SOURCE: Wall, Wendy. “Why Does Puck Sweep?: Fairylore, Merry Wives, and Social Struggle.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52, no. 1 (spring 2001): 67-106.

[In the following excerpt, Wall studies the relationship between the play's treatment of fairylore and Elizabethan conceptions of social order. ]

Why does puck sweep? At the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon and his troupe of fairies enter the Athenian palace to bless the aristocratic newlyweds as they set out to consummate their marriages. After waxing lyrical about screeching predators and demonic spirits, Puck describes his nocturnal mission as an oddly mundane hallowing: “I am sent with broom before, / To sweep the dust behind the door” (5.1.389-90).¹ When the fairies saunter casually into the ducal palace, the magic that had been located specifically within the forest is unleashed onto Theseus's domestic, if hyperrational, human sphere. In this moment, class tensions and marital disputes are also overshadowed by the play's culminating interest in aristocratic reproduction. But why in helping to achieve this closure does the mischievous Puck play the role of housewife? Why does the reproduction of the social world, a goal at the very heart of romantic comedy, rest on a task usually too banal for representation—disposing of dirt left in domestic corners? Why introduce a homey image in a play concerned with the grand affairs of state or the chaotic force of the imagination, one situated, albeit loosely, in the remote world of classical Athens?

I suggest that Puck's sacred sweeping links good housewifery with dramatic closure and political authority and, for the brief moment that it does so, allows a glimpse of an Englishness founded on principles that the play has not generally endorsed—the vernacular broadly defined. As Puck assumes the part of the very English Robin Goodfellow, the exotic mythological realm to which he is attached expands to include local and domestic associations that reverberate oddly with the flexible civic monarchy that founds social order in Dream. Shakespeare's later comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor repeats but perhaps helps to clarify this curiosity, for the fairies who emerge in its final scene produce a different but equally unexpected moment of disjunction. Why would housewives, who have figured so prominently in this play, seemingly turn away from their domestic province to dream up a fairy spectacle in the forest? How does attention to ethereal spirits square with the play's interest in the foundational status of prosaic household life? By positioning domesticity and “popular” discourse differently, A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor test the range of early modern connections among housewifery, class status, and fairylore. In putting forth this claim, I should make clear that I attempt neither to recover some discrete entity called “the popular” nor to establish how truly widespread, oppositional, or lower-class a particular belief system might be in a given period. Instead I look at how drama represents the “consumption” or “use” of something designated as popular by different social groups.² Fairylore becomes a channel through which Shakespearean drama grapples with the class-specific practices that subtend debates about English community in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries; and it is this broader debate—about domestic ideology and community—that I hope to illuminate by scrutinizing two of its local dramatic instances.

Folklorists suggest that fairy discourse spanning many centuries designates belief in these spirits as both domestic and fading; that is, it constitutes a belief system held reverently until just recently, such that “believers” simply represent the unenlightened part of any given culture. As recipients of fairy tales, children (a term signifying differently over the centuries) constituted a privileged group who could still cling, temporarily, to a belief system that many would be encouraged to renounce when they entered adulthood. Children marked the site of the culture's continuity with a legendary past, even when the myth of this fading system was false; that is, even when many parts of the population still believed fervently in fairies or never had done so at all. Two evolutionary narratives were at work: early modern writers projected an individual chronological evolution for elite children, who had to renounce folktales as part of their initiation into upper-class adulthood, as well as a broader historical evolution for fairylore. The child's temporary immersion in a domain designated as imaginative (the fantasy space inculcated in the domestic world) rehearsed the historical diachronic tale of the whole culture's march toward enlightenment.

Who served as gatekeepers to this illusory past world? Erasmus pointed specifically to early child care when arguing that a boy's proper humanist education should center on “high” canons rather than lower-class forms:

a boy [may] learn a pretty story from the ancient poets, or a memorable tale from history, just as readily as the stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives' fairy rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and serving women. Who can think without shame of the precious time and energy squandered in listening to ridiculous riddles, stories of dreams, of ghosts, witches, fairies, demons; of foolish tales drawn from popular annals; worthless, nay, mischievous stuff of the kind which is poured into children in their nursery days?³

Ballads and tales are damaging, according to Erasmus, because of their superstitious content as well as their mode of transmission. In fact, these two features fuse, as the tales of lower-class women supposedly derive from the printed ballads that threatened to infantilize adults. What the lower classes are imagined to consume becomes identical with what “old wives” whisper to elite children in their “nursery days,” with the result that nondiscriminating readers of cheap print are coded as immature. Erasmus hints that the aristocratic household also risked class hybridity, since serving women opened the door to the “mischievous stuff” that filled young minds. What Erasmus does is to construct “fairy rubbish” as a discourse of the popular in arguing for its eradication; and he associates the popular with the embarrassing secrets of “our” past. His comment bespeaks a widespread practice, Renaissance and contemporary, in which the reality of multiple social groups is reduced to a two-tiered model: popular/elite, vulgar print/ancient poetry, humanistic pedagogy/vernacular domesticity. If female domestic workers are dangerous conduits for “foolish” knowledge, returning to a home tainted by their influence produces a shame that secures these binaries.

Erasmus's concerns might be understood within the story of humanism's transformation of education and its attempt to mark and privilege particular forms of knowledge. Despite this effort, “mischievous stuff” seeped into the poetry and history that Erasmus held dear, intermingling with classical traditions in many sites, including London theater. The fact that A Midsummer Night's Dream is steeped in fairylore and Ovidian tradition indicates that dramatists readily joined popular influences with erudite lineages of knowledge. But isn't it significant that domestic laborers and popular forms were conjoined so thoroughly in the early modern imagination—even if that association was designed as a slur? Is it not noteworthy that people associated fairy stories with serving women and domestic work—in short, with the material relationships hovering around the household and childhood?⁴ Drawing on the burgeoning fairy tradition of ballads, poems, and oral culture—one in which sprites could represent the values of gentry, yeoman, courtiers, or citizens—plays suggest the complicated role that the household played in the project of conceptualizing England's social order.

HOUSEHOLD “BUGS”

Erasmus was not alone in attributing belief in fairies to uneducated people and in using female domestic workers to symbolize a backward population. Numerous self-professed “enlightened” skeptics identified fairies as part of a dead or idolatrous belief system. In The discouerie of witchcraft, Reginald Scot placed fairies both within a past agrarian world and within the imaginations of contemporary nurses and mothers who sought to use the specter of spirits to frighten children into obedience. “In deede your grandams maides were woont to set a boll of milke before him [an incubus] and his cousine Robin good-fellow, for grinding of malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight,” writes Scot about the custom of rewarding fairies for nighttime work.⁵ Not simply the practice of servants, fairylore formed the past that continues to haunt a tenuously identified first-person plural. “But in our childhood,” Scot continues,

our mothers maids have so terrified us with an ouglie divell having hornes on his head, fier in his mouth, and a taile in his breach, … they have so fraied us with bull beggers, spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, fairies, satyrs, pans, faunes, sylens, … dwarfes, giants, imps, calcars, conjurors, nymphes, changlings, Incubus, Robin good-fellowe, the spoorne, the mare, the man in the oke, … and such other bugs, that we are afraid of our owne shadowes.⁶

In their drive to classify fairies either as obsolete knowledge or as the domain of a female work force, early modern writers demonstrate how potent and persistent these “bugs” were as figures for a particular kind of influence. Erasmus's suggestion that fairies constitute a vital belief system (“nowadays”) is credited by evidence from non-literary sources, which indicate that large parts of the population were avid believers in many types of spirits. Interested in discrediting fairylore, Scot links it to lower-class domestic forms of knowledge and, most generally, to behavioral control—the moment when an earlier and vulnerable self was coerced into obedience through mystification. Recognizing “bugs” as illusory seems to be the first step toward throwing off the shackles of intellectual imprisonment ironically forged by marginal parts of the population. After all, who wants to admit to being controlled by servants and women?

While Scot saw the entire genre as the weapon of women's domestic tyranny, other writers viewed spirits as a source of collective mirth. In Tarltons newes out of purgatory the narrator dreams that the ghost of the theatrical clown Richard Tarlton appears, offering tales of the afterlife prefaced by an assurance:

although thou see me heere in likenes of a spirite, yet thinke me to be one of those Familiares Lares that were rather pleasantly disposed then indued with any hurtfull influēce, as Hob Thrust Robin Goodfellow and such like spirites (as they terme them of the buttry), famozed in every old wives Chronicle for their mad merrie prankes. Therefore sith my appearance to thee is in resemblance of a spirite, thinke that I am as pleasant a Goblin as the rest, [and I] will make thee as merry before I part, as ever Robin Goodfellow made the coūtry wenches at their Creamboules.⁷

Tarlton's ghost identifies “pleasant” spirits not only by their domestic habitation (as Familiares Lares or Roman household tutelary gods) but also by the “old wives” who beheld them. In this appreciative linking of women and the supernatural, Robin Goodfellow is rehabilitated through his classification with the folk heroes of a comfortingly familiar world. In identifying Robin with merry household spirits and country servants' stories, the narrator, like Erasmus, defines fairies with “popular knowledge,” but he does so in order to validate the imaginative world of country dwellers as the unofficial chronicle that Londoners are presumed to know.

The impulses to privilege an educated urban citizenry or to champion a return to the delights of common folk were not as distinct as one might imagine. As the antics of fairies increasingly appeared in ballads, poems, pamphlets, and plays, the reputed beliefs of gossips, old wives, and milkmaids became available for multiple readerships. Michael Drayton's 1609 courtly poem Nimphidia: The Court of Fayrie opens by commenting on the stupendous popularity of fairies, whose “Elfish secrets” have never been truly told:

Another sort there bee, that will
Be talking of the Fayries still,
Nor never can they have their fill,
As they were wedded to them;
No Tales of them their thirst can slake,
So much delight therein they take,
And some strange thing they faine would make,
Knew they the way to doe them.(8)

The pleasure that merry country women take in entertaining sprites finds a complementary register in the courtier's eroticized appetite for “strange” subject matter. Drayton's courtly text marks the old wives' tale not as the vulgar subject of household talk but as the alien matter that elite readers hungrily claim and metaphorically marry. If fairies were the purview of children and nurses, then this rapacious thirst for outlandish talk shows how easily the domestic could become the uncanny.

When George Puttenham terms a figure of speech a “changeling” in his Arte of English Poesie, he not only consolidates the connection between women and fairies but explains the class hybridity attached to this lore:

The Greekes call this figure [Hipallage] the Latins Submutatio, we in our vulgar may call him the [underchange] but I had rather haue him called the [Changeling] nothing at all sweruing from his originall, … and pleasanter to beare in memory: specially for our Ladies and pretie mistresses in Court, for whose learning I write, because it is a terme often in their mouthes, and alluding to the opinion of Nurses, who are wont to say, that the Fayries vse to steale the fairest children out of their cradles, and put other ill fauoured in their places, which they called chāgelings. …⁹

In a rhetorical conduct manual here addressed specifically to courtly ladies and an upwardly mobile audience, Puttenham notes that noblewomen perpetuate stories derived from childhood nurses. The figure of the familiar serving woman haunts the corridors of the court in the form of a local knowledge compelling enough to warrant its inclusion in an anatomy of erudite language. In this sense vulgar nurses continue to speak through “pretie mistresses” so as to provide the terms in which they can memorize and learn new practices. What “Nurses … are wont to say” echoes in the polite speech of courtiers, where it is identified as the feminized vernacular counterpart to Greek and Latin terminology, the repertoire of courtiers and Londoners as well as country wenches. In this way the text conflates social groups (represented by courtier and nurse) with conceptions of domesticity (the familiar now exoticized).

Thomas Churchyard suggests a similarly ambiguous delight in popular lore when he imports country fairies into his 1592 royal pageant, A Handeful of Gladsome Verses. Glossing supernatural events that hover around ordinary domestic acts, he writes about wives who discover monsters as they roast crabs at night, maids scared of hobgoblins, Robin Goodfellow skimming cream bowls, and spirits who smash plates when “foule sluts” fail to scour the pewter.¹⁰ The “world full merry was, / And gossips made good glee,” Churchyard notes with nostalgia over this simpler, albeit dizzyingly fantastic, lifestyle.¹¹ Although he apologizes for including vulgar subjects in royal encomia, he does so only after linking fairies to a golden world—England's pastoral days of yore and each person's domestic roots. Churchyard implies that disregard for his “base” subject matter reveals a pronounced want of taste. Fairies could thus be positioned not only as the abject belief system jettisoned in the culture's march toward progress but also as the pastoral life endangered by the social ills of the present world. It is the world, good or bad, that people forgo when they supposedly mature, and, as such, it remains the object of fascination as well as disgust. “Famozed in every old wives Chronicle,” as Tarltons newes claims; the talk of courtly ladies; vulgar yet desirable, merry but frightening—fairylore comprised a common and commonly disavowed knowledge.

Fairies made their most frequent appearance in English literature between 1570 and 1625, making the Renaissance a critical period in the establishment of fairylore as well as the time in which the modern features of fairies came into being.¹² Although our impressions of fairies are indelibly colored by those ethereal beings from the Victorian era, it was only in the seventeenth century, following the work of Shakespeare and Drayton, that the concept of the fairy as a delicate, miniature, and essentially benevolent spirit became the norm. Medieval fairies were neither friendly nor cute but were instead considered an arm of evil. By the sixteenth century fairies began to be dissociated from the devil as they mutated in popular tradition into child-sized country pranksters who wore coarse clothing and busied themselves with fooling travelers and tinkering with household order. Spenser's vision of the fairy kingdom (populated with creatures derived from medieval romance and Celtic tradition) was not the norm in literary discourse. According to Katharine Briggs, the main types of fairylore available to writers in sixteenth-century England included: 1) the “trooping fairies” of Celtic legend, which subdivided into the aristocratic heroic spirits of medieval romance and their rustic descendants, the child-sized fairies of popular tradition; 2) the more ominous hobgoblins associated with devil worship, witchcraft, or paganism; 3) mermaids, water sprites, nature fairies, giants, monsters, and hags; and 4) the miniature fairies of Continental oral tradition.¹³ The most common fairy incarnation was the rustic creature of folk tradition, who in the sixteenth century was lumped indiscriminately with elves, mermaids, giants, fairies, and even the English hobgoblin called Robin Goodfellow, a descendant of agricultural deities sometimes attached to evil. As human or child-sized fairies began to shrink into those precious spirits familiar to modern audiences, they absorbed the characteristics of country fay, namely, a fanaticism about cleanliness, housework, and chastity as well as a love for waylaying travelers, merriment, and shapeshifting. Although having the power to levitate, these spirits oddly concerned themselves with the material rhythms of human work and leisure.

In its literary incarnations the folk fairy tradition underwent a change in late-sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century England.¹⁴ Country fairylore blended into classical mythology, with the result that demonic spirits were rehabilitated and became less sinister, elves and hobgoblins were assimilated into the fairy kingdom proper, and domestic nosiness spread to all classes of fairies as their chief identifying feature.¹⁵ Cultivated by a growing national consciousness, this transformation foregrounded precisely those figures, such as Robin Goodfellow, who were hailed as “native English” stock, while downplaying spirits with links to German and Scandinavian folklore.¹⁶ Since it was specifically coarse spirits with an interest in domestic work who were specific to England, this synthesis of traditions had the effect of diffusing national sentiment into popular legend.¹⁷

The best-known hobgoblin of this period found his fullest textual elaboration in a 1628 pamphlet called Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes, and merry Iests. In this collection of diverse tales fairies make nocturnal visits to households where they reward housemaids for jobs well done or pinch “sluts” for creating “ill ordered houses.”¹⁸ Like the brownies, those supernatural workers from Scottish fairy tales who inspired the American girl-scout troop of that name, fairies would not only compensate good housework but actually join in the tasks of cleaning. In this text Oberon impregnates a country maid, the result of which union is the rough and hairy Robin Goodfellow. Thus assimilated into the fairy kingdom, Robin sheds his sinister and pagan characteristics. While using his shapeshifting powers to aid honest folks and play mischievous pranks, Robin's central preoccupation is with eroticism and domesticity. He disrupts lascivious male courtships, engages in adulterous affairs, and insistently patrols women's work in the home. The frame tale of Robin Good-Fellow creates him as the product of entertaining female talk in the countryside.¹⁹

Robin Goodfellow gradually becomes identified as the arbiter of good housekeeping. In Samuel Rowlands's More knaves yet? this pleasant “deuill” is an inveterate inhabitant of the dairy and the mill, with a privileged knowledge of a domain coded as female and lower-class:

Amongst the rest was a good fellow deuill,
So cal'd in kindnes, cause he did no euill,
Knowne by the name of Robin (as we heare)
And that his eyes as broad as sawcers were,
Who came a nights and would make Kitchins cleane,
And in the bed bepinch a lazie queane.
Was much in Mils about the grinding Meale,
(And sure (I take it) taught the Miller steale)
Amongst the Creame bowles & Milke pans would be,
And with the Country wenches, who but he
To wash their dishes for some Fresh-cheese hire:
Or set their Pots and Kettles 'bout the fire.(20)

Located within the landscape of the household, Robin becomes intimately associated with pots, cheese, and women's beds. Pinching maids, grinding meal, and scrubbing the kitchen, he makes eroticism and work seem natural allies. Both enabling and playfully disrupting daily rhythms, Robin serves as a heuristic device not only for galvanizing women to work but also for rendering a fully anatomized housewifery into exotic myth. The idea that serving women transmitted fairy stories was thus not the only domestic component to fairy fantasy, for the spirit's most prominent characteristic was a deep interest in the details of household life. The content of fairy tales had a class and gender coding separate from their location in the mouths of nurses and buttery maids. As industrious workers, fairies were not just the ignorant belief system against which humanists liked to tilt, for they began to be associated with (even as they eroticized) the values of stewardship, diligence, and œconomia so dear to the “middling sort.”²¹

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century husbandry books, cookbooks, conduct manuals, and sermons reveal a concerted attempt to rehabilitate domestic work and make people of rank take interest in the cultivation of land and in trade. Old gentry found their wealth threatened by an encroaching yeomanry that exhibited an entrepreneurial spirit about land management.²² Due to changes in the labor population, a consequence of the shift from feudal to wage labor and the shrinkage of large households, elite property owners were forced to develop efficient methods in order to keep their lands. In the wake of increased urbanization, specialized production, and the rise of service centers, the economy changed indelibly, enlarging to include a new “middling sort” of the population and a more affluent yeomanry.²³ Exemplifying this new entrepreneurial spirit, husbandry books and domestic manuals concerned with the material details of household production flooded the book market. Charging that aristocratic consumption was a moral failure deteriorating the nation, these books sought to instill a work ethic in country gentry and to champion England's true anticourtly character. The first English cookbooks tellingly distinguished themselves from their Continental counterparts by addressing noncourtly female readers.²⁴ Women at all points on the social spectrum were urged to embrace the middle-class ideology of the “good wife,” which fused virtue with industry.²⁵ In shaping an audience of prosperous household managers interested in the specifics of up-to-date household work, these books placed domesticity at the fore of economic issues and made it a touchstone for marking “proper” definitions of social groups.

When literary and performance texts of the period make fairies a heuristic device for exploring collisions between ostensibly “high” and “low” social groups, they touch on this debate about domesticity. Drayton's Nimphidia presents the almost schizophrenic class divide within fairy representations made to embody chivalric and popular traditions simultaneously, for he burlesques the plot elements of heroic romance by rendering valiant warriors in miniature form, and he shows courtly fairies to belie an interest in the drudgery of housekeeping.²⁶ In Jonson's “Entertainment at Althrope” (first performed in 1603) Queen Anne and Prince Henry are greeted by a satyr who delights in importing fairies from the dairy into the grandeur of royalty's presence:

This is Mab the mistris-Faerie,
That doth nightly rob the dayrie,
And can hurt, or helpe the cherning,
(As shee please) without discerning.(27)

But if the fairies' ability to transport a butter churn into a royal encomium is seen as quaint, Jonson's later masque Love Restored shows that these two worlds are not so easily reconciled. While courtiers are invited to revel in the antics of the rustic Mab at Althorp, they are directed by this later spectacle to scrutinize their own sophistication. As an “honest plaine countrey spirit, and harmelesse,” Robin Goodfellow is repeatedly excluded from the court; Whitehall has no place for a spirit that “sweepes the harth, and the house cleane, riddles for the countrey maides, and does all their other drudgerie, while they are at hot-cockles.”²⁸ Robin succeeds in gaining access to the masque only by having his “costume” of broom and candles mistaken by the audience as a theatrical “deuice.”²⁹ Robin thus ruptures the exclusivity of the court by embodying a fantasy. The joke is on the court, however, for Jonson uses this moment to criticize courtly foibles and satirize the nastiness of elite society.

In Grim, the Collier of Croydon, Robin's decision to escape the corrupt courtly society and return to his country roots provides a sharp satire of high living: “These silken Girles are all too fine for me,” he declares:

My Master shall report of those in Hell,
Whilst I go range amongst the Country maids,
To see if home-spun Lasses milder be
Than my curst Dame. …(30)

In this play, banqueting on exotic foodstuffs is the sign of the bad œconomia that inevitably produces a “loose” house (one simultaneously unproductive, unlocked, and adulterous). Although he takes pleasure in foiling housewives, Robin concludes that a modest country maid is more true than ladies of means; thus he chooses country life by choosing its women. Fleeing demonic sophistication, the “home-spun” Robin champions a rural world removed from the depravity of hyperrefined society.

I suggest that two aspects of fairylore blended in the cultural imagination: domesticity and a “low” country workforce defined in patent opposition to the court or the site of humanist “high” learning. Since the countryside was often touted as preserving an agrarian self-sufficiency threatened by market forces, fairies could be enlisted as arbiters of individual virtue critical to a yeomanry faithful to the tenets of good housekeeping; that is, servants' labor was easily recruited to support the ideology of the middling sort.³¹ Yet something remains to be said about the fairies' interest in sexual, as well as class, trespass. While fairies sometimes punish licentiousness (as in The Faithful Shepherdess), their activities inevitably engaged them in the erotic life of maids. In John Lyly's 1591 Endymion fairies don't merely supervise household work but instead pinch saucy mortals who try to view the Queen of Stars. But in the anonymous 1600 Maydes Metamorphosis fairies are not the guardians of forbidden and eroticized spaces but their most successful intruders. In their nocturnal appearances spirits leap into maids' gowns, peep beneath their frocks, and nip at their sleeping bodies.³² And in Thomas Campion's 1601 Booke of Ayres, Proserpina is so eager to encourage ladies to feed on amorous delights that she sends out fairy minions to punish those not properly sympathetic to their paramours.³³ In this odd representation fairies reverse their typical mission of safeguarding female virtue. Whether protecting honor or provoking desire, fairies surface as gatekeepers to an explicitly sexualized and work-centered world.

As the title-page image in Robin Good-Fellow makes strikingly clear, Robin Goodfellow is defined by both domestic and sexual escapades. In this woodcut, Robin appears as a gigantic bearded satyr with hairy breeches and hoofed feet, holding a priapic scepter in one hand and a broom in the other. Circled by miniature, vaguely demonic spirits, he has an erect penis protruding from his pants. … Perhaps this mixture of household sweeping with a slightly sinister eroticism is not surprising, since Oberon and his crew are described as regularly swooping down on the mortal world to dally with women's “sluttery,” both their domestic shortcuts and their wayward desires.³⁴ And in Robin Good-Fellow, Robin's bawdy songs are intermixed with provocative advice about housework:

Maydes in your smockes,
Looke well to your lockes,
And your Tinder-boxe,
Your wheeles and your rockes,
Your Hens and your Cockes,
Your Cowes and your Oxe,
And beware of the Foxe,
When the Bell-man knockes.
Put out your fire and candle light,
So they shall not you affright:
May you dreame of your delights,
And in your sleeps see pleasant sights. …(35)

This song veers from practical advice about guarding household property into a fantasy of what young girls in their “smocks” behold in their “pleasant sights.” The innocent blessing of dutiful maids mutates into speculation about the pleasure women take in dreaming. In these moments the household is imagined as a place of female enclosure, locked tight and protected by a watchful maid—but not protected from the gaze of the surveying ethereal male advisor. The fantasies and habits of serving women mark the site of a sexualized domestic nostalgia, as Robin's secretive trespass joins stories in which fairylore itself threatens to recede into a national and personal past. As Drayton's amused description of the court's avid desire for fairy stories implies, the erotics of the fairy world could bleed into their form of representation; that is, stories about fairies' entry into the fantasy life of women seep into the wistfulness or disgust that writers express about old wives' tales.

Fairies were inconsistently represented: they sometimes punished bad housewifery, sometimes worked laboriously, and sometimes simply danced among the trenchers in the kitchen as magical footnotes to the materiality of the house.³⁶ In the English cultural imagination their attachment to domestic work made them multifaceted emblems of vernacular culture. For elite audiences they signified the exotic or vulgar hominess of serving women; for the middle part of the population they enabled a critique of elite neglect for life's basics; and for general audiences they simply marked the threat or comfort of a “familiarity” inscribed in the rural roots of Londoners, native traditions, or the mythological space of childhood itself. Rather than merely demonstrating evidence of the widening gap between popular and elite cultures, fairylore casts light on how this two-tiered model was constructed discursively in the period, as well as showing the presence of a middling sort that complicated the model.³⁷ Because fairy discourse cut across class lines, its reputed and intertwined class assignments (rather than its “true” class position) should be the object of our inquiry. Fairy belief was not the province of one specific social group but served as a discursive field that could be activated in diverse ways to produce alliances and stratifications. As such, fairylore offered a storehouse of fantasies of recovery, popular “home” traditions that could never be fully absorbed or renounced. As an institution catering to multiple social groups, the London stage presents a particularly interesting site for looking at how fairy discourse was taken up by different constituencies in early modern England. …

THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED WIFE

The Merry Wives of Windsor works through the contradiction implicit in the incongruous image of a fairy servant sweeping the court, for it presents faux fairies whose service to the court is simply a ruse orchestrated by pragmatic housewives and citizens. Here the ideology of œconomia that flickers dimly in Dream becomes the centerpiece for a play thoroughly immersed in the world of pots and pans. Unlike Puck and his spritely crew, the fairies in Merry Wives play a relatively small and belated part in the drama, for they appear only in the conclusion. Yet these fairies significantly emerge as the culmination of the townspeople's domestic and community projects. As illusory projections of the middling sort, these co-gendered fairies extend the merry wives' domestic authority beyond the household into the reach of the court, forest, and myth. Here children posing as spirits rehearse the final court blessing from Dream as a hoax designed to establish their fabricated credentials as fairies. Their demystified status, as the real unreal, punctuates the play's interest in the governing power of everydayness, a point to which I will return. While critics have reached opposite conclusions when they look to this scene for evidence of the play's view of monarchy, they tend to agree that the court isn't the ultimate determining factor in Windsor's community.³⁸ Yet the play's climactic fairy performance does offer a salient clue as to how we should read the Windsor citizens' relationship to popular lore, aristocratic status, and English subjecthood.

Merry Wives's fairies extend Puck's casual sweeping into a full-scale cleansing of the royal palace. But fairy praise for the court and its esteemed Order of the Garter ritual serves as a mere detour in the drive to purge Falstaff of what is misrecognized as his sexual licentiousness (it is, in fact, a desire to steal money from citizens). At the heart of the fairies' disciplining is a story about protecting money and social class as well as correcting the flaw of presumption. Rather than guarding the fertility and status of the aristocracy, as do Oberon and Titania, these fairies dabble with those further down the food chain: they seek to safeguard the property and authority of citizens from encroachment by the upper classes. Thus in Merry Wives, Shakespeare returns fairies to a more predictably homey milieu, showing how a citizen ethic could assimilate popular myth precisely by foregrounding its domestic components. Commerce, industry, and work pervade the very fabric of Merry Wives, such that the fairies' regard for housework serves as the culmination, rather than the repressed subtext, of this play. Since citizens in this plot enact a project devised by housewives, Merry Wives makes the gendered aspect of fairylore congenial to middle-class self-identifications.

In a much-cited study of the play's politics, Peter Erickson suggests that the subversive energies of the wives' control over marital and community relations are contained by conventional class arrangements. Contradictions in gender and in class, he argues, stem from the contradictory authority of Queen Elizabeth, who legitimated female authority only by affirming social hierarchy. Erickson sees this problem as encoded in the Folio's final allusion to the Order of the Garter, the elite chivalric society established by Edward III and used effectively by Queen Elizabeth.³⁹ In his analysis the play finally erodes the wives' authority by reinscribing it within the terms of the court—within Elizabeth's normative terms, so to speak. Wives can be merry and powerful only when they invest their chaste power in the iconography of the queen. While Erickson argues that this middle-class investment in aristocratic ideology belies male anxiety about a female-centered court, it nevertheless makes monarchy the ground of all meaning. Reading the local and national politics of the play, Richard Helgerson supports Erickson's argument by detailing ways in which a highly local early modern domesticity is relentlessly produced in the play as the object of national and aristocratic appropriation.⁴⁰

In my view, however, the play's representation of domesticity and fairylore undermines the endorsement that Erickson and Helgerson describe.⁴¹ Instead of an unhampered celebration of the court, the Folio's final fairy scene—which is campy, stylized, and clearly over the top—parodies courtly values. Rather than limiting the power of citizen housewives, this scene shows that housewives and castigating fairies are the generative grammar enabling the community to consolidate in Windsor. In foregrounding the faultlines between aristocracy and citizen and between Englishman and foreigner, Merry Wives mystifies gradations of status (e.g., collapsing the differing interests of yeoman, townsperson, local and national justices, wage servants). Yet it clearly unsettles the assimilation of popular folklore within a court-centered national mythology.⁴² For while the village rejuvenates itself as a merry old England by using everyday practice to patrol linguistic, social, and sexual improprieties, the England it produces is not one defined within the peculiar province of the court.⁴³ Even in the more urban-oriented quarto version of the play, which Leah Marcus has argued persuasively to be a credible and separate variant, a fairylore attached to housewifery ends up underpinning the ideology of citizens in Windsor—or elsewhere.⁴⁴

CLEANING HOUSE IN WINDSOR

In the final scene of the Folio Merry Wives, Pistol, disguised as a hobgoblin, introduces the puckish spirits who will torture Falstaff for his attempted seduction of Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford:

Elves, list your names; silence, you aery toys!
Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap;
Where fires thou find'st unrak'd and hearths unswept,
There pinch the maids as blue as bilberry;
Our radiant Queen hates sluts and sluttery.

(5.5.42-46)

In this version the debauched knight and slovenly housekeepers are mutually defined in opposition to the stainless chastity of the radiant Elizabeth. By convening fairies to reprimand bad housekeeping and to maintain the hearth, Pistol equates domestic supervision with the sexual management exemplified in the head of state: both reprove “sluttery.” And, as Hugh Evans's subsequent instructions make clear, the fairies are sent to oversee moral conduct as well as labor:

Go you, and where you find a maid
That ere she sleep has thrice her prayers said,
Raise up the organs of her fantasy,
Sleep she as sound as careless infancy;
But those as sleep and think not on their sins,
Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, sides, and shins.

(5.5.49-54)

Although negligent maids are unsurprisingly bruised, pious workers are oddly rewarded with pleasing fantasies that return them to infancy. While a serving maid's excellence in housewifery marks moral innocence, her reward for self-discipline seems to smack of sexual pleasure, the erection of her “organs” of “fantasy.” The fairies' nocturnal delights, seen so clearly in Robin Good-Fellow, seem strangely out of place in this play, since the whole performance of popular ritual is designed to banish Falstaff's overweening fantasy. Windsor's expulsion of “lust and luxury” (l. 94), a scapegoating ritual that Jeanne Addison Roberts sees as re-enacting ancient seasonal folk rituals and Marcus sees as mimicking the charivari of early modern Europe, becomes a task performed as fairy housewifery. Since Falstaff is made to play the part of the wayward court maid subject to the castigation of housewife and queen, Merry Wives uses popular tradition to analogize community, household, and court.⁴⁵

But the fairies are, of course, putting on an elaborate act for Falstaff, conjuring up a counterfeit supernatural world in order to strike fear into his heart. Falstaff's belief—“They are fairies,” he exclaims (l. 47, emphasis added)—is the stuff of farce, amplified by his ridiculous headdress of horns and his pathetic daydreams about bestial orgies. Dreaming of aphrodisiacs falling from the heavens and imagining himself as Jove, Falstaff cuts a ridiculous figure fully in tune with the fairies' chant about the maid's fantasizing organs. Connecting the fairies' ethical housekeeping with the queen's chastity is quite evidently a fiction designed to gull someone foolish enough to misread thrifty wives for unchaste ones. Falstaff's actual punishment lies at the hands of a community empowered by women who don't mind engineering a masquerade Fairy Queen.

In the 1602 quarto, Pistol is not present to steer the elves to Windsor. Instead, Parson Evans directs the fairies to commercial as well as rural locations:

… go to the countrie houses,
And when you finde a slut that lies a sleepe,
And all her dishes foule, and roome vnswept,
With your long nailes pinch her till she crie. …
go you & see where Brokers sleep,
And Foxe-eyed Seriants with their mase,
Goe laie the Proctors in the street,
And pinch the lowsie Seriants face.(46)

Instead of serving a luminous queen who guards the chaste industry of maids, these elves move between countryside and town. “The folio version of Merry Wives is a comedy of small-town and rural life, steeped in rustic customs and topography, but also imbued with the ‘high’ presence of the royal court,” Marcus writes; “the quarto version is ‘lower,’ more urban, close to the pattern of city or ‘citizen’ comedy.”⁴⁷ Yet even in the commercial environment, the fairies still are galvanized to action by the thought of “lowsie” household servants. Fairy interest in domestic management pervades both topographies.

In the Folio, Mistress Quickly's role as faux fairy queen extends her role as Shakespeare's most notorious housekeeper and highlights the domestic aspect of popular lore. “[T]here dwells one Mistress Quickly,” says Evans of Dr. Caius's house, “which is in the manner of his nurse—or his dry nurse—or his cook—or his laundry—his washer and his wringer” (1.2.3-5). Quickly's self-description two scenes later refuses her translation into “laundry” and shows herself more cognizant of domestic hierarchy: “I may call him my master, look you,” she declares of Caius, “for I keep his house; and I wash, wring, brew, bake, scour, dress meat and drink, make the beds, and do all myself” (1.4.94-97). Having been introduced so emphatically as a servant, housekeeper, and nurse, Quickly makes the stylized purgation of sin evident in the Garter motto, “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (“Evil to him who evil thinks”), into a purification ritual emanating out of her work. “The several chairs of order look you scour / With juice of balm and every precious flow'r,” the Folio Quickly commands her fairy helpers (5.5.61-62).

It isn't just through laundering that domesticity makes an appearance in supernatural ritual, for fairies “scour” stalls by applying flower juice to them. Macbeth's plea for advice from the doctor provides a gloss for this word, for it tellingly links national cleansing with bodily purgation: “What rhubarb, cyme, or what purgative drug, / Would scour these English hence?” (5.3.55-56). Using “flow'rs for their charactery” (5.5.73), the fairies marshal the herbal knowledge that every good housewife was enjoined to master (a component part of tending kitchen gardens, distilling and learning the properties of flowers and spices).⁴⁸ Collapsing the activities of cleaning and healing, Quickly's spirits continue the activities of the two merry wives, who have spent much of the play attempting to repel Falstaff's sexual advances by transforming him into the objects of housewifery. Described as a barely congealed liquid mass of desires subject to dissolution, Falstaff attempts to frame his “old body” as the gross means to a much-needed end (2.2.139); yet the play deflates his bodily pretensions by making him into manageable domestic goods: gross fat puddings (2.1.32), whale oil used for candle wax (l. 65), and cooking grease (l. 68). The wives' attempts to purge him of lust consolidates their role as cooks, home doctors, and housecleaners.⁴⁹ Or, rather, the depiction of moral ordering never strays too far from that of domestic labor. “I think the best way [for revenge] were to entertain him with hope, till the wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own grease,” Mrs. Ford declares (ll. 66-68). Undertaking Falstaff's spiritual reformation, the wives move between figurative and literal acts of purgation, with the result that the household swells to define the ethics and boundaries of the community. Is it any wonder that the chastising fairies later appear specifically as housecleaners?

THE BUCK(ING) NEVER STOPS HERE

If The Merry Wives of Windsor can be said to “dilate,” in Patricia Parker's terms, on a set of puns that discursively frame its meaning, the fairies provide the terminal point for a central discursive tissue emanating from the word buck.⁵⁰ When caught with Falstaff in her home, Mrs. Ford sneaks him past the search party organized by her husband by hiding him in a buck-basket, a tub for soiled laundry on its way to be “bucked,” or bleached. Her husband's blind curiosity about this large, greasy object inspires an odd, somewhat hysterical meditation: “Buck! I would I could wash myself of the buck! Buck, buck, buck! ay, buck! I warrant you, buck, and of the season too, it shall appear” (3.3.157-59). Obsessing on the word buck and airing the family's (or rather his own) dirty laundry to his acquaintances, Ford converts soiled wash into the male horned deer that figures both his sexual vulnerability and his overly lusty rival. His rage manifests itself as a jealous pun marking his inability to see the obvious: the intruder is in the buck-basket. Instead his fixation on the plight of bucks leads him to free-associate on washing the household's sexual threat, identifying Falstaff as a rutting beast and imagining the shape of his own cuckold's horns. It's standard for sexual pathologies in the period to turn on images of deer—“I'll be horn-mad,” Ford cries (3.5.152), and he fantasizes Page as “a secure and willful Actaeon” (3.2.43)—but it is highly unusual for domestic labor, in the form of “bucking,” to dominate this semiotic network. As Ford later says in disgust when he imagines his wife's infidelity: “This 'tis to be married! This 'tis to have linen and buck-baskets” (3.5.142-43).

What Ford has to renounce is precisely a single-minded obsession with domestic space and objects as sites of sexual pollution. Dreaming of monsters sequestered in his house, he takes to such an extreme the role of “good husband”—someone who was to acquire goods and oversee the wife's ordering of material resources—that he threatens the credit and resources of the family. Going so far as to relinquish possession of his household keys (objects as treasured as a modern police officer's weapon),⁵¹ Ford shows what even his friends recognize as “fantastical humors and jealousies” (3.3.170-71).⁵² When Falstaff, trapped in the Ford house, suggests an escape by creeping up the “kill-hole,” Mrs. Ford explains that her husband knows all household recesses by heart: “He will seek there, on my word. Neither press, coffer, chest, trunk, well, vault, but he hath an abstract for the remembrance of such places, and goes to them by his note. There is no hiding you in the house” (4.2.60-64). Long before Falstaff appeared on the scene as a would-be seducer, Mr. Ford apparently acted on this “abstract” by habitually searching his own house. Inventorying the space “by his note,” Ford takes stock of his luxurious furniture—chimney, press, coffer, and vault—only by imagining it as defiled. His attempt to patrol the home's purity in fact leads him to produce its tainting. Testing his wife's honesty by asking Falstaff to seduce her, he complains,

She dwells so securely on the excellency of her honor, that the folly of my soul dares not present itself; she is too bright to be look'd against. Now, could I come to her with any detection in my hand, my desires had instance and argument to commend themselves. I could drive her then from the ward of her purity, her reputation, her marriage-vow, and a thousand other her defenses, which now are too too strongly embattled against me.

(2.2.242-51)

In other words, he needs to dig up dirt on Mrs. Ford to give him leverage in overturning her marriage vows. Ford's pretense belies a truth: although he devises this plan as part of his impersonation of Master Brooke, he does so hoping to tarnish his wife's reputation and confirm his humiliating status as a cuckold. Touching on the discourse of dirt and redemptive cleansing evident throughout the play, Ford becomes an antihouse cleaner who hopes to “drive [his wife] from the ward of her purity” and make her shine less “bright.” Mrs. Page later acknowledges Ford's twisted ambitions when she encourages Mrs. Ford to “scrape the figures out of your husband's brains” (4.2.216). Scraping dirt out of an impure imagination involves showing Ford that he has overattended to the household in a way that ends up rupturing his husbandly responsibilities.

It is appropriate that the Folio text creates a punning joke by having Ford assume the alias “Master Broome” rather than the quarto “Brooke.” If editors did not choose the “bad” quarto's “Brooke” over the more editorially respected Folio, readers would hear Falstaff declare his allegiance to a household utensil.⁵³ Puck's broom, linked to the squalid broomsman or to menial service, surfaces as Ford's domestic alias. His self-transformation into a household object registers less a general anxiety about emasculation at the hands of women, I would argue, and more a desperate concern over the power of household materiality. Hoping to sully his wife's purity, the broomlike Ford is ironically draped in an ensuing scene with soiled laundry and found crying: “Behold what honest clothes you send forth to bleaching” (ll. 120-21). Deliriously looking to torn clothing and laundry tubs for external evidence of his domestic losses, Ford displays a perverse fantasy of wastefulness that sets up the play's prominent dream of domestic recovery.

Ford is not the only character to experience domesticity as a threat. Having been buttered with “greasy napkins” and carried “like a barrow of butcher's offal” (3.5.5), Falstaff describes his dunking in the buck-basket in oddly domestic terms:

I suffer'd the pangs of three several deaths: first, an intolerable fright, to be detected with a jealious rotten bell-wether; next, to be compass'd like a good bilbo in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then to be stopp'd in like a strong distillation with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease. Think of that—a man of my kidney. Think of that—that am as subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw. It was a miracle to scape suffocation. And in the height of this bath (when I was more than half stew'd in grease like a Dutch dish) to be thrown into the Thames, and cool'd, glowing-hot, in that surge, like a horseshoe; think of that—hissing hot—think of that, Master [Brook]!

(ll. 107-22)

In Falstaff's imaginative universe the buck-basket mutates into a limbeck, a dairy cask, a bathtub, and a cookpot, all offering brands of kitchen torture. His mind first converts laundering to distilling, another purifying household activity. A 1631 play called Rhodon and Iris defined an artful housewife simply by saying: “With limbecks, viols, pots, her Closet's fill'd / Full of strange liquors by rare art distilled.”⁵⁴ Wielding this equipment, the housewife refined waters; extracted oils from herbs and flowers; and concocted medicines, alcoholic beverages, and perfumes. “[D]istil your water in a Stillitorie, thē put it in a faire glasse, and take the buddes of Roses … and put the leaues into the stilled water,” advises John Partridge in The Treasurie of hidden Secrets; and Thomas Dawson tells the housewife how to stuff a whole young chicken “well fleshed and not fat” into an earthen distilling jar after hacking its bones.⁵⁵ In a pre-Cartesian Galenic world, where the psychological and the material had not yet divided, it isn't surprising that Falstaff's sexual humiliation and fear of castration (becoming a “bell-wether”) could register as corporeal liquefaction or that these emotions could find a material correlate in the processes by which the body was routinely tended. The degree to which he attaches destruction to domesticity does, however, signal his affinity with Ford, as he unwittingly notes: “I have had ford enough. I was thrown into the ford” (3.5.35-36). He experiences his purgative baptismal bath as threatening his very constitution, or “kidney.”

Falstaff's worry about being heated, stewed, and cooled stems from the period's belief that the humoral body churned unpredictably in a state of disequilibrium and required an almost daily regimen of diets, purges, vomits, sweatings, and enemas. The housewife was enjoined to orchestrate the flow of intake and output for these bodies. An Elizabethan audience would have understood Falstaff's profound fright at being thrown “hissing hot” into the cool Thames, just as they would have seen the interconnection between this purgative treatment (much like a sweating tub) and his venal appetites.⁵⁶ As Paster's work demonstrates, affective relations in the early modern period were shaped by the child's bodily dependence on female healers and caregives. “The repeated bodily phenomenon of the purge,” Paster writes, “perhaps calling up unpleasant early memories of … physical subjection, perhaps calling up pleasurable memories of genital/anal stimulation …, helped to constitute normative forms of bodily self-experience.”⁵⁷ This may explain the sentiment fueling John Cotta's 1612 attack on female medical practitioners, whose deceptively simple staples of milk, broth, and butter were said to mask hidden dangers. In a stunning theological interpretation, Cotta compares the housewife to Eve, whose offering of the apple was the first pharmacological seduction.⁵⁸ And maybe this helps to account as well for John Johnson's 1641 Academy of Love, which depicts men's willing submission to the erotic manipulations of wildly beautiful female purgers, who perform vomits, glisters, and bloodletting as part of courtship ritual. “[P]repare my Bath,” commands a character in Shirley's 1640 Humourous Courtier; “Ile distill and grow amorous.”⁵⁹ Although meant to purify lust, Falstaff's “bath” is read by him as part and parcel of the discursive tissue binding eros to control and to bodily care. The fantasy of Bottom's erotic games in Titania's purgative fairy bower is replayed in this plot through the register of alarm. Yet the controlling forces are not courtly fairies and patriarchal dukes eager to reinstate domestic hierarchy but housewives whose authority in the domus is only credited by the spectacle of male panic.

Describing his symbolic castration (his “crestfall'n” and dried Fall-staff [4.5.100]) as a transformation into the stuff of bootmaking, laundry, and preserving (drying pears), Falstaff imagines the court laughing at him in terms that obsessively repeat acts of housewifery. “If it should come to the ear of the court, how I have been transform'd, and how my transformation hath been wash'd and cudgell'd,” Falstaff worries, “they would melt me out of my fat drop by drop, and liquor fishermen's boots with me. I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits till I were as crestfall'n as a dried pear” (ll. 94-100, emphasis added). He feels compelled, that is, to reproduce endlessly an earlier loss of status, money, and land, now interiorized as court gossip resembling his liquefying romp in the buck-basket. That Ford's desire to “wash himself of the buck” and Falstaff's claustrophobic buck-washing both betray erotic investments suggests more than the axiom that disgust bears the imprint of desire; it indicates ways in which early modern domesticity profoundly stamped registers of emotion and ways of articulating status.

Merry Wives ends up suggesting that male characters have simply perverted an authentic middle-class belief in the interrelationship of work and social life, for the play rescues housewifery as key to community formation.⁶⁰ Unlike Dream, where Theseus and Oberon must regain domestic control in order to stabilize the community, Ford and Falstaff learn, through the grammar of domesticity, to cede authority. As its title may lead us to predict, the play offers a female fantasy in which household labor insures pleasure, profit, and social order. “I know not which pleases me better,” declares Mistress Ford, “that my husband is deceiv'd, or Sir John” (3.3.178-79). The wife's artful pleasure, emanating from her domestic responsibilities, founds the play's final presentation of social order. For while Falstaff sees his body as put in harm's way by mischance, the wives offer a diagnosis that the play as a whole endorses: Falstaff's excessive heat and moisture make necessary the wives' kitchen physic. “We'll use this unwholesome humidity,” says Mrs. Ford, “this gross wat'ry pumpion” (ll. 40-41). Mrs. Page appropriately identifies a curative: “[W]e will yet have more tricks with Falstaff. His dissolute disease will scarce obey this medicine” (ll. 190-92). Alternately presented as negligent maid, gadding “aunt” (the emblem, in Renaissance misogynist stereotypes, of mutability and poor self-control), and unruly object (e.g., a “gallimaufry” or “hodge-pudding”), Falstaff is thoroughly implicated in signifiers of domestic and bodily disorder. Posing as a lusty buck, Falstaff becomes the mere stuff of buck-baskets, putty in the hands of housewives.

In its discursive and thematic interest in bucking, the play implicitly ties its privileging of household work to a defense of laundering. Such a move was necessary because the early modern laundress was a target of social condescension, often labeled as a prostitute and associated metonymically with the dirt she was charged to expel. Both laundresses and wanton women “took up linen” or stripped gentlemen of clothes.⁶¹ Thus an anonymous character book, The Whimzies, bawdily puns when describing the laundress's morning access to gentlemen's bedchambers: “Her young Masters, whom shee serves with all diligence, neede no Cocke but her: shee'll come to their Chambers, and wake them early; and if they have the Spirit to rise, may at their pleasure use her helpe to make them ready.”⁶² Privy to the family secrets marked on clothing and sheets, and mocked for her compromised physical posture in wading into streams and bending over to beat clothes, the laundress was the object of derision and awe: “Shee must not tell what shee sees,” warns The Whimzies.⁶³ Ford's frightened gaze at laundry may be directed toward his wife's behavior, but, in suggesting that only the paranoid and foolish are overly concerned with laundry, it undoes a widespread stereotype.

John Taylor's 1630 “The praise of cleane linnen. With the Commendable use of the Laundres” similarly reverses the laundress's figurative association with dirt by praising the laundress's spotless chastity and capacity for effecting redemption. “I am strucke into admiration,” he says in a preface,

at the undaunted valour, that champion-like doth accompany and constantly defend your chastitie; For you dare in a morning to enter a Gentlemans chamber, to strippe him out of his foule shirt in his bed, to have him at your bare and naked mercy, and then like a vertuous victor, in pittie and commiseration, you put a cleane shirt on his backe, leauing him in a clearere and farre sweeter case then you found him; no doubt but such objects are prouacatory temptations to fraile flesh and bloud: but as I said before, your courage and constancie alwaies brings you fairely off and on, though thousands weaker vessels of mortalitie would bee crak'd.⁶⁴

In his text the laundress's proximity to the “prouacatory temptations” of men's bedchambers only proves her moral fiber. Exposing naked vulnerability, she righteously strips the flesh of its stain, keeping at bay the soiled linen she handles. Dedicating his work to “the most Mondifying, Clarifying, Purifying, and Repurifying, Cleanser, Clearer, and Reformer of deformed and polluted Linnen, Martha Legge, … Snow-Lilly white Laundresse to the Right worshipfull and generous the Innes of Court,” Taylor conflates moral and literal cleansing, with only a hint of the scandal that trails her.⁶⁵ As Quickly and the wives safeguard the community, Merry Wives similarly elevates washing to a social enterprise akin to the skimmington ritual, in which the community would “dunk” an adulterer, female scold, or husband-beater in a local pond. Falstaff's immersion in Datchet Mead shows that the world can be made safe by industrious wives, though fears of the dominating housewife haunt the scene of moral redemption. Falstaff's and Ford's compulsive dread about linens has to do with the domestic worker's command within a newly valued domus, an authority mainly legible in this play as control over sexuality.⁶⁶ In the readily identifiable sexual politics of Merry Wives, then, are found traces of household materiality in the grammar structuring social identifications.

Is it surprising that the Folio ends this prolonged domestic meditation with a fairy blessing of the Windsor court? That fairies mark the collapse of the vulgar laundress and magisterial monarch? In part, the fairies import and tailor the populist aspects of fairy behavior to the enterprise of mocking the aristocrat, for Falstaff's naïve belief in fairies overturns the common gesture in which “low” culture is defined by unenlightened superstition. Locating myth in the hands of the citizenry, the play presents fairylore as the endpoint of its extended exploration of domesticity as a foundational discourse for individual experience and social relations. Falstaff thus appropriately emerges dressed as the buck that Ford glimpsed in the laundry, one who can't keep his mind off bodily fat and household candles. Adorned in horns as Herne the Hunter, Falstaff goes into his romantic rendezvous calling for a purgation: “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).⁶⁷ He then lustily imagines a cross-species orgy: “Divide me like a brib'd-buck, each a haunch” (l. 24).⁶⁸ Having fairy citizens mortify Falstaff's abundant “waste,” the play puns once again on buck—in its meaning as a large belly—here dieted in a fitness program of thrift. With Falstaff substituting for a legendary slutty maid, his wastefulness is reproved by Mrs. Page's plan to bring on the fairies. Falstaff's redemption is thus renarrated within popular myth, as the housewife materializes the “old tale” (4.4.28) of Herne the Hunter, urchins, ouphs, and fairies. The wives argue that staging a vernacular tale allows them to punish Falstaff, eke out a public confession, and “dis-horn the spirit” (l. 63). Gathering “properties” (l. 78), purchasing vizards, and rehearsing parts, the entire community busies itself with the work of producing the spectacle of fairies.

When the housekeeper-fairy queen grandly hails her minions as the “orphan heirs of fixed destiny” (5.5.39), the ceremonial language of moral-domestic redemption begins. Falstaff falls prostrate on the ground in fear, submits to the torture of pinching and burning, and then is ridiculed by the citizens. But the talk still is of buckwashing and bucks: Mrs. Ford lovingly calls Falstaff her “deer,” Ford teases Falstaff about laundry, and Falstaff likens all gulled people to deer. Opening with charges of deer-stealing, a crisis deferred by eating “hot venison pasty” (1.1.195), Merry Wives circles back in its final moments to the discourse of bucking as a way of registering a potentially emasculating domesticity that can be circumscribed within the fantasy of a socially empowering housewifery.⁶⁹ Fairies thus complete a fully domestic scouring, as they labor to “pinch the unclean knight” (4.4.58). The baton of domesticity has been handed from paid housekeeper to indignant housewives to co-gendered punitive fairies whose domestic interests now define their character and function.

While the fairies of popular lore are tailored to fit the purposes of Folio citizens, those townspeople are somewhat thwarted in their attempt to ward off the aristocracy, for Anne Page and the aristocrat Fenton use the cover of the night's havoc to gull the Pages. The scope of domestic disorder widens in this scene, as the conflict between genders and classes disappears momentarily in the wake of a generational struggle, and courtship uncovers the specter of two same-sex marriages brought about by fairy disguises. Both Dr. Caius and Slender steal away a figure whom they believe to be Anne Page only to find themselves with a boy-fairy in tow. The scene thus produces “changelings” of another kind, as the fairy daughter mutates into multiple wayward boys. The daughter's disobedience qualifies the housewives' power in dictating the shape of the community. Folio citizens are bested by a courtier, while the quarto Fenton remains a hometown boy. Either way, the play ends by qualifying the power of housewifery to govern the meaning and use of popular ritual. Positioning Falstaff properly in the social landscape, the fairy pageant pressures parental authority in the Page household and ignites a set of problems not contained by tropes of purification. Dr. Caius has married a boy, and the reproduction of citizens lies with the whims of Anne Page, the only woman in the play not linked to œconomia. While fairies reassuringly bless babies in Dream, Merry Wives's spirits suggest that reproduction and the property transfer it insures can be only tenuously controlled; that is, the popular ritual it so clearly ties to the fantasies of the middling sort can be made to serve many ends.

In dramatizing an old wives' tale, Merry Wives points to the widespread conjunction of female labor, vernacular speech, and popular lore evident in fairy legend, for the play reintegrates Falstaff and Ford into a community founded on right English speaking. The national contours of the community, clearly established by reference to the English tongue and the pointed exclusion of foreigners, are consolidated by having native fairies and English lore affirm citizens' values.⁷⁰ As a self-consciously English comedy, Merry Wives inflects locale, ritual, and speech with nationalist sentiment. In seeing the drama as a mimetic reproduction of experience, some critics take their cue from the play's construction of Englishness: “There is no play of Shakespeare's which draws so unmistakably on his own experience of English life as this,” Felix Schelling argues, “and the dramatist's real source here is indubitably the life of the Elizabethan.”⁷¹ Presenting our only comedic access to a locale imagined to resemble Stratford, this play is unsurprisingly required to be mimetic and truly English.⁷² The homey atmosphere of English life is conveyed by a return to the housewife's reassuring if somewhat alienating domain and by the recoding of popular lore as socially useful for a middle class eager to claim the nation. No more true than Italianate comedies, of course, Merry Wives suggests the audience's (and, apparently, critics' and editors') domestic experience.⁷³

Turning away from their predecessors' appreciation of the play's neoclassical unities of time and place, nineteenth-century scholars embraced Merry Wives's folklore and folded it into the myth of merry old England. A product of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, folklore was fueled by the project of recovering and preserving indigenous traditions often at a remove from institutional learning. Assuming that they could recover an unchanging oral culture of the “folk,” scholars reacted in part against the Enlightenment in concord with the nationalist European movements of the nineteenth century. In England, Merry Wives's fairies validated the portrayal of a quaint old England characterized by a whimsical queen, pastoral bliss, and mirthful citizens. What was, in fact, part of the play's inscription of popular fairylore within middle-class domesticity soon became readable as Shakespeare's immersion in a national lore surely connected to the meads of Stratford. Yet Folio references to the court can't obscure the play's mockery of one aspect of the myth of merry old England which Marcus describes: “a timeless vision of court and countryside in harmonious alliance, of simple rural folk and their superiors, nay even the queen herself, as working reciprocally for mutual prosperity and betterment.”⁷⁴ Indeed in Merry Wives, Shakespeare parodies the assimilation of popular forms and courtly lineage seen in Dream. As a garrulous laundress directs native fairies to sing chants about the Virgin Queen, the play may be said to produce an “Englishness of everyday life”—one that nominates the values of the emergent middle class as the foundational world for which everyone supposedly yearns. Elite citizens, whether in the quarto town or the Folio Windsor, seize on the popular discourse of country value and use it to position Englishness as the preserve of townspeople.

The play's “mimetic effect” in part explains why fairies must be unmasked as mere mortals. Dream's pastoral magic both allowed for the gentrification of popular ritual and broadcasted the elite humanist male fantasy of returning to domesticity. By having fairies appear as the culmination of the citizens' attempts to protect hearth and well-furnished homes from intruders, Merry Wives casts a skeptical eye on the imaginative license of pastoral fantasy and instead locates fairylore in a more workaday domestic realm. Without chalking up their “unreality” to the inherent mimeticism of citizen drama, I would argue that the Windsor fairies' explicitly theatrical status reveals the play's interest in the process of producing popular culture. The ideological configuration of court, polis, and fairy world is thus effected in these plays differently, for the homage paid to the court as a fairy blessing turns so evidently into a class-motivated fantasy. If Titania and Oberon immerse the audience in the pleasurable and anxious return to the childhood household, Merry Wives presents a domestic-national ideology in which housewifery never has to be renounced at all. Indeed domesticity—including sweeping and laundering—remains the cornerstone of community; and Ford's and Falstaff's misguided anxiety about its influence is mocked as a patent flaw of character. Rather than marking a deliciously transgressive place in the elite imagination, the Windsor town fairies instead materialize out of the fabric of household life, and, as such, they function conspicuously to challenge aristocratic claims to popular lore.

Taken together, these two Shakespeare plays reveal divergent ways in which the class-specific elements of fairylore could be taken to represent household and national relations. In the process, both plays expose the potential uncanniness of domesticity, the fantastical quality of everydayness that made submission to household tasks a precarious but formative activity. During a period when the household was seen as modeling and providing the training ground for political order, such an experiment had potentially important implications. Why would fairies be the logical finale for a plot about housewives and laundry? Why does Puck sweep? Thematically tied to a powerful popular lore, his broom, like the Fords' buck-basket, stubbornly recalls the material grounding for household relations as well as their vexed but critical place in the cultural imagination.

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, quotations of Shakespeare in this essay follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. My terminology here is drawn from Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Randall (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984), esp. 1-28. Scholars have questioned popular as an intelligible critical term of analysis or a distinct culture, noting that it sometimes refers to the origin of production, sometimes to cultural objects consumed exclusively by lower classes but produced elsewhere, and sometimes to the most widely shared aspects of any given culture. Arguing that popular forms are not finally extricable from the culture at large and thus can't be distributed to one set social group, Stuart Hall has suggested that we think of popular culture as either a process—i.e., the culture of a people as they actively interweave forms and customs from material and social conditions—or a shifting designation (“Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular’” in People's History and Socialist Theory, Raphael Samuel, ed. [London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981], 227-41). Since people label practices as “popular” for strategic reasons, it seems foolhardy to assume in advance its definition (as authentic, indigenous, politically resistant, or conservative). On debates over the notion of the “popular,” see Peter Burke, “The ‘Discovery’ of Popular Culture” in Samuel, ed., 216-26; Jacques Le Goff, “The Learned and Popular Dimensions of Journeys in the Otherworld in the Middle Ages” in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, Steven L. Kaplan, ed. (New York: Mouton Publishers, 1984), 19-37; David Hall, “Introduction” in Kaplan, ed., 5-18; Tim Harris, “The Problem of ‘Popular Political Culture’ in Seventeenth-Century London,” History of European Ideas 10 (1989): 43-58; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 2-4; and Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987), 3.

3. Desiderius Erasmus, De pueris statim ac liberaliter instituendis (1529), quoted here from William Harrison Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (New York: Columbia UP, 1964), 214. Although we cannot with any surety evaluate the level or breadth of early modern belief in fairies, we can attend to conflicting ways in which that belief, as well as the changing shape of its content, was represented in the culture. On how fairylore demonstrated elite culture's withdrawal from common culture, see Mary Ellen Lamb, “Taken by the Fairies: Fairy Practices and the Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 277-312.

4. For work that draws out the exotic, alien, and freakish features of fairies, see Diane Purkiss, “Are Fairies a ‘Race’? Anthropology, Folklore and the Exotic,” a lecture delivered at the 1999 annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America, San Francisco.

5. Reginald Scot, The discouerie of witchcraft (London, 1584), rpt. (New York: Dover Publications, 1972), 48.

6. Scot, 86.

7. Richard Tarlton, Tarltons newes out of purgatory (London, 1630), sig. B1^v.

8. Michael Drayton, Nimphidia: The Court of Fayrie in Minor Poems of Michael Drayton, ed. Cyril Brett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 124 (ll. 9-16).

9. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 1589 (rpt. fac. Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1968), 143-44.

10. Thomas Churchyard, A Handefvl of Gladsome Verses, giuen to the Queenes Maiesty at Woodstocke this Prograce (Oxford, 1592), sig. B3^v.

11. Churchyard, sig. B4^r.

12. See Minor White Latham, The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and The Faires of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia UP, 1930), 14. Latham argues that in English literature there were few references to fairies before mid-sixteenth century but abundant allusions in Scottish literature. After the 1553 English publication of the Scottish translation of The Aeneid, fairies began to appear in English translations of Virgil and Ovid and then saturated English literary texts.

13. Katharine Briggs, The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare's Contemporaries and Successors (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1959), 12-24.

14. The current critical debate among scholars of fairylore seems to be about chronology: was a native tradition of large and dangerous spirits erased when Renaissance writers penned darling and diminutive fairies? Latham argues that Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream single-handedly destroyed a living belief system by reducing fairies to inconsequential beings (176-218). Briggs counters this argument by pointing out that a tradition of tiny beings already existed on the Continent before Dream was performed, so Shakespeare can be indicted only for importing a foreign fairylore into England.

15. On changes in fairylore, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 608. Thomas defines fairylore as a “store of mythology rather than a corpus of living beliefs” in the Elizabethan period (608).

16. See Latham, 8, 25-27, and 222.

17. See Latham, 26 and 222. In Ben Jonson's masque Oberon the Faery Prince the satyrs identify Oberon and his fairies as having “rough, & rude” forms (Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52], 7:351).

18. Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes, and merry Iests (London, 1628), sig. A4^r.

19. Briggs argues that fairies became a popular motif for literary writers because church prosecution of heresy declined enough in the Elizabethan era to permit an older belief system to surface in benign form (18). Briggs's theory perhaps naively assumes a time when fairies didn't hover unstably between the real and fantastical, when they were not the product of avid belief tainted by skepticism. Nevertheless, she convincingly tracks the ways in which fairies increasingly became identified as “literary” machinery, the stuff of self-conscious legend.

20. Samuel Rowlands, “Of Ghoasts and Goblins” in More knaues yet? The Knaues of Spades and Diamonds (London, 1613) sig. F2^v.

21. The poetry of Robert Herrick may seem an exception, for Herrick includes fairy antics in his descriptions of popular rural pastimes. Despite the occasional poem devoted to cleaning, Herrick's evocations of the countryside emphasize the festivity of popular rituals rather than daily work: his poetic creatures are more inclined to go a-maying than to wash pails; see, e. g., “The Fairies” in The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. F. W. Moorman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), 201. Leah S. Marcus argues in The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1986) that Herrick creates a self-conscious rural mythology that smacks of seventeenth-century royalism. But at the turn of the century, the court's interests were not yet so insistently identified with those of the countryside; indeed the yeomanry was often in tension with the court about regulation of land and taxation. Since the fractious political tensions that would split the realm in civil war had not yet solidified into the ideological faultline that Marcus suggests, these earlier invocations of fairies gracing the countryside didn't necessarily indicate a Cavalier outlook (140-68).

22. See Andrew McRae, “Husbandry Manuals and the Language of Agrarian Improvement” in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, eds. (Leicester and London: Leicester UP; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 35-62; Joan Thirsk, ed., Vol. 4 (1500-1640) of The Agrarian History of England and Wales, H.P.R. Finberg, gen. ed., 8 vols. in 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1967-91); and Joan Thirsk, “Making a Fresh Start: Sixteenth-Century Agriculture and the Classical Inspiration” in Leslie and Raylor, eds., 15-34.

23. See Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1982); and Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women's Work in England, 1500-1660 (New York: Columbia UP, 1987), 11-32. On the “middling sort” as a social category, see Theodore B. Leinwand, “Shakespeare and the Middling Sort,” SQ 44 (1993): 284-303.

24. Though the first English printed cookbook—This is the Boke of Cokery (1500)—addressed elite male readers, subsequent English cookbooks, including John Partridge's 1573 The Treasurie of commodious Conceits & hidden Secrets …, Hugh Plat's 1602 Delightes for Ladies …, and Gervase Markham's 1615 The English Huswife …, were addressed to women.

25. See Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1987), 36-61; John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Houshold Gouernment … (London, 1630), sigs. F4^v-F8^v; and Patrick Hannay, A Happy Husband or, Directions for a Maide to choose her Mate (London, 1619), sigs. B2^v-B3^r.

26. In Drayton's poem, Oberon, fearful of the amorous designs that Pigwiggen has on his Queen Mab, dons an acorn cup as a hat and battles valiantly with a wasp. While Drayton uses mock heroic language to emphasize the humor of these aristocratic creatures, he can't help mentioning their rustic interest in sweeping: they “make our Girles their sluttery rue, / By pinching them both blacke and blew, / And put a penny in their shue, / The house for cleanely sweeping” (126 [ll. 65-68]).

27. Ben Jonson, “The Entertainment at Althrope,” 7:119-31, esp. 122.

28. Ben Jonson, Love Restored, 7:377-85, esp. 378.

29. Jonson, Love Restored, 7:381.

30. Grim, the Collier of Croydon (1662); fac. rpt. (Old English Drama Students' Facsimile, 1912), 51-52.

31. Hence the humor of Eastward Ho!, where two city ladies bemoan the fact that “there are no Fayries now adayes” when they run into financial trouble. Feeling entitled, they recoil from the idea of working and instead fantasize that fairies might deliver them from poverty if they themselves consent to do minimal domestic tasks: “Sure, if we laye in a cleanly house, they would haunt it,” says Gertrude, “Ile sweepe the chanber soone at night, & set a dish of water o' the Hearth. A Fayrie may come, and bring a Pearle, or a Diamonde” (Ben Jonson, eds. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 4:599.

32. See The Maydes Metamorphosis (London, 1600), sig. C4^v.

33. Thomas Campion, The Booke of Ayres in The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 44.

34. Although Maureen Duffy exaggerates the implications of her research and relies at times on vaguely defined universal archetypes, her Erotic World of Faery (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1972) persuasively uncovers texts that link fairies with eroticism. On the etymological connection between puck and fuck, see Duffy, 92n.

35. Robin Good-Fellow, sigs. E3^r-v.

36. See Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the blessed Angells (London, 1635), 574.

37. It is easy to locate fairy tales within the broader narratives that historians offer about the widening split between popular and elite cultures and the decline of magic in the early modern period. According to Peter Burke's account in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), elite people withdrew from the world of popular festivity and traditional beliefs between 1500 and 1800, as popular culture was gradually replaced by a mass culture that served the interests of the ruling classes (270-286). The invention of folklore as an intellectual enterprise in the late-eighteenth century became the core of a romantic nationalism founded on the category of the vulgar. But scholars have quibbled with Burke's two-tiered model of elite and popular cultures, noting the potent presence of a “middling sort” as well as the problems that ensue when one tries to distribute cultural objects to fixed social classes. See critiques by Harris, Watt, and Hall. On the problems of naming exclusionary practices as “popular,” see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 266; as well as Louis Adrian Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the cultural politics of the Elizabethan theatre (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996), 23.

38. For opposite readings of the play's inscription of gender and of class, see Peter Erickson, “The Order of the Garter, the cult of Elizabeth, and class-gender tension in The Merry Wives of Windsor” in Shakespeare Reproduced: The text in history and ideology, Jean E. Howard and Marion F. O'Connor, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 116-42; and Carol Thomas Neely, “Constructing Female Sexuality in the Renaissance: Stratford, London, Windsor, Vienna” in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof, eds. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1989), 208-29.

39. Steeped in Arthurian mythology, the exclusive Order of the Garter was used to insure the loyalty of feudal aristocratic factions to the sovereign, and to display that ritual of allegiance to a larger populace. The chapel in which members were inducted was originally located in the Windsor court, but Elizabeth moved the ritual to London. On the Order, see Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 179; Erickson, 124-28; and Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 20.

40. Richard Helgerson, “The Buckbasket, the Witch, and the Queen of Fairies: The Women's World of Shakespeare's Windsor” in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds. (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999), 162-82. Helgerson's essay, which appeared after this essay was written, dovetails with mine in its interest in how a localizable and English domesticity is produced in the play. But he sees the play's representation of women's work as finally supporting the interests of the court.

41. On how the final scene reinscribes court ritual as the object of voyeurism in the public's “hideous imagination,” see Leslie Katz, “The Merry Wives of Windsor: Sharing the Queen's Holiday,” Representations 51 (1995): 77-93, esp. 79 and 81. While I appreciate Katz's reading of how the play enables collective fantasy, I disagree with her final assessment that Merry Wives primarily indulges the audience's speculations about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Instead I see the play as showing how the court's desirability was positioned strategically to serve the interests of the citizenry. Katz's reliance on the Folio is implicitly critiqued by Leah S. Marcus in Unediting the Renaissance: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Milton (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 68-100.

42. Erickson insists that the play's politics can be read in one of three ways: “as the victory of bourgeois solidarity over the aristocratic court, as the reconciliation of the best of both bourgeois and aristocratic worlds, or as the consolidation of aristocratic power through a populist approach” (124).

43. As Helgerson notes, “Merry Wives is not only uniquely English as a simple fact of its setting; it also works at its Englishness, insists on it, makes it fundamental to the definition of a domestic space that court and town can share” (168). In examining the play's construction of national identity, I am mindful of Homi K. Bhabha's comment that critics sometimes lose sight of the nation as a “modern Janus” (2): “there is a tendency to read the Nation rather restrictively; either, as the ideological apparatus of state power, somewhat redefined by a hasty, functionalist reading of Foucault or Bakhtin; or, in a more utopian inversion, as the incipient or emergent expression of the ‘national-popular’ sentiment preserved in a radical memory” (“Introduction: narrating the nation” in Nation and Narration, Homi K. Bhabha, ed. [London and New York: Routledge, 1990], 1-7, esp. 3).

44. In Unediting the Renaissance, Marcus argues that quarto Wives presents a play not set clearly in Windsor, despite its title, but instead laden with references to London or a large provincial town. Stripped of references to the Order of the Garter with a Fenton who is no longer a courtier, the quarto version is less eager than the Folio to harmonize court and countryside and more interested in the work of urban citizens.

45. See Jeanne Addison Roberts, Shakespeare's English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979), 74-83; and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957), 183.

46. A Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Syr Iohn Falstaffe, and the merrie Wiues of Windsor (London, 1602), sig. G2^r-v. In Marcus's reading, Q1 emerges as the political hero, suppressed by editors interested in preserving the Folio's courtly prominence. I would temper her claims for the ideological differences between the plays while endorsing her sense of their distinct features. It is true that the allusion in F to the Garter posits a world of honor from which Falstaff has fallen, but that ideal, I would argue, is evidently constructed as part of a fantasy controlled by village citizens.

47. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, 88.

48. For a sample of housewifery guides, see Gervase Markham, The English Huswife (London, 1615); Thomas Tusser, Fiue hundreth points of good husbandry (London, 1573); and the anonymous A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen … (London, 1635).

49. After receiving their charter in 1518, the Royal Academy of Physicians began to ward off the barber-surgeons, apothecaries, and lay-women (known as “old wives” or “wise women”) who historically controlled health care. On conflicts between professional and domestic medical practitioners, see Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1919), 253-65; Doreen Evenden Nagy, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988); and Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1990).

50. In discussing translatio as a figure for numerous types of transfers, Patricia Parker charts how Merry Wives's linguistic puns address the vector where the gendered language of humanist learning and patriarchal property meet; see Patricia Parker, “The Merry Wives of Windsor and Shakespearean Translation,” Modern Language Quarterly 52 (1991): 225-61. In my reading, housewifery provides a complementary set of controlling metaphors that shape the action of the play.

51. On the importance of keys in the period, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1994), 182-89.

52. On the play's “imaginative configurations” at many levels, see Katz, 82-84; and William Carroll, “‘A Received Belief’: Imagination in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 186-215.

53. See 2.2.155-58 and 172-73. Editors who condemn the quarto but still choose the “bad” quarto's “Brooke” probably do so in order to enable a set of puns on aquatics.

54. Ralph Knevet, Rhodon and Iris (London, 1631), sig. E3^v.

55. John Partridge, The Treasurie of hidden Secrets. Commonlie called, The Good-huswiues Closet of prouision … (London, 1600), sig. D2^r; Thomas Dawson, The Second part of the good Hus-wiues Iewell (London, 1597), 48.

56. Paster notes that almanacs warned against bathing in particular thermal conditions and that bodily events of “like evacuation”—bleeding, purging, and sexual activity—could be seen as hazardous (134-38). On the sweating tub as a cure for venereal disease, see Henry V, 2.1.75; Timon of Athens, 4.3.85-88; and Pompey's characterization of Mistress Overdone in Measure for Measure: “she hath eaten up all her beef, and she is herself in the tub” (3.2.556-57). For a description of the sweating tub, see F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992), 243-45.

57. Paster, 115.

58. See John Cotta, A Short Discoverie of the Vnobserved Dangers of seuerall sorts of ignorant and vnconsiderate Practisers of Physicke in England (London, 1612), 32-33.

59. James Shirley, The Hvmorous Covrtier (London, 1640), sig. H1^v.

60. Helgerson asks: “What then are we to make of a play that uses the same female control of domestic space to correct this male fantasy in both its paranoid and its wishful versions?” (171). He argues that two of the play's three domestic playlets—the buck-basket and Brainford-witch scenes—demonstrate that women's rule over the household can merge the local and domestic harmoniously; but for Helgerson the third fairy playlet signals the erosion of the wives' domestic control: “The local and the domestic are thus subsumed into the national,” and the national is, according to Helgerson, defined by the queen's presence (176). I instead suggest that the domestic defines the way that fantasies of the court are shaped.

61. In Thomas Dekker and John Webster's Westward Ho!, Mrs. Justiniano cries to her husband when he threatens to throw her out of the house: “What would you haue me do? Would you haue mee turne common sinner, or sell my apparell to my wastcoat and become a Landresse?” He replies, “No Landresse deere wife, though your credit would goe farre with Gentlemen for taking vp of Linnen” (The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols. [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1953-61], 2:324 [1.1.177-81]).

62. Richard Brathwait, Whimzies: Or, A New Cast of Characters (London, 1631), 83.

63. Brathwait, 85. For a history of modern laundresses that sheds light on early modern meanings, see Patricia E. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850-1930 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1986). Laundering was included in housewifery guides, with starching and washing of silks, points, laces, and stockings seen as a more prestigious activity than regular washing. On this hierarchy of labor, see Hannah Woolley, The Compleat Servant-Maid; or, The Young Maidens Tutor (London, 1683), 62-69 and 141-42.

64. John Taylor, All the Workes of Iohn Taylor The Water Poet … (London, 1630), 165.

65. Taylor, 164. While imagining the laundress as a noble warrioress, Taylor describes her valor in a way that nevertheless sexualizes her: “She strikes, she poakes and thrusts, she hangs and drawes, / She stiffens stiffly” (169).

66. Arguing for a symbiotic domestic unit, post-Reformation conduct books stressed the wife's economic importance, which was often at odds with her prescribed place in the marital hierarchy. Thomas Tusser's bestseller jauntily says: “Take weapon awaye, of what force is a man? / Take huswife from husband, and what is he than? / As louers desireth, together to dwell, / So husbandrie loueth and good huswiferie as well” (Fiue hundred pointes of good Husbandrie [London, 1580], fol. 66). See also Thomas Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet Furnished (London, 1616), 102.

67. Coppélia Kahn's remark in Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981) that Falstaff's horns are a “richly multivalent” symbol (147) is nicely borne out by the profusion of symbolic meanings critics have found in them as references to a fertility spirit, satyr, sexual potency, devil, hunted deer, Actaeon, the victim of a charivari ritual, and male impotence. See also Anne Parten, “Falstaff's Horns: Masculine Inadequacy and Feminine Mirth in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Studies in Philology 82 (1985): 184-99.

68. For an analysis of the play's meditation on pure transmission, multiplication, authenticity, and circulation, see Elizabeth Pittenger, “Dispatch Quickly: The Mechanical Reproduction of Pages,” SQ 42 (1991): 389-408.

69. See Patricia Parker, “Shakespeare and rhetoric: ‘dilation’ and ‘delation’ in Othello” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 54-74.

70. The play concludes with what Jeanne Addison Roberts terms decidedly “English” materials (58), the fairy “Cricket” and the Folio Herne the Hunter. While Roberts is mistaken in thinking that Merry Wives's satiric presentation of cuckoldry and city sharpers is “peculiarly English” (59), her assessment follows the play's witty construction of its own Englishness.

71. Felix E. Schelling, Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642: A history of the Drama in England from the accession of Queen Elizabeth to the closing of the theaters …, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 2:324.

72. While Marcus's central argument is that the rural landscape so dear to this mythology is located only in the Folio version, she makes visible the extent to which the “Merry England” ideal is premised on the play's “realistic” portrayal of everyday life and country manners (Unediting the Renaissance, 80-92).

73. Marcus's argument in Unediting the Renaissance against a critical tradition that assumes the hygienic superiority of the Folio is particularly interesting for my purposes, since she frames her textual analysis in terms of Mary Douglas's work on the conceptual uses of dirt and cleanliness. Asserting that the editorial tradition's condemnation of the quarto as “textual filth” belies an overinvestment in purity, Marcus notes that editors-turned-housewives explicitly use metaphors of cleaning in their work without seeing how these tropes fit into the ideological project of affirming the play's “proper” presentation of social hierarchy. Editors sanitize the play, that is, by affirming a Folio text respectful of the court (72-80).

74. Marcus, Unediting the Renaissance, 70-71.