SOURCE: Roberts, Jeanne Addison. “The Play: Suitably Shallow but Neither Simple nor Slender.” In Shakespeare's English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context, pp. 61-83. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

[In the essay below, Roberts reviews the plot, themes, and characters of The Merry Wives of Windsor, challenging the fact that the play is often classified, and subsequently dismissed, as farce.]

Most modern critics who discuss Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor at all, sooner or later describe it as farcical, or a farce.¹ At best the terms are used with a note of condescension or apology, and at worst they are scathing. The farcical label seems to date back to Hartley Coleridge, who sets the tone for the more favorable category of comments by saying in 1851 that though the “plot is rather farcical … it is exceedingly diverting.”² The negative attitude is best represented by A. C. Bradley, who speaks bitterly of the “hasty farce” in which Falstaff is “baffled, duped, and treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and worst of all, repentant and didactic,” concluding, “it is horrible.”³

On the surface there is nothing surprising about considering The Merry Wives a farce. Its most memorable, most referred to, most illustrated scenes—Falstaff in the buck basket, Falstaff horned as Herne the Hunter—involve visual, physical humor; its characters are recognizable types; the plot is rapid and artifically repetitious; the tone is joyously lighthearted. All this sounds to the modern ear like farce. And yet, the more we study the critical history of the play, the more uneasy we become about dismissing it as a farce. The modern attitude has by now become a habit which blinds us to much of the play's skillful design, genuine comic impact—even subtlety. Both in content and dramatic technique, if not in depth of characterization or poetry, The Merry Wives deserves, I believe, to be considered with such other plays of its probable period of composition as The Merchant of Venice and Much Ado about Nothing rather than with the more farcical Comedy of Errors and The Taming of the Shrew, with which it is frequently associated. The play has a structural coherence and a social orientation which are fundamentally opposed to the spirit of farce. Early critics, from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth, saw these qualities clearly. They saw The Merry Wives as a comedy of great merit, and the word farce is never used. We would do well to let the early critics reopen our eyes.

John Dryden, not to be lightly disregarded as a critic, is on record as detesting “those farces which are now the most frequent entertainments of the stage.” He goes on to generalize that farce consists of “forced humours and unnatural events,” and pleases only those who can judge neither manners nor men.⁴ But The Merry Wives is the only play of Shakespeare that Dryden mentions by name in his Essay of Dramatick Poesy, and he singles it out for praise as being “almost exactly formed” (p. 46). Could such a play be a farce? Certainly Dryden thought not.

Performance records indicate that in the first half of the eighteenth century The Merry Wives was produced more than any other Shakespearean comedy,⁵ and Charles Gildon called it Shakespeare's only “true comedy.”⁶ Other early criticism stresses the comic power of the play and accords it a very high place in the Shakespeare canon. The modern tone of tolerance for an inferior genre is totally absent. Joseph Warton, in 1778, speaks absolutely of the play as “the most complete specimen of Shakespeare's comic powers.”⁷ Many of the nineteenth-century editors are similarly laudatory. William Oxberry gives extreme praise in 1820, declaring that “this delightful comedy is perfect,” and describes it as a composition in which “light and shadow are blended with matchless skill.” He commends especially the subtle interaction of the characters, which he finds as natural and pleasing as the blended parts in a landscape.⁸ Samuel Weller Singer adds in 1826 that the incidents, characters, and “plot of this delightful comedy are unrivalled in any drama, ancient or modern.”⁹ H. N. Hudson in 1851 comes to an arresting conclusion: “Queen Elizabeth was indeed a great woman, and did some great things: but if it were certain she was … the occasion of this play, there are many who would not scruple to set it down as the best thing she had any agency in bringing to pass.”¹⁰ And the editor of the Arden edition, H. C. Hart, as late as 1904, calls the play “a treasured possession, for which he could better afford to part with, perhaps, half of the author's works, admittedly superior though several of those may be.”¹¹

It is hard to believe that the two critical attitudes refer to the same play. The discrepancy in the accounts forces us to consider why the play has slipped in critical opinion from the rank of comedy to the level of farce. Has there been some shift in the definition of farce? Or is it possible that early critics somehow saw different values and emphases as they studied the play? And finally, of course, there follows the perennial effort at a “just” description. Is the play indeed a comedy or a farce, or some combination of the two?

Part of the problem of classifying is surely the result of definitions. The eighteenth century saw farce as “loose and disengaged” and “not cramped by Method, or measure of Time or other Unity.”¹²The Merry Wives, on the other hand seemed to Nicholas Rowe so unified that the plots are “much better join'd, connected and incorporated, than in any Play, that I remember, either in Latin or English.”¹³ The fact that it came closer than almost any other play of Shakespeare to observing the unities of time, place, and action was highly in its favor. It is true that John Dennis in adapting the play in his Comical Gallant in 1702 seems to have felt the need of tightening the plot. He eliminates the first scene and Falstaff's disguise as Mother Prat, and he contrives to introduce family relationships between Fenton, Mistress Ford, and the Host. But he is careful to announce that he found the play already “by no means a despicable comedy.”¹⁴ Certainly from the point of view of structure it was not a farce.

Structure is, of course, closely related to the importance of action, and here again The Merry Wives benefited by Neoclassical theory. For Dennis, at least, action is in drama “the chief thing of all.” It is precisely because he talks less and acts more than the Falstaff of 2 Henry IV, that Dennis prefers the Falstaff of The Merry Wives. He concludes that “action at last is the business of the Stage. The Drama is action itself, and it is action alone that is able to excite in any extraordinary manner the curiosity of mankind.”¹⁵ That The Merry Wives is a play above all in which something is constantly happening would have recommended it highly as a successful comedy.

Most critics of the early eighteenth century took for granted the fact that the characters of a play would be types. How could they be successful otherwise in the abbreviated and limited representation available to the stage? As late a critic as Samuel T. Coleridge praises Shakespeare because “no character in his plays (unless indeed Pistol be an exception) … can be called the mere portrait of an individual.”¹⁶ The fact, therefore, that The Merry Wives makes use of recognizable stock characters derived from Roman and Italian comedy (senex, adulescens, servus, virgo, matrona, miles gloriosus, ancilla, nutrex, medicus, pedante, priest)¹⁷ would never have relegated it to the realm of farce. Characters become farcical, says Dennis (Critical Works, 2:385), only when they are too extravagant and too singular to involve the sympathies of the audience, and the recurring praise of the “manners” of The Merry Wives shows that this was not the case. Again Dennis may have had a few misgivings, since he concedes that some of the characters may seem out of date, but he attributes this to the incapacity of the general audience to judge “the boldness and the delicacy of the strokes” (Gallant, p. v).

Farce was associated in the early eighteenth-century mind with “low” characters, characters both low in social status and low in moral capacity. It is true that The Merry Wives is Shakespeare's only “middle-class comedy”; however, this did not make it farce. Characters below the highest social level were for the neoclassical critic the proper subject-matter for comedy. Only, says Laurence Echard, in his preface to Plautus's Comedies, when drama presents men “more Vicious, more Covetous, [and] more Foolish” than they really are does it degenerate into farce.¹⁸ On this score, The Merry Wives was safe. Dennis is right in saying that “tho the Characters are low they are true and good” (Gallant, p. iii).

“Lowness” in character continues to be thought a sign of farce. Eric Bentley says in The Life of the Drama that farce shows men as knaves and fools—only a little above the apes.¹⁹ There are plenty of dupes in The Merry Wives and some attempted knavery, and no one is spectacularly bright. But the impression now as in the eighteenth century is that morally the characters are not the subnormal creatures of farce, but precisely on the level of their audience—somewhere in the midregion between apes and angels.

Modern critics frequently seem to be looking at the same play that the Neoclassicists saw and simply describing it in different terms. Their terms are less complimentary, and one often suspects that the injured feelings of Falstaff-lovers are at the root of their evaluation. The nineteenth- and twentieth-century Falstaff-apotheosis has put up serious barriers to any objective view of this play. Nonetheless, both early and modern critics have seen in The Merry Wives a play where plot and action are important. But for modern critics, this quality, far from eliciting praise, has demoted the play to farce or evoked the epithet “non-Shakespearean.” Nevill Coghill, in his essay on Shakespeare's comedy, mentions the play only in a footnote as “hurried and exceptional.”²⁰ R. G. Hunter, in Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, and C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, make only two brief references each to The Merry Wives.²¹ In other books on Shakespearean comedy, H. B. Charlton mentions the play only, and J. D. Wilson chiefly to agonize over Falstaff.²² S. C. Sen Gupta in Shakespearian Comedy, remarking on the fact that characterization is “subordinated to intrigue,” concludes: “The Merry Wives is not necessarily Shakespeare's worst play, but it is the one least characteristic of him,” and Larry Champion devotes one paragraph to it, dwelling on its aberrant qualities.²³

F. T. Bowers sees the emphasis on plot and the use of type characters as clearly identifying the play as farce.²⁴ R. B. Heilman, speaking generally, lists the “surface manifestations” of farce as being “hurly-burly theater, with much slapstick, roughhouse … pratfalls, general confusion, trickery, uproars, gags, practical jokes.”²⁵ Such description brings to mind immediately the dumping, beating, and pinching of Falstaff, the choleric rantings of Dr. Caius, the duel that is never fought, the post-horse plot, the multiplicity and rapid movement of characters—all of which seems to point toward farce. About one characteristic of farce, in fact, it seems to me that there can be no quarrel. From its earliest appearance as the interpolation of gags in religious drama, through its manifestation in the mute Harlequin in the commedia dell'arte, farce has always involved bodily and nonverbal humor. And insomuch as physical and nonverbal action are an important element in the continuous stage success of The Merry Wives, there can be no doubt that in this respect the play is farcical. Farcical, but not necessarily a farce.

It is important to distinguish here between stage business—admittedly often farcical—and plot. The Merry Wives has at least two plots, and their structures are of great interest. The main plot is farcical in subject matter, though not, I think, in treatment. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre defines a farce as a “full-length play dealing with some absurd situation hingeing generally on extramarital relations,”²⁶ and this does describe the action involving the title characters. The second plot, however is typically comic, if we accept the view that comedy is the celebration of the triumph of young love, the overthrow of the authority of the older generation, and the acceptance by society of the new. There is the suggestion of a third plot in the affairs of the Host, Caius, Sir Hugh, Nym, and Pistol. The various threads of the three plots are loosely interwoven until they come together in the last act.

What the Neoclassical critics really admired in The Merry Wives was the plotting. Although Dr. Johnson early pointed out some shortcomings and loose ends in the play, he remarked especially how beautifully the two main plots merge in the final scene. The nineteenth century continued to admire the complexity and inevitability of the structure. H. N. Hudson found it typical of Shakespeare's “general order and method,” with “the surrounding parts falling in with the central, and the subordinate plots drawing as by a hidden impulse, into harmony with the leading one.”²⁷ The best analysis of the great sophistication of Shakespeare's manipulation of the discrepant awarenesses of his characters in carrying forward plot and producing humorous situations is to be found in Bertrand Evans's chapter in Shakespeare's Comedies—one of the few full and detailed discussions of the play in modern criticism. Evans's book classifies The Merry Wives, properly, I think, with Much Ado and As You Like It.²⁸

Here at last, in the complex and artfully contrived plot, is the proof, one might suppose, that The Merry Wives is a comedy rather than a farce. But even on this there is no necessary agreement. We have seen that emphasis on plot is taken as a sign of farce by modern critics. Heilman says that neatness of plot and mechanical action leading to symmetrical effects are typical of farce (pp. 153, 160). Neatness and symmetry there certainly are in The Merry Wives. There are three suitors for the hand of Anne Page, and Mistress Quickly systematically encourages all three. Falstaff decides to send identical letters to Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, and their identical responses lead to his being trapped three times in the situation of a would-be adulterer. The body-curer is balanced by the soul-curer. Both Master and Mistress Page decide at the same time on a secret marriage for their daughter, and both are disappointed. Both would-be suitors carry off boys instead of girls. It is like an elaborate ritual dance, and, as in any good dance, there is a little incidental variety. Master Ford is jealous and Master Page is not; Slender is shown wooing and Caius is not; however, the variations only emphasize the patterns, and it is obvious that symmetry is an important part of the method and meaning of the play. But then, is not symmetry important to the method and meaning of all drama? Indeed of all art?

Symmetry is especially crucial to certain kinds of comedy, where effects depend on the arousal and manipulation of audience expectation, and where absurd repetition is frequently a vehicle of satire. But it is a mistake, I think, to identify symmetrical effect as a special characteristic and not simply an instrument of farce. Typically the symmetry of farce is saying that the world is absurd and that man is a ridiculous animal compulsively repeating meaningless configurations. The structure of The Merry Wives is saying rather that the world is patterned and the patterns have meaning. And the effect is not limited to this one play. Elaborate symmetry is a regular characteristic of Shakespearean comedy, at least through Twelfth Night. On the other hand, mechanical action, coincidence, effects produced without developed motivation of character, and behavior persistent in the face of all probability are more properly associated with farce. Here the judging of The Merry Wives becomes a delicate matter.

The greatest improbability in the play is that Falstaff should be fooled three times by essentially the same device. If one can accept this—and Shakespeare makes it easier, as Bertrand Evans points out, by manipulating suspense and discrepant awarenesses in the second occurrence, and by focusing our attention on Anne Page in the third—the rest of the play becomes consistent and credible. There is nothing remarkable about Falstaff's being willing to exploit sex for money, in three men wanting to marry a rich beautiful girl, or in a perversely jealous husband wanting to discover what he believes to be the truth.

And the action which grows out of these situations is not mechanical. Only Falstaff blindly repeats his folly. Sir Hugh and Dr. Caius discover that they have been tricked by the Host and conspire together for “revenge.” Ford discovers his error and reforms. Further, Shakespeare seems to have been at some pains to eliminate coincidences. In both Il Pecorone and Tarlton's Newes Out of Purgatorie, an analogue and a possible source of the Falstaff-Ford plot, coincidence is central to the farcical effect. In the former, the young lover happens to choose the wife of his teacher on whom to practice his lessons in love; in the latter, the lover happens to choose his lady's elderly husband as his confidant. But Shakespeare carefully motivates Pistol to tell Ford of Falstaff's advances to his wife, and Ford to disguise himself and seek out Falstaff in order to trap her.

Everything in the play is believably arranged by someone in it. Comic effects are achieved by the fact that all of the arrangers, except Anne Page, are ignorant of some essential fact. Bertrand Evans is wrong, I think, in assigning Mistress Quickly the role of an all-knowing Portia or Rosalind. She knows no more than the wives in the Ford-Falstaff plot, and she is in fact ignorant of Anne Page's true affections, as we see when she says after her first interview with Fenton, “But Anne loves him not” (1.4. 157 [548]). It is not Mistress Quickly but the Host who is Fenton's confidant on the night of the elopement. And it seems likely that Quickly only takes the role of the Fairy Queene at the end because the part must be taken by an actor who has established a “female” identity in the play, and no other such actor is available.

Bentley says that in the world of farce coincidence is taken for granted and mischief becomes fate (p. 245). Thus the jealous husband arrives home by accident when the lover is being entertained by his wife. But in The Merry Wives the jealous husband arrives home because he has helped to plan the assignation. As Bertrand Evans points out, nearly everyone in the play is both deceiving and deceived. The Host aborts a duel by deceiving Caius and Evans but is in turn victimized by their plot. Falstaff is deceived by Ford but still gains a kind of superiority over him as he relates his “adventures” with his wife. The wives deceive Falstaff but are genuinely surprised at the actual arrival of Ford at the assignation when they had expected only to pretend he was coming. Fenton is deceived by Mistress Quickly, who takes his money while apparently doing nothing to advance his suit, but at the end he deceives everyone and triumphantly bears off Anne Page. Master and Mistress Page, Slender, and Caius plan to deceive each other but are deceived by Fenton and Anne.

Complex as it is, the structure of the play is obviously a simplification and ordering of life. It is not the random world of farce. It is a world of cause and effect, human interaction, and rational principle. One might note in passing that, though everyone in the play but the lovers is notably imperfect, the women are superior to the men in knowledge and capability. And, although no one person is in control, some beneficent force, perhaps even Queen Elizabeth herself presiding from the audience, is ordering this universe. If farce is absurd and ruled by whim, one is forced to conclude that the eighteenth century was right: The Merry Wives is not farce but comedy.

There remains to be considered the question of characterization. Everyone has seen the the characters of this play as varied and vivid, but it would be hard to deny that they are shallowly developed and superficially presented to the audience. The movement of the action is very rapid. Although there are a number of soliloquies, none of them is memorable as a subtle exploration of character. Their purpose is clearly either to advance the plot—as in the case of Mistress Page's reading of the letter from Falstaff—or to supply incidental humor or develop mood—as in the soliloquies of Falstaff. Most of the play is written in prose, and where there is poetry, it is usually flat and “unpoetic” in tone. There are no long, leisurely scenes which reveal the nuances of human interrelations. The main plot demands a husband, wife, and lover, and they are supplied, the two former in duplicate. The Anne Page plot demands parents, daughter, and suitor, and they are supplied, the latter in triplicate. Several characterizations—Nym and probably Caius and the Host—are determined by the vogue for humours in comedy. (Whether they helped to set the vogue, which is likely, or merely exploit it, they belong to the fashion.) The chief comic features of Caius and Sir Hugh are the result simply of their national origins.

Certainly these characters are types, but I would deny that this makes them farcical. The minimally developed young lovers are a standard feature of comedy, and, as Northop Frye shrewdly suggests, too much detail may make it impossible for the audience properly to identify with their innocence. Shakespeare gives Anne Page a total of thirty-three lines. Dennis in The Comical Gallant greatly expands her role and ruins the play. If Frye is right about the forces at work in comedy, the characters must be types. Eugène Ionesco says much the same thing: “Take a tragedy, speed up the movement, and … empty the characters of psychological content … and you will have a comedy.”²⁹

The remarkable thing about the characters of The Merry Wives is not that they are types, but that they have been so much commented on as if they were not. When the marchioness of Newcastle wants to demonstrate that Shakespeare's powers of drawing women are such that one feels “he had been metamorphosed from a man to a woman,” she lists eight examples: Mistress Page, Mistress Ford, Mistress Quickly, and Nan Page (of the thirty-three lines) appear in the company of Cleopatra and Beatrice.³⁰ Rowe finds the characters “perfectly distinguish'd,” and Dr. Johnson says there are “more characters appropriated and discriminated, than perhaps can be found in any other play.”³¹ William Mark Clark points to their “great originality and whim,” and Arthur Quiller-Couch says the play is “overcharged with eccentrics.”³² Slender has been widely praised for the special wistful quality of his foolishness, the Host for his robust idiosyncrasies, and even John Rugby, whose only really distinguishing quality is that he is “given to prayer” (1.4.12 [410]), comes in for special mention. M. R. Ridley, the editor of the 1935 Dent edition of the play, concludes, “There is not a character who is not a human being with the blood of life flowing in his veins.”³³ Shakespeare seems to have been in as much danger of falling into the sin described by Dennis as creating “particular” characters instead of “universal” ones as of creating only types. That he escaped both extremes is part of his genius, and it is not the genius of farce.

We have seen that in some respects The Merry Wives has seemed to remain the same to its viewers and readers over the years, while the definitions of farce and comedy have changed. Early critics found the neat plot and type characters indicative of comedy while modern critics have frequently seen them as the signs of farce. But in one respect the definition of farce has remained constant while the play itself seems to have shown different facets to different critics.

Both early and late critics agree that farce is drama of which the only purpose is to provoke laughter. Thus, those critics who have designated the play a farce are generally bound by definition to find it lacking in underlying significances. The Wright-LaMar edition of The Merry Wives is typical in its statement that “no profound lessons are implicit in this play, and no refinements of aesthetic theory can be found by the most diligent searcher.³⁴

Lessons have, nonetheless, been found, and illustrations of aesthetic theory may be discovered. Francis Gentleman says in 1774 that “a lesson of use flows from the whole; vain concupiscence and groundless jealousy are ridiculed in a commendable manner,” and Rowe identifies the main design of the play as the curing of Ford's unreasonable jealousy.³⁵

Dennis sees the same theme but apparently wants it all spelled out more clearly and neatly, since he makes Mistress Ford's motivation in her game with Falstaff the desire to “reclaim” her husband from jealousy. This is quite different from Shakespeare, who shows that she realizes that, because of the jealous nature of her husband, she is playing a dangerous game. In addition to the moral “lessons” of the plot, the Neoclassical critics probably saw more satire in the play than a modern audience does. The gallery of “humourous” characters would have associated itself in their minds with Ben Jonson's announced intention to use drama to “ceaze on vice, and squeeze out the humour of spongie natures,” exposing and therefore supposedly reforming.³⁶ They would have hoped that by seeing the folly of Slender and the choler of Caius the audience would learn to avoid them. Later critics pretty much abandoned such expectation of moral efficacy. Stuart Tave says that by the middle of the nineteenth century the “humour” of the best comic works was expected to “present amiable originals … whose little peculiarities [were] not satirically instructive, but objects of delight and love.³⁷ By this standard The Merry Wives would still have qualified as a good comic work—would still, indeed, have seemed “humourous,” but would no longer have been thought corrective of the minor eccentricities of folly and excess.

The more one thinks of the moral design of the play, however, the more interesting it becomes. It is not simply an illustration of the poetic justice which one would expect Neoclassical critics to admire. In fact, Dennis tried to make the play conform more nearly to poetic justice. In his adaptation, he substituted Ford for Falstaff in the final scene, thus ensuring that Ford be punished for his unreasonable jealousy and that Falstaff be saved from the final ignominy. But this was not Shakespeare's way.

His play, a true domestic drama, focused on marriage—the problems of achieving it and the perils of maintaining it. The enemies of good marriage which he singles out are greed, lust, jealousy, and stupidity. Greed appears in two forms and provides a thematic link between the two plots: it is Falstaff's greed which motivates him to attempt to seduce the wives (though vanity and lust become operative later), and it is greed also, in a more innocuous-appearing form, which is Page's motive for desiring to marry his daughter to Slender. As Anne shrewdly observes, “a world of vilde ill-favour'd faults / Lookes handsome in three hundred pounds a yeere” (3. 4. 32-33 [1600-1]). Interestingly Falstaff's greed is punished, not once but three times, while Page's, though of potentially more disastrous consequences, is disappointed but forgiven.

Similarly Falstaff's adulterous intentions and his developing lust, although they are hardly dangerous since they are instantly recognized and rejected, are thrice punished. Ford's jealousy, a really serious threat to happy marriage, involving blindness and breach of trust, goes unpunished except for his humiliation before his friends.³⁸ An echo of the jealous theme appears in the subplot in Caius's hysterical challenge to Sir Hugh when he hears of a rival. As a husband he would be more jealous than Ford. His passion leads to mild humiliation, and his desires, like Page's, are ludicrously disappointed, but he is otherwise unscathed. Stupidity appears, alas, in the Falstaff of the main plot, in spite of his still-active wit, and is supremely developed in the poignantly unassuming Slender. Again the major deficiency of Slender is laughingly enjoyed, while Falstaff suffers the consequences of his fault.

Why should Falstaff bear so much and everyone else so little? It does begin to appear that nonrational, perhaps subconscious forces are at work in the play as well as clear-cut principles of cause and effect. Eric Bentley, who takes farce very seriously as a means of the emotional catharsis of suppressed aggression through laughter, contends in Life of the Drama that violence is the essence of farce (p. 219). Conceivably there is some vicarious pleasure in the violence directed against Falstaff. Possibly some of the audience is in fact delighted by the exposing of the outrageously witty conman who got away with so much in Henry IV, and now reveals himself as a stupid, vain, old man. Perhaps the furiously offended critics who object so loudly are only a very vocal minority. But even if this is so, it does not explain the lenience in dealing with Ford or the other subtly diffused hostilities which are explored but never openly enjoyed.

Underlying hostilities there certainly are in this play. Most of them are generated by sexual feelings—a fact that should hardly surprise us in a play about marriage. It is sexual rivalry which leads to the attempted duel between Caius and Evans; it is sexual rivalry which motivates the struggle between Ford and Falstaff. And, interestingly enough, as Sherman Hawkins points out, some of the hostility is expressive of the war between the sexes.³⁹ Mistress Page and Mistress Ford move with one accord, almost savagely, to be “revenged” on Falstaff, and Ford seems to get considerable pleasure from cudgelling the old “woman” of Brainford. Master and Mistress Page are rivals in their plans for their daughter. Mistress Ford gratuitously tricks her husband a second time with the buck basket, apparently enjoying his agonies, and he is almost sadistic in plotting to unmask his wife as an adulteress. Anne Page moves with all the cool clear-sightedness of Shaw's life-force to select her mate, blithely dismissing the ineffectual ardor of Slender, and protesting that rather than marry Caius she would be “set quick i' the earth / And bowl'd to death with Turnips” (3. 4. 84-85 [1655-56]).

Thus, sexual encounters may be fraught with dangers, fringed with resentments, and generative of hostilities, but these are not openly exploited as they are in farce. Shakespeare keeps these hostilities peripheral. They are safely surpressed by the general aura of good feeling; the need of society for the establishment and preservation of the family overrides the incidental feelings of the individuals. And what cruelty there is, is insulated by the sure sense that the audience has, that what they see is all a game, that the limited characters before them can not, in fact, feel much pain.

If there is a real satisfaction in violence in The Merry Wives, it is interesting to note that its source is exactly opposite to that which Bentley describes in farce. He argues that violence springs out of resentment against the repression imposed by society. Farce embodies, he says, the wish to damage the family and “desecrate the household gods.”⁴⁰ The forbidden delights of adultery are openly contemplated, and the mother-in-law is actually slapped. The reverse is true in the dominant themes of The Merry Wives. Although there are the casually revealed social hostilities mentioned above and although there may be some faint traces of good-natured satire against the follies of the churchman, the schoolmaster, and the doctor, the major emphases of the play specifically reinforce the middle-class social values of its participants. The chief enemy—personified by Falstaff and defeated in the ruthless attack mounted against him—is not just adultery, but uncontrolled sex. The wives in this action become not merely women whose virtue has been affronted but defenders of the social order. The narrative becomes not so much moralistic as flatly descriptive. The sex drive is not so much “punished” as rechanneled.

An interpretation of this sort explains, I think, the puzzling identification of Falstaff with Actaeon, discussed by Geoffrey Bullough and John M. Steadman, and accounts for what seems to be an anticlimactic sequence in the defeats of Falstaff.⁴¹ Why should Falstaff, the fat, dissolute old knight, be associated with the young hunter, the nephew of Cadmus, who comes by accident upon Diana bathing, is changed to a stag and torn to pieces by his own dogs? Why should Actaeon be associated with adultery, and in what sense can he be seen as representing a moral lesson? It may be true that Actaeon came to be associated with adultery because of his horns, but neither he nor Falstaff fits as the prototype of the cuckold, the horned husband. Each represents a sexual menace, whose horns are a sign of sexual potency. Actaeon begins to grow his horns immediately upon seeing the naked body of Diana; Falstaff's develop more slowly, urged on by the desire to be revenged on Ford and by two unsuccessful encounters with the wives. The phallic significance of the horns is reinforced in Falstaff's heavily erotic soliloquy in the last scene where he refers to Jove as a bull on whom “Love set … hornes” (5. 5.4 [2484-85]). By this last scene Falstaff has become so eager that he prays to Jove for a “coole rut-time” lest he “pisse his Tallow” (5. 5. 14-15 [2494-95]).⁴² Whether or not there is a moral “sin” involved in the “horniness” of Actaeon or Falstaff is really irrelevant. The Elizabethans may have moralized the myth, and Shakespeare's fairies speak against “unchaste desire” (5. 5. 97 [2579]), but the myth itself is purely descriptive of causes and effects. Actaeon simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ovid says specifically that not desert, but “cruell fortune … was the cause of … his smart.”⁴³ Falstaff's initial motivation in writing his letters, as we have seen, was greed. His lust develops later, and we see him as much pursued as pursuing. One might well even argue that the wives are guilty of entrapment. But the point is that both Actaeon and Falstaff become sexually threatening to the social order, and the order does not tolerate such menaces. Actaeon is torn to pieces by dogs; Falstaff is symbolically castrated.

One wonders in reading The Merry Wives in the study, though not as one sees it on the stage, why Shakespeare chose the order that he did for the three humiliations of Falstaff. Being pinched by fairies seems something of an anticlimax after being thrown into the Thames with a basket of dirty linen and beaten by a jealous husband. There is in the final episode a change in mood from the realistic to the fantastic as well as what seems a decrease in physical intensity. I would argue that the decrease in intensity is only seeming and not actual. Because the events of the final scene are ruthless and cruel, and because the play is a comedy, the action is quite literally masqued. The atmosphere is lightened by the pretense of unreality; the lecherous fat knight is balanced by the ideal of the Knights of the Garter. But what happens is clear.

Society has tried its usual methods for controlling illicit, threatening behavior. Rebirth and baptisms—the expulsion from the buck basket and the dip in the Thames—have failed. Physical punishment—the cudgelling by Ford—has failed. The only alternative is to incapacitate the offender. Lest there be any doubt, we have Mistress Page's announcement that the group's objective is to “dis-horne the spirit” (4. 4. 64 [2188]).

“Dis-horning the spirit” means three things in this scene: (1) the removal of the sexual potency of Falstaff; (2) the transferral of this potency to Ford; and (3) the final exorcising of the specter of cuckoldry. The moment the pinching is finished, Falstaff becomes Fall-staff, the figure of impotence his very name suggests. (Small wonder that Bradley should have found his condition in this scene horrible.) The horns should, I think, be removed from his head immediately. The stage directions do not make this clear, but the dialogue suggests it strongly. Mistress Page, forbidding her husband to carry the “jest” further, apparently holds up the horns, saying “Do not these faire yoakes / Become the Forrest better then the Towne?” (5. 5. 108-10 [2590-91]). (I.e., unchecked sexuality is all right among animals but not in human society.) And in the next speech Ford jokingly shows the horns to “Master Brook.” The final speech of the play, in which Ford says to Falstaff,

To Master Brook you yet shall hold your word;
For he to-night shall lie with Mistress Ford.

[5. 5. 241-42 (2728-29)]

indicates that Ford means to make good use of his horn(s).

I would not rule out the likelihood that the horned Falstaff represents specifically adultery as well as sexual potency. Obviously the two are closely related, and the image of the horned man would surely have suggested cuckoldry to the audience. The Oxford English Dictionary says that in German and French, but not in English, the word cuckold is used for the lover as well as the husband, and this is certainly suggested by Ford's calling Falstaff a “cuckoldly knave.” The final scene of The Merry Wives represents then both the disarming of the threatener and the removal of the threat. Altogether a victory for middle-class morality.

The emotional effects of the action of The Merry Wives may be variously explained, but all the explanations point toward comedy rather than farce. It may be that Falstaff is the pharmakos, or scapegoat, who must be sacrificed to restore the health of society. This would explain the fact that only he suffers real punishment and that his final punishment seems to release the group from all its follies and anxieties. If this is the case, the theme is touched very lightly, as Frye says it must be to be successful, and the result is what he calls “ironic” comedy.⁴⁴ It may be that the play represents, as Frye suggests elsewhere, an “elaborate ritual of the defeat of winter,” where

Falstaff must have felt that, after being thrown into the water, dressed up as a witch and beaten out of a house with curses, and finally supplied with a beast's head and singed with candles while he said, “Divide me like a brib'd buck, each a haunch,” he had done about all that could reasonably be asked for any fertility spirit.

[P. 183]

This suggestion has been illuminatingly developed by J. A. Bryant to show how Falstaff's first two humiliations represent forms of “Carrying Out Death” and how the third humiliation dramatizes the “ancient castigation of the scapegoat.”⁴⁵ If this view is accepted, the play becomes a “festive comedy,” appropriately designed for the season, if 23 April 1597 is indeed the date of the first performance.

Actually, however, The Merry Wives may be viewed more satisfactorily in connection with another kind of festivity. In trying to define its mood and its artistic movement, it is provocative to imagine what the season of the setting ought to be. Since much of the action takes place out of doors, the season is important to the realist, and if any symbolic or ritual progress is to be discerned, the season is significant in establishing the tone and in possibly indicating the occasion.

The text of the play itself is not very helpful. “Birding” is a sport which can be indulged in at any season, and laundry might conceivably be sent to the Thames any time, though certainly spring, summer, and fall are more likely than winter. The reference by Simple (1. 1. 185 [188]) to the use of a Book of Riddles on “Allhallowmas last” is interesting but inconclusive. And Mistress Page's reference to the fact that Herne the Hunter wanders in the winter forest (4. 4. 30 [2152]) does not necessarily set the season for the current action. Even the specific reference to “this raw-rumaticke day” (3. 1. 443 [1197]) leaves the season open.

Traditionally The Merry Wives has been thought of as a summer play. William Mark Clark, for example, spoke lyrically of the “sylvan spendour of its enchanting scenes” with special reference to Herne's Oak, immortalized “fresh and green” for succeeding generations. Charles Cowden Clarke in 1863 refers similarly to the visions conjured up in the play of “leafy nooks” on the Thames, with “barges lapsing on its tranquil tide.” John Middleton Murry finds the play “redolent of early summer,” with “the air … full of May or June.”⁴⁶ And, as we have seen, Northrop Frye suggests spring.

Two modern approaches to the seasonal background of the play cast sharp new light on its mood and, I think correctly, illuminate its purpose. By extension, this new view of the play makes possible new speculation about its date of composition and about how it properly relates to 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV.

Anne Barton in Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play refers without elaboration to the “wintry darkness” of Windsor Park with its “huge leafless oak.”⁴⁷ Possibly following up her suggestion, the Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Merry Wives in 1968-70 specifically associated it with Halloween. The program is done in orange and black, and an early set of descriptions of Halloween rites is included in the background materials.⁴⁸ The careful student's response to this interpretation is an overwhelming assent. Yes, The Merry Wives is a Halloween play. In saying this I do not mean to insist that Shakespeare had Halloween deliberately in mind as the time of the action, although such an interpretation would help account for all those elves and fairies cavorting in the forest, and for Falstaff's disguise. I mean rather to argue that a Halloween setting strikes the right note for the mood of the play.

Halloween, 31 October, is the night before the Christian festival of Allhallows or All Saints' Day. But it is also clearly a relic of pagan times. J. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough associates the celebration with a Celtic festival of the beginning of the New Year, marking the “transition from autumn to winter.” It was, he says, a night on which witches, fairies, and hobgoblins were thought to roam freely. The Merry Wives is a play about the final fling of mischievous, sometimes dangerous spirits before the dawning of a pious and orderly All Saints' Day. It is also, to use the more primitive implications of the feast, a play about fertility, about the end of one harvest season and the preparation for the next. And it is, for Falstaff at least, a play about the beginning of winter. It is in a very genuine sense a festive comedy releasing, clarifying, and at the same time poignantly foreshadowing worse days to come.⁴⁹

The mischievous spirit of the play—ranging from mild to malevolent—is abundantly evident. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page trick Falstaff; Mistress Quickly tricks Ford, who is attempting to trick his wife. Master and Mistress Page attempt to trick each other in arranging Anne's marriage, but Anne succeeds in tricking them both. The Host tricks Sir Hugh. Slender and Caius are tricked by the Pages, and so on. The great majority of the trickery is directly related to sex and marriage, and thus the pranks of the Halloween spirit relate to the more ancient fertility celebration.

The process sounds very much like that described by Barber and Frye as the ritual associated with the scapegoat, where the evils potential in society are recognized and enjoyed (Falstaff shares in all except jealousy) and then driven out. Barber does not mention this process, however, in regard to this play. He regards The Merry Wives simply as a later play (1598-1602) where Shakespeare's creative powers were not “fully engaged” (p. 222). The scapegoat ritual is associated by him with the Falstaff of only 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV. And yet Barber's own description of what happens in 2 Henry IV sounds much more precisely like a description of The Merry Wives. “To put Carnival on trial, run him out of town, and burn or bury him is in folk custom a way of limiting, by ritual, the attitudes and impulses set loose by ritual. Such a trial, though conducted with gay hoots and jeers, serves to swing the mind round to a new vantage.” From this new vantage, says Barber misrule is seen not as “benign release,” but as a source of destruction to society (p. 213). This is exactly what happens in The Merry Wives. Inevitably, and a little sadly, the virtuous forces of fidelity and matrimonial love triumph over disruption. Law and order are restored.

This process is not primarily a rational one. Having had their fling, the goblins and elves are prepared to be saints on the morrow. Falstaff's “sacrifice” restores Ford's harmonious potency with his wife, provides the occasion for Anne's successful union with her lover, and restores harmony to the community. On one level the old fertility god is sacrificed; order is restored to marriage, and posterity is assured. On another, rather uglier, level, social forces have focused their hostilities on a convenient butt and, having vented their explosive power, subside into calm normality.

The situation at the end of The Merry Wives is rather like that in The Merchant of Venice. In each case the community has chosen an outsider as scapegoat, in each case thoroughly defeated him, and then in each case offered him token membership in the community. The chief differences is that Shylock is a “kill joy,” opposed to the “holiday” qualities enumerated by Barber (p. 7), whereas Falstaff is the very embodiment of “holiday”—drinker, lover, and riotous liver. His defeat in The Merry Wives is the inevitable sequel to the defeat of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. Holiday may truimph momentarily, but, as Barber says, misrule must be defeated when it seeks to become an everyday racket (p. 14). Defeated it is in Windsor Forest. If the three Falstaff plays are read in proper order, we see that this scene in the forest foreshadows Falstaff's rejection by Hal at the conclusion of 2 Henry IV.

Following the story this way, we see that the “festive” rejection and then social inclusion of Falstaff, which Barber finds missing in 2 Henry IV, are clearly contained in the Windsor play. Only the political rejection, necessary for Prince Hal, remains for the history to act out. It is interesting that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the three Falstaff plays were commonly played together, there were no complaints about the rejection of Falstaff. It is a custom to which we should probably return: reading or seeing The Merry Wives, as Edmond Malone once suggested, between the two parts of Henry IV.⁵⁰

The process of scapegoating, however skillfully portrayed, is a disquieting one to watch. Banding together against an outsider does indeed unite a community, and driving him out does create a temporary sense of unanimity. But it is perhaps the least rational of all means of achieving concord and the most shortlived. It is significant that both these scapegoating plays (The Merry Wives and The Merchant), in spite of the surface serenity of their endings, leave their audiences with a lingering uneasiness. And it is also significant that when Shakespeare uses the pattern one final time in Twelfth Night, he reduces it to a minor position in the resolution of the actions and confines it to lower-class characters. Even so, it is disturbing.

Another approach to defining the special qualities of The Merry Wives is to speculate that Shakespeare was contrasting in this work, as well as in The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, and Measure for Measure, notions of strict justice as opposed to mercy. In any case, the reconciliation and total harmony of the end suggest “comedy of forgiveness.” One other element is clearly operative: the younger generation quietly but resolutely establishes a new social unit and overrules the edicts of its elders. Dennis misses the emotional importance of this action in his rational concern for parental authority. In The Comical Gallant his lovers return from their elopement unmarried to seek their parents' permission. But in comedy the laws of society must be broken as well as defined. The old order survives only as it continues to make way for the new.

Emotionally as well as rationally the effect then of The Merry Wives is that of comedy. We must say that farce is the exploitation of fears and resentments, conscious and unconscious—the fear that man is essentially only an animal and that chance totally controls the universe; the resentment of the repressions and frustrations of a social order. Comedy, on the other hand, is the literary equivalent of the theology of hope. It reinforces our confidence in social forms and asserts that there are orderly and beneficent forces at work in them, however weak, imperfect, and absurd or cruel the individual parts. The latter is an exact description of the tone of The Merry Wives. Farcical it is in some respects—as Bentley says, the higher form frequently absorbs the lower⁵¹—but we cannot achieve a full appreciation of the play by reducing it to a farce. More accurately we might describe it as a farcical, humorous, ironic occasionally poetic, happy, festive middle-class comedy of forgiveness in prose.

The Merry Wives is not a lighthearted midsummer romp, or a springtime celebration, but rather a record of the transition from fall to winter—an effort to put the house in order, to become reconciled to the passing of fertility from the old to the young. Just beyond the frivolity of the play's pranks and the “innocent” revenge of its night-wandering spirits lie the gravity and earnestness of a sober New Year. Allhallow Eve must give way to the Feast of All Saints. The key figure in this ritual is, of course, Falstaff. Since he looms so large (in all senses) in our response to the play and since responses to him have been so varied, it is worthwhile to examine in some detail the historical spectrum of critical comments about him.

Notes

1. The list includes A. C. Bradley, Charlotte Porter, Fred Emery, F. T. Bowers, Mark Van Doren, J. R. Brown, T. M. Parrott, Alfred Harbage, P. G. Phialas, L. B. Wright and Virginia LaMar, William Green, Philip Edwards, Clifford Leech, Ralph Berry, and Larry Champion. E. M. W. Tillyard, The Nature of Comedy and Shakespeare, p. 11, gives the play a kind of word as “social comedy”; and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, pp. 167, 45, 69, takes it seriously as comedy, as do Sherman Hawkins (see note 39), Bertrand Evans (see note 28), and Leo Salingar. In his edition, G. R. Hibbard treats it respectfully as a bourgeois play of comic revenge. (The idea of a revenge comedy appears also in Godshalk [see below] and Berry [see note 39].) Anne Righter (Barton), Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, p. 147, classifies it, albeit briefly, with Hamlet as a study of reality and illusion. Recently its comic qualities have been perceptively explored by W. L. Godshalk, “An Apology for The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Renaissance Papers 1973, pp. 97-108; J. A. Bryant (see note 44), and William Carroll (see note 38).

2. Hartley Coleridge, Essays and Marginalia, 2:134.

3. Andrew C. Bradley, “The Rejection of Falstaff,” in Oxford Lectures on Poetry, p. 248.

4. John Dryden, Literary Criticism, ed. Arthur C. Kirsch, pp. 91-92.

5. Charles Beecher Hogan, Shakespeare in the Theatre 1701-1800, 1:460; 2:716-17.

6. Charles Gildon, Post-Man Robb'd of His Mail, pp. 112-13.

7. Joseph Warton, quoted in Plays (1778), ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, 1:227.

8. W. Oxberry, ed., The Merry Wives of Windsor, in The New English Drama, 8:i, iii.

9. Samuel Weller Singer, ed., Dramatic Works, 1:182.

10. H. N. Hudson, ed., Works, 1:207.

11. H. C. Hart, ed., The Merry Wives of Windsor, pp. lxx-lxxi.

12. Charles Gildon, A Comparison Between the Two Stages, p. 148.

13. Nicholas Rowe, ed., Works, 7:285.

14. John Dennis, The Comical Gallant, p. ii.

15. John Dennis, Critical Works, ed. Edward N. Hooker, 1:279-80.

16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas M. Raysor, 2:129-30.

17. These are taken from the list of stock characters of Elizabethan comedy in Richard Hosley's, “The Formal Influence of Plautus and Terence,” in Elizabethan Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, pp. 137-42.

18. Laurence Echard, ed., Plautus's Comedies, pp. iv-v.

19. Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama, pp. 248-50.

20. Nevill Coghill, “The Basis of Shakespearean Comedy,” Essays and Studies of the English Association, n.s. 3 (1950): 10.

21. Robert G. Hunter, Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness, pp. 1, 88; C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, pp. 154, 222.

22. Henry B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy, pp. 193-98; John Dover Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies, chap. 4.

23. S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespearian Comedy, p. 59; Larry S. Champion, The Evolution of Shakespeare's Comedy, pp. 61-62.

24. Fredson T. Bowers, ed., The Merry Wives of Windsor, p. 19.

25. Robert B. Heilman, “The Taming Untamed, or, The Return of the Shrew,” Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966): 151.

26. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre, ed. Phyllis Hartnoll, p. 255.

27. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, eds., Plays (1773), 1:312; Johnson, ed., Plays (1765), 2:554 n.; H. N. Hudson, ed., Works, 1:207.

28. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies, pp. 98-117.

29. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 67; Eugene Ionesco, in the program for the National Theatre production of Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear, London, 1966.

30. Margaret Cavendish, Sociable Letters Written by the Lady Marchioness of Newcastle, p. 246.

31. Rowe, ed., Works, 7:281; S. Johnson and Steevens, eds., Plays (1773), 1:312.

32. William Mark Clark, ed., Plays 5:5; Arthur T. Quiller-Couch and J. Dover Wilson, eds., The Merry Wives of Windsor, p. xxxiv.

33. M. R. Ridley, ed., The Merry Wives of Windsor, p. xvi.

34. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar, eds., The Merry Wives of Windsor, p. ix.

35. Francis Gentleman, ed., Plays, 3:3; Rowe, ed., Works, l:xviii.

36. Ben Jonson, “Introduction to Every Man Out of His Humour,” Works, ed., C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, 3:433.

37. Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorist, p. viii.

38. Although I unfortunately did not see The Royal Shakespeare Theatre production of The Merry Wives, 1968-70, it is clear from the reviews that Ian Richardson as Ford was able to maintain comic control while suggesting the tragic undertones of his behavior. For an excellent analysis of the progress of Ford's jealousy, see William Carroll, “‘A Received Belief’: Imagination in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 188-89.

39. Sherman Hawkins, “The Two Worlds of Shakespearean Comedy,” Shakespeare Studies 3 (1967):67. Ralph Berry also emphasizes hostilities in his chapter on The Merry Wives, significantly entitled “The Revenger's Comedy” in his book Shakespeare's Comedies, but he considers the effect farcical.

40. Bentley, The Life of the Drama, p. 226.

41. Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, 2:17; John M. Steadman, “Falstaff as Actaeon: A Dramatic Emblem,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 230-44.

42. A number of learned annotations on the sex habits of deer have failed to obscure a double-entendre which must refer also to a fear of premature ejaculation.

43. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding. Quoted in Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, 2:51.

44. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 45.

45. J. A. Bryant, “Falstaff and the Renewal of Windsor,” PMLA 89 (1974): 296-301.

46. William Mark Clark, ed., Plays, 5:7; Charles Cowden Clarke, Shakespeare's Characters, p. 142; J. Middleton Murry, “The Creation of Falstaff,” Discoveries, p. 251.

47. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, pp. 146-47.

48. The production of the play at Stratford, Connecticut, in the summer of 1971, began with townsmen carrying jack o'lanterns and followed through with a Halloween motif in the costume of the “fairies” in the forest.

49. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, pt. 7, vol. 1, pp. 224-26; C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, p. 4.

50. Edmond Malone in Supplement (1780) to Plays (1778), ed. Samuel Johnson and George Steevens, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 89. Malone later changed his mind and dated the play after Henry V, see his edition of Poems and Plays, vol. 1, pt. 1, p. 328.

51. Bentley, The Life of the Drama, p. 302.

Works Cited

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