne Page and Fenton elope, to the dismay not only of Slender and Caius, both of whom discover that they have married boys, but of Mistress Ford and her husband, whose separate and competing plots have been foiled. In this victory of Anne and Fenton over the older generation, Shakespeare further complicates the motif of the charivari with the conventions of comedy. As we have seen, Fenton and Falstaff are in a curious way mirror images. At the end of the play, however, their fates diverge sharply. While the town joins together to punish the threat of rampant sexuality ironically represented by the aging Falstaff, another illicit suitor, who “capers,” “dances,” and “has eyes of youth” (3.2.67), is secretly marrying Anne Page. At the end of the play both Falstaff and Fenton stand before the community as social rebels, but Falstaff stands alone and humiliated, while Fenton stands with Anne, his equal in rebellion, and triumphant. By admitting his poaching at the very beginning of the play, Falstaff evades punishment; by admitting his marriage at the end, Fenton gets a reward. Whereas Falstaff's degraded version of court life threatens the community of Windsor, Fenton's, equally and more permanently rebellious, renews it. Although Anne's rebellion against the marriage market goes no farther than a husband of her choice, this in itself is a significant social gesture, and one that goes beyond the more domesticated rebelliousness of Mistress Ford and Mistress Page.

To pursue this vein, however, and to draw political, social, or economic conclusions from the ending of The Merry Wives, is to enforce a closure that the play itself resists. Critics who take such a tack generally see the play as socially conservative, and its conclusion as a celebration of Windsor's ability to resolve conflict without significant social change.⁴⁵ One could mount a progressive, if not radical, challenge to this apparent consensus by accentuating the recognitions of the protagonists, the residual power of the wives, and the infusion of new values into the community by the elopement of Anne and Fenton. Either view, however, risks oversimplifying the complexity of the social vision that makes the play most distinctive. Although it is the protagonist of the play, the community of Windsor is finally neither celebrated nor attacked, merely embodied with comic realism—a realism that cuts to the paradoxical quick of town life in a way that is difficult to generalize in political terms. If the play tests the popular custom of the charivari against the festive expectations of comic form, it also tests the capacity of comedy to resolve the social tensions that give rise to such customs.

The comic irresolution of the play's final scene is appropriately embodied in the figure of Mistress Quickly, whose actions throughout the play travesty the notion of “good neighborhood.”⁴⁶ She is the go-between, the peace-maker, whose indiscriminate good will serves Caius, Shallow, Fenton, and Falstaff. Her motives are obscure, especially to herself. Busybody, trickster, bawd, prude, she is as happy fostering illicit marriages as she is furthering the punishment of Falstaff for lechery. Although her achievements are uncertain at best—Fenton and Anne prosper through their own device, and Falstaff is foiled through the devices of Mistress Page and Mistress Ford—her energy and resiliency make her irrepressible. As the Fairy Queen, she achieves a comic apotheosis, ensuring through her fairy power the virtue of Windsor Castle and the Order of the Garter and bringing Falstaff to “trial-fire” (5.5.84) for his lechery. She and her fairies disappear, ironically, before the outcome of her own plots to marry Caius, Shallow, and Fenton is known. Any social order that depends upon such a presiding spirit is unlikely to be stable.

The play ends more or less as it began, with a “posset” and “a country fire” taking the place of a dinner of “venison pasty” as the backdrop for attempted social reconciliation. One thing has changed, permanently: Anne Page and Fenton are married. The charivari against Falstaff, moreover, and the revelations of the young lovers have provoked a social catharsis, leaving the citizens, for the moment, at least, emotionally purged and enlightened. Essentially, however, the town remains as it was. Whether outsiders like Falstaff and Fenton will eventually be assimilated, or even uneasily “contained,” as are Caius and Evans, is left uncertain; perhaps they will both return to a more courtly environment. Whether Ford's obsession has been broken is also unclear, especially in view of his final taunt against Falstaff. Shallow's complaints against Falstaff are unresolved, as are the Host's against Caius and Evans, whose revenge has left him without his horses. The future roles of the wives, too, are left somewhat in doubt: Ford's concluding taunt not only mocks Falstaff but asserts his sexual mastery over his wife, and even Page invites Falstaff to “laugh at my wife” (5.5.172) in anticipation of his success in the wedding plot. The play's vision of social life, while comic, is distinctly unsentimental, suggesting the resiliency of the community and its capacity to absorb conflict, but suggesting as well that conflict is only absorbed, never resolved, and that social tensions are paradoxically both creative and destructive of social order. The town of Windsor will survive, but any peace it achieves will be restless and unstable, for “good neighborhood” carries the motto that “friends is the sword” and is nourished by “ill-killed” deer, whether poached from Shallow or pinched by fairies in Windsor Forest.

The Merry Wives is not a play about hunting. But the town of Windsor, as befits a royal seat located near both the Little and Great Parks of Windsor Castle and the immense tract of Windsor Forest, is touched at many levels by the culture of the hunt. Its gentry give venison to cement relationships, threaten poachers with the Star Chamber, go birding, imagine themselves with buck's antlers when anxious about cuckoldry, and devise charivari that make full use of the ritual of the hunt. When confronted with an alien poacher, the citizens unite, transforming the hunter into the hunted. And the mark of their unity, ironically, the charivari, is itself poaching in another guise—a kind of rough justice, a symbolic assault by means of which the offender is harassed and humiliated for social deviance. In its representation of Falstaff as the “stag” of Windsor Forest, the comedy of The Merry Wives captures something of the rough humor of poaching, in which society both destroys and renews itself in the “killing” of rascals.

Notes

1. The pun is clear from Holoferne's lines in Love's Labor's Lost describing the deer the Princess has killed: “The deer was (as you know) sanguis, in blood, ripe as the pomewater …” (4.2.3-4).

2. Although the Oxford English Dictionary places the first appearance of the latter meaning of “embossed” no earlier than 1641, it is used in this sense in reference to a stag hunt by Florio in Montaigne's essay, “Of Cruelty,” published in 1603; see The Essays, trans. John Florio (1603; facs. rpt. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1969), 249 (the page is marked erroneously, 237).

3. The most influential treatment of Falstaff's resurrection from this perspective has been C. L. Barber's; see Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; rpt. Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1968), 205-13. For an account of the folk-plays, see E. K. Chambers, The English Folk-Play (1933; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), and Alan Brody, The English Mummers and Their Plays (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970); Brody includes photographs of the Bromley horn dancers (figs. 5, 6).

4. J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 25-31.

5. See Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 10, and William Harrison, The Description of England, ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), 132. Harrison notes that if “the inferior sort of artificers and husbandmen” come upon a piece of venison and a cup of wine” at a feast, they imagine themselves to have “fared so well as the Lord Mayor of London.”

6. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan Van Dorsten, eds., Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 97; a crowder is a fiddler.

7. John E. Housman, ed., British Popular Ballads (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1952), 177; further citations to this edition are indicated parenthetically by stanza.

8. It is possible that the ballad is also echoed in the witches' prophecy in Macbeth. The witches tell Macbeth that “none of woman born” shall “harm” him (4.1.80-81). In the ballad, Percy meets Douglas's challenge with the assertion that he has never feared single combat with any man: “Nethar in Ynglonde, Skottlonde, nar France, / nor for no man of a woman born, / But, and fortune be my chance, / I dar met him, on man for on” (st. 21). He repeats the words in stanza 35.

9. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 49.

10. An extreme version of this tendency may be seen in the Coburg Hunting Chronicle of the Emperor Maximilian, written in 1499-1500. Images from the Chronicle are reproduced in William A. Baillie-Grohman, Sport in Art, 2nd edn. (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1919); figure 113, for example, which depicts the weighing of stags, shows about fifteen corpses meticulously lined up according to size in an enclosed field full of dogs, hunters, horses, and carts.

11. The Oxford editor, T. W. Craik, provides a useful survey of these issues in The Merry Wives of Windsor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1-13, 48-63. See also Leah Marcus's convincing treatment of the Quarto and Folio as independent texts in “Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 168-78, and Barbara Freedman's thoughtful challenge to the conventional arguments surrounding the questions of date and occasion: “Shakespearean Chronology, Ideological Complicity, and Floating Texts: Something is Rotten in Windsor,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994): 190-210. Arthur F. Kinney has extended Marcus's approach to the texts of the play; see “Textual Signs in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Yearbook of English Studies 23 (1993): 206-34. In view of Marcus's argument, I should note that my interpretation is directed primarily to the Folio text, which highlights the locale of Windsor. The edition of the play in The Riverside Shakespeare, which I cite parenthetically throughout this study, is based on the Folio.

12. R. S. White, The Merry Wives of Windsor (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 2.

13. Anne Barton, “Falstaff and the Comic Community,” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”, ed. Peter Erickson, and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 142.

14. Linda Anderson, A Kind of Wild Justice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 68.

15. For the generalizations in this paragraph, see Peter Clark, “A Crisis Contained? The Condition of English Towns in the 1590s,” The European Crisis of the 1590s, ed. Peter Clark (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 45; David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 33; and Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 149-82.

16. Wrightson, English Society, 150.

17. Ibid., 157.

18. Keith Wrightson, “Two Concepts of Order: Justices, Constables and Jurymen in Seventeenth-Century England,” in An Ungovernable People, ed. John Brewer, and John Styles (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 24.

19. Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman (1942; rpt. The Hague: Krips Reprint Company, 1960), 382.

20. Wrightson, English Society, 51.

21. Ibid., 51-57.

22. See Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England,” Past and Present 105 (1984): 86, and Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 50.

23. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 68

24. The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles H. McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 342.

25. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 160, 164, 167.

26. If Shallow represents Sir Thomas Lucy, as seems to be the case, and if the satire commemorates Shakespeare's own poaching as a youth, then the episode includes an additional kind of symbolic assault, identifying Shakespeare, delightfully, with Falstaff; see above, p. 20.

27. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 188.

28. Resolutions in the Privy Council for 1582 and 1589 attempted rather ineffectually to shift the burden of private complaints to other courts, unless they concerned, as stated in the 1582 resolution, “‘the preservacion of her Majesties peace or shalbe of some publicke consequence to touche the government of the Realme’”; see Sir William Holdsworth, A History of English Law (London: Methuen, 1903), 1: 498.

29. Wrightson, English Society, 61.

30. Rosemary Kegl, “‘The Adoption of Abominable Terms’: The Insults that Shape Windsor's Middle Class,” ELH 61 (1994): 265. Kegl also provides a useful account of the ineffectuality of Shallow and Evans as representatives of legal and ecclesiastical authority.

31. Joan Rees, “Shakespeare's Welshmen,” in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Vincent Newey, and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 38.

32. Other critics have noted the relevance of charivari to the play; for especially helpful comments, see François Laroque, “Ovidian Transformations and Folk Festivities in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and As You Like It,” Cahiers Elisabethains 25 (1984): 23-36, and C. Gallenca, “Ritual and Folk Custom in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Cahiers Elisabethains 27 (1985): 27-41. As far as I am aware, no critic has dealt with the play's reflections upon charivari, or with the tensions created by adapting such a social form to comic ends.

33. Ingram, “Ridings,” 86.

34. Ibid., 82.

35. Ibid., 86.

36. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), 480.

37. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 140.

38. Ingram, “Ridings,” 96.

39. For an insightful treatment of the complex relationship between the two characters, see William C. Carroll, The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 183-202.

40. In his reproduction of Norden's 1607 map of Windsor Castle, William Green situates Herne's Oak within the Little Park; see Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), fig. 2.

41. Manning, Hunters and Poachers, 153; see also 157 and 218-19.

42. See Thompson, Customs, 470-71, and Theo Brown, “The ‘Stag-Hunt’ in Devon,” Folklore 63 (1952): 104-9. Although probably of ancient origin, this brutal sport is not recorded until well after the Elizabethan period.

43. Jeanne Addison Roberts treats the ambiguity of Falstaff's role in the final scene with particular insight; see Shakespeare's English Comedy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 110-16.

44. John M. Steadman, “Falstaff as Actaeon: A Dramatic Emblem,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 231-44.

45. G. R. Hibbard, for example, sees the play as endorsing “the values of the Elizabethan bourgeoisie, the class from which its author came and to which he belonged”; see his edition, The Merry Wives of Windsor (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1973), 14. George K. Hunter takes a similar view, arguing that Shakespeare implicitly endorses the efforts of Windsor to resist social change; see “Bourgeois Comedy: Shakespeare and Dekker,” in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1986), 14. Peter Erickson sees the image of the Garter and the triumph of Fenton as justifying the aristocracy, although he concludes that male anxiety about female rule prevents Shakespeare from endorsing the power of the state; see “The Order of the Garter, the Cult of Elizabeth, and Class-Gender Tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” in Shakespeare Reproduced, ed. Jean E. Howard, and Marion F. O'Connor (New York: Methuen, 1987), 126-34. Rosemary Kegl notes that the restoration of order by the wives reinforces “the play's more general sense that town gentlemen are the ideal custodians of both the town and the nation” (“Adoption,” 272).

46. Both the Quarto and Folio texts assign the role of Fairy Queen in act 5 scene 5 to Mistress Quickly. During the preparations for the scene, however, Mistress Page says that “My Nan shall be the queen of all the fairies, / Finely attired in a robe of white” (4.4.71-72). The discrepancy has led some directors to substitute Anne for Quickly in the role; see Peter Evans, “‘To the Oak, to the Oak!’ The Finale of The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Theatre Notebook 40(1986): 106-14.