[In the following essay, Slights maintains that in The Merry Wives of Windsor “the pastoral values of simplicity, humility, and fidelity are elusive and transitory but always accessible.” The critic also points out that Windsor is not like Sidney's Arcadia—a golden or green world—but is instead a retreat that combines two traditions: pastoral as a place of innocence and pastoral as a celebration of “sensual gratification.”]

Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson in The Merry Wives of Windsor, tries to arrange Master Slender's marriage to Anne Page and in the process offends another of Anne's suitors, Doctor Caius, who challenges him to a duel. Act three finds Parson Evans waiting, with considerable trepidation, to answer the challenge:

Pless my soul, how full of chollors I am, and trempling of mind: I shall be glad if he have deceived me. How melancholies I am! I will knog his urinals about his knave's costard when I have good opportunities for the 'ork. Pless my soul!

(III.i.11-15)¹

Suddenly, in the course of expressing his malevolence and apprehension, he breaks into song:

To shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sings madrigals;
There will we make our peds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies.
To shallow—

(ll. 16-20)

The delivery of a familiar text in Evans's comic Welsh accent compounds the incongruities inherent in the situation of a clergyman preparing to fight a duel of honour over his role as go-between in a romantic intrigue. Moreover, as Ronald Huebert has pointed out, the Marlowe quotation not only reminds us of Evans's incongruous position but also parodies the conventions of the pastoral love song that were becoming literary clichés by the late 1590s.² In the robustly middle-class world of Shakespeare's Windsor, the delicate beauty of Marlowe's poem seems absurdly out of place.

Nevertheless, while the singer and his song may appear ridiculous, Evans's choice of musical texts is less incongruous than critics have allowed. Indeed, the lines he quotes are apt and illuminating both for his immediate situation and for the comic world he inhabits. In a time of anxiety and anticipated danger Evans recalls Marlowe's pastoral lyric not because his thoughts have turned to love but because he longs for the world of peace and safety Marlowe evokes. To Evans, this pastoral ideal of human and natural harmony seems poignantly inaccessible, and he breaks off, exclaiming that he feels as much like crying as singing. When he resumes his song, he interpolates a more melancholy line of pastoral poetry:

Mercy on me! I have a great dispositions to cry.—
                              Melodious birds sing madrigals—
                              Whenas I sat in Pabylon—
                              And a thousand vagram posies.
                              To shallow, etc.

(ll. 21-25)

He interjects into Marlowe's love poem a line from Psalm 137, which in a similar metrical version begins:

When as we sate in Babilon,
          the riuers round about,
and in remembraunce of Sion,
          the teares for griefe burst out:
We hangd our harpes and instruments,
          the willow trees vpon:
for in that place men for their vse,
          had planted many one.(3)

Clearly, Psalm 137 intrudes into Evans's memory because it combines the pastoral imagery of river, trees, and music with the direct expression of grief and with elegaic longing for an idealized harmonious community.⁴ Like most people, Parson Evans turns to pastoralism when the stress and complexity of the world are too much with him and he yearns for the peace and innocence of a better world.

The most delightful irony implicit in Evans's evocation of the pastoral tradition is the fact that he is in the midst of that harmonious world without knowing it. Specifically, he is in no danger from Doctor Caius's sword. The genial host of the Garter, who has no intention of losing either his doctor or his priest, has misdirected the would-be adversaries to opposite sides of town in order to avoid bloodshed. More generally, the Windsor of Shakespeare's comedy is a community of human and natural harmony where rural virtue triumphs over courtly sophistication. Sir Hugh's quotations signal that the pastoral, along with Plautine comedy, medieval farce, and Italian novelle, is among the generic antecedents of the play's comic form.

The Windsor of The Merry Wives is admittedly an unlikely locus amoenus. Sir John Falstaff attempts to seduce Mistress Page and Mistress Ford in a busy village, not the fields of Arcady or the forest of Arden. The fat knight and those respectable matrons and their families, not lovesick shepherds and innocent nymphs, are at the centre of the dramatic action. Still, while Windsor does not provide a wholly natural contrast to urban artificiality, the green world is all around and easily accessible. The basic staples of pastoral landscape are ready to hand: fields with birds, woods with deer, a flowing river, and even an ancient oak all play notable parts in the action and serve the traditional function of bringing sophistication, ambition, and greed to terms with natural simplicity.

For all of Falstaff's natural exuberance, his designs on the deer and the women of Windsor constitute an attack by the civilized vices of greed and pride on bucolic contentment. In scene one, when he is accused by Shallow of beating his men and killing his deer, Falstaff arrogantly admits the charges, brags that he has also kissed the keeper's daughter and broken Slender's head, and taunts Shallow that he would make a laughingstock of himself by his threatened complaint to the Council. Falstaff's attempt to seduce Mistress Page and Mistress Ford originates in greed and is nurtured by vanity. He plans to solve his financial problems by making love to the women, whom he believes to control their husbands' ample purses. His social rank and his personal vanity make him confident of success. Mistress Page, he brags, “examined my parts with most judicious oeillades: sometimes the beam of her view gilded my foot, sometimes my portly belly” (I.iii.56-58), and she understands his proposal as a temptation to ambition, confiding to her friend that “if it were not for one trifling respect, I could come to such honour! … If I would but go to hell for an eternal moment or so, I could be knighted” (II.i.43-48). Falstaff woos Ford's wife by flattering her that nature intended her for a more exalted social sphere: “thou wouldst make an absolute courtier, and the firm fixture of thy foot would give an excellent motion to thy gait in a semi-circled farthingale” (III.iii.55-58), and he has no doubts that he can “predominate over the peasant” her husband (II.ii.270-71).

While Sir John and his followers clearly exhibit the vices of civilization, the denizens of Windsor may seem too concerned with economic advantage and social status and too busy with schemes of matchmaking and revenge to illustrate the contrasting pastoral virtues of humility and contentment. For example, the play opens with Shallow's indignant assertions of the dignity of his social rank and family lineage. Economic considerations, moreover, determine both Master and Mistress Page's choice of husband for their daughter, Mistress Page supporting Doctor Caius, who has money and powerful friends at court, and Master Page favouring Slender, who has land and 300 pounds a year. Even Fenton, Anne's own choice, admits that he was first attracted to her by her father's wealth. In addition, Falstaff's aggression against the gamekeeper is echoed in Shallow's repeated boasting of the combative prowess of his youth, in Doctor Caius's challenge to Evans, and in the beating Ford administers to the supposed old woman of Brainford. The citizens of Windsor have even been accused of sharing Falstaff's gluttony, exhibiting inordinate appetites for food and drink.

In short, acquisitiveness, pride, and pugnacity are as natural to the inhabitants of Windsor as to Falstaff and his followers. And that similarity, I think, is just the point. Desires for food, drink, sex, money and prestige are as basic to life in Windsor as to life in the most worldly and self-indulgent urban or courtly society, but in the simple rural community they are held in check. The citizens of Windsor are conscious of distinctions of social rank but are fundamentally unimpressed by them. The merry wives are immune to the temptation of a knightly lover. Justice Shallow is asserting his right to respect in spite of Falstaff's superior rank when he blusters, “If he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, Esquire” (I.i.2-4). Although Anne's parents prudently want to secure their daughter's social and economic position through her marriage, they are not socially ambitious and do not want an aristocratic son-in-law who would marry her “but as a property” (III.iv.10) to repair his own depleted fortune. Essentially, economic and social status function in Windsor as means of establishing membership within the community, not as means of asserting individual superiority.

The sense of community, moreover, controls the appetitive and aggressive impulses of the citizens. It is true, as Barbara Freedman comments, that “eating seems to be the major preoccupation of Windsor society; everyone is always coming from or going to a dinner,”⁵ but it is equally notable that no one eats alone: the references to dining are almost always in the form of invitations offered and accepted. While Falstaff poaches another man's deer, Shallow gives deer to Page, who invites everyone to share his venison pasty and wine. By the same token, the men of Windsor are naturally combative, as Shallow boasts:

Bodykins, Master Page, though I now be old, and of the Peace, if I see a sword out, my finger itches to make one. Though we are justices, and doctors, and churchmen, Master Page, we have some salt of our youth in us; we are the sons of women, Master Page.

(II.iii.41-45)

But for all their irascibility and nostalgia for youthful exploits, they accept transformation into pillars of the community. Shallow remembers that he is a sworn Justice of the Peace come to pacify Caius not to “make one” in his quarrel. Reminded of their responsible roles in the community as “a curer of souls” and “a curer of bodies” (II.iii.35-36, cf. III.i.90) and learning how they have been tricked by the Host, Evans and Caius drop their quarrel rather than be “laughingstocks to other men's humours” (III.i.78-79).

Life in Windsor is not uneventful, but on the whole people live together there peacefully, controlling potentially explosive situations through various forms of social pressure. Act one, scene one, sometimes criticized as superfluous, demonstrates the social group functioning smoothly, reconciling differences through good will and hospitality. Settling the quarrel between Evans and Caius requires more complicated manoeuvres and recourse to the harsher weapons of trickery and ridicule. In both cases the peacemakers act as a group: Evans, Page, and the Host are the self-appointed umpires for the deer-stealing controversy, and Shallow, Slender, Page, and the Host co-operate to reconcile Caius and Evans. While they are effective as representatives of the community, not as individuals, they transmit the group judgment personally and informally rather than through impersonal institutions, and their power is accepted rather than imposed. With the notable exceptions of Falstaff and his followers, the residents of Windsor have a sense of themselves as part of a group and are willing to bend to social pressure in order to retain the reassurances of community.

Although critics have made much of Falstaff's status as an outsider, the fact that he is a visitor is less crucial than his imperviousness to public opinion and his refusal to identify with the group. After all, for an English village, Windsor has a remarkably heterogeneous population, including a Welsh parson and a French doctor as well as the Fords, Pages, and Justice Shallow with his three-hundred-year-old coat of arms. Even Shallow and Slender, like Falstaff, are visitors, guests at the inn (II.iii.53, 69).

Being a visitor or an alien is no bar to participation in Windsor society. Although there are jokes about Evans and Caius, they are mocked affectionately as members of the group. Their accents are ridiculed as Mistress Quickly's malapropisms are, as personal idiosyncracies, and cause no real problems in communication. In contrast, Nym's affected language earns Master Page's distrust and defeats his attempt to make Page jealous. And Falstaff, whose command of the King's English surpasses all other characters', utterly misunderstands Mistress Quickly and Mistress Ford. He boasts that Mistress Ford “gives the leer of invitation; I can construe the action of her familiar style, and the hardest voice of her behaviour, to be Englished rightly, is, ‘I am Sir John Falstaff's’” (I.iii.42-45). As Pistol says, he has “translated her will—out of honesty into English” (ll. 46-47), and he suffers for his mistranslation. Society is held together, then, not so much by a shared language as by shared values, in this play especially by agreement about permissible sexual activity. The scene where Mistress Quickly hears indecencies in young William's recital of his Latin lesson comically demonstrates that, as society transmits its culture to the young, it passes on not merely grammar and vocabulary but attitudes and assumptions and that the two are distinguishable: proficiency in one does not necessarily imply understanding of the other.

While the heterogeneity of Windsor's population suggests that enjoying the bucolic peace and innocence traditionally symbolized by a pastoral setting depends not on place of nativity or social rank but on values and attitudes, the physical presence of the court itself at Windsor suggests that the courtly vices of ambition and sexual intrigue are temptations for country men and women as well as for courtiers. Mistress Quickly assures Falstaff that he is not the first courtly suitor to address Mistress Ford:

there has been knights, and lords, and gentlemen, with their coaches—I warrant you, coach after coach, letter after letter, gift after gift … that would have won any woman's heart … and yet there has been earls, nay, which is more, pensioners, but, I warrant you, all is one with her.

(II.ii.60-74)

Although this flight of fancy is not to be believed literally, it reminds us of the immanence of the court and establishes that it is a matter of conscious choice that the court has no effective reality in the lives of the characters. Just as a harmonious social life is possible for a French doctor, a Welsh clergyman, and a down-at-heels aristocrat as well as for the Fords and Pages, so the civilized decadence and individual ambition associated with the courtly ambience are possibilities within ordinary life. Caius, who boasts of his practice among earls, knights, lords, and gentlemen, and Fenton, who is reputed to have “kept company with the wild Prince and Poins (III.ii.66-67), as well as Falstaff, have connections with the court, but their preference for integration with the humbler Windsor community is expressed by their desire to marry Anne Page.

The Windsor community that accepts considerable diversity and tolerates a good deal of aggressive, anti-social behaviour severely punishes Falstaff for his proposed adultery. By attacking marriage, the basis of social structure, Falstaff has repudiated the friendliness and hospitality that are the means both of creating and of expressing communal solidarity. Also, his smug assumption of the acceptability of his proposal threatens the women's sense of their own identity, which depends largely on their public status as virtuous wives. Mistress Ford's reaction on receiving Falstaff's letter is to reflect uneasily on her own behaviour:

What an unweighed behaviour hath this Flemish drunkard picked … out of my conversation, that he dares in this manner assay me? … I was then frugal of my mirth. Heaven forgive me!

(II.i.22-28)

Mistress Page expresses even more explicitly the disorientation they both feel at this threat to their sense of themselves:

MRS. Ford.
What doth he think of us?
MRS. Page.
Nay, I know not: it makes me almost ready to wrangle with mine own honesty. I'll entertain myself like one that I am not acquainted withal; for, sure, unless he know some strain in me that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me in this fury.

(ll. 80-86)

Because their sense of themselves depends on their public image, they cannot simply refuse Falstaff's proposal but must prove to him and to the community at large how totally wrong he is. Thus their revenge is as much educative as retributive. They do not denounce Falstaff and send him packing; instead they teach him a lesson by humbling his aggressive individualism to the values and authority of their rural community. They put him through a series of experiences that forces him to bow to social pressures and prepares him to understand and accept his place within the society.

Appropriately, the staging of Falstaff's humiliation utilizes burlesque versions of pastoral motifs. In the first episode, the ubiquitous flowing brook of the pastoral landscape has been transformed to the muddy banks of the Thames into which Falstaff is thrown. The traditional symbolism of purity is rendered comically in the domestic details of laundering, and Falstaff's urgent need for purification is reified in the dirty, smelly linen that he shares the buck basket with. The man who woos with talk of jewels and courtly finery is unceremoniously “rammed … in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins, that … there was the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril” (III.v.80-84).

As the merry wives anticipate, this first treatment does not cure Falstaff's “dissolute disease” (III.iii.177). Like Duke Senior, who finds that natural adversities “‘feelingly persuade me what I am’” (AYL II.i.11), Falstaff is reminded by his rude immersion in the Thames of what kind of man he is—a man with “a kind of alacrity in sinking,” “a man … that am as subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw” (III.v.12, 105-08). But while he is made conscious of his physical grossness and vulnerability, he remains unrepentant and unashamed. He recounts the experience with indignation at the discomfort he has suffered and with undiminished arrogance and contempt for Master Ford, whom he again plans to cuckold, and for Mistress Ford, whom he plans to pass on afterwards to Master Brook.

In his next encounter with the Windsor wives, Falstaff is disguised as a woman. Although a shepherd's costume is a more usual pastoral disguise, Falstaff's female clothing is not unprecedented. Pyrocles in Sidney's Arcadia also puts on women's clothing to disguise his pursuit of a forbidden love. But while Pyrocles disguises himself as a splendidly beautiful and war-like amazon, Falstaff appears as an outcast old woman. Again, the details of the punishment appropriately travesty the fat knight's pretensions. His favourite persona as suitor has been that of a blunt, virile soldier. For example, his initial love letters concluded:

“Let it suffice thee … if the love of soldier can suffice—that I love thee. I will not say pity me—'tis not a soldier-like phrase—but I say, love me. By me,

                              Thine own true knight,
                              By day or night,
                              Or any kind of light,
                              With all his might
                              For thee to fight,
                                                            John Falstaff.”

(II.i.9-19)

And at his first assignation with Mistress Ford he disdainfully contrasts his own manly courting with that of those effeminate “lisping hawthorn-buds that come like women in men's apparel” (III.iii.65-66). At their next meeting when he hears that her husband is coming, this mighty knight begs the women to devise a disguise for him—“any extremity rather than a mischief” (IV.ii.65-66). Pyrocles, disguised as the amazon Zelmane, feels only momentary shame at being discovered in his female disguise and justifies his adopted motto, Never more Valiant, by fighting bravely and victoriously. But the merry wives have mischievously dressed Falstaff as “the fat woman of Brainford” (IV.ii.67), whom Master Ford believes to be a witch and has threatened to beat, so that, in addition to betraying his cowardice, Falstaff receives a thorough drubbing from the “peasant” Ford.

This experience shakes Falstaff's self-confidence even if it does not damage his self-esteem. He rather defensively boasts to “Master Brook” that, although he has been beaten “in the shape of a woman[,] … in the shape of man … I fear not Goliath with a weaver's beam” (V.i.20-22). In soliloquy he admits that he has been “cozened and beaten too” (IV.v.89), but he boasts to Mistress Quickly of the “admirable dexterity of wit” (IV.v.112) with which he avoided the further humiliation of being exhibited as a witch in the common stocks. He fears public humiliation, but the authority and judgment he respects are the court's:

If it should come to the ear of the court how I have been transformed, and how my transformation hath been washed and cudgelled, 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 crest-fallen as a dried pear.

(IV.v.89-95)

Abashed but unrepentant, he wants revenge rather than forgiveness from Windsor society.

His desire to be revenged on Ford incites him to meet Mistress Ford once more and so to fall into the last trap set for him. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page understand that Falstaff has been sufficiently frightened by the last fiasco not to renew his solicitations but that his punishment will not be complete until his shame is made public. Falstaff suffered his dunking in the Thames privately and his beating anonymously; his final humiliation takes place before the entire community. It also penetrates most deeply to the core of his pride. When Ford, disguised as Master Brook, flatters Falstaff that he is renowned for his “many war-like, court-like, and learned” (II.ii.220-21) endowments, he shrewdly articulates Falstaff's image of himself. Although his soldierly swaggering and his courtly wooing are perhaps largely tongue-in-cheek, pride in his “admirable dexterity of wit” is wholly genuine. For example, it provides his enjoyment in mocking country obtuseness and superstition when Slender sends Simple to consult the fortune-telling woman of Brainford (IV.v.28-53). And, of course, a sense of intellectual superiority underlies his whole cony-catching scheme. Just as being treated as a piece of dirty laundry has tarnished his pretensions to courtly grandeur and receiving a beating as a weak old woman has undermined his war-like boasting, the last plot is designed to attack his intellectual pride.

For the last, much elaborated punishment, Mistress Ford arranges a midnight rendezvous in Windsor forest by an old oak tree reputed to be haunted by the spirit of Herne the hunter. Falstaff, wearing stag antlers in disguise as Herne the hunter, is caught up in the fabulous, numinous atmosphere:

The Windsor bell hath struck twelve; the minute draws on. Now, the hot-blooded gods assist me! Remember, Jove, thou wast a bull for thy Europa; love set on thy horns.

(V.v.1-4)

Although he had planned to manipulate the women sexually for his own financial purposes, they now arouse him to an erotic frenzy:

My doe with the black scut? Let the sky rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’, hail kissing-comfits, and snow eringoes; let there come a tempest of provocation, I will shelter me here.

(ll. 18-22)

Suddenly, his sexual fantasy-come-true is interrupted by Evans, Quickly, and the Windsor children disguised as fairies, and the women flee. Falstaff, who had mocked Simple's credulity so wittily, is totally duped and hides his eyes in terror: “They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die” (l. 48). The “fairies” discover and torment him until the Pages and Fords arrive to complete his disgrace by mocking him.

The scene at Herne's oak is a burlesque version of the supernatural centre at the heart of the pastoral landscape. Speaking of the multiple setting of Renaissance pastoral romances, Walter R. Davis suggests thinking of “a center with two concentric circles surrounding it.” The pattern, he says, implies

a kind of purification of life proceeding inward: from the … naturalistic outer circle, to the refined pastoral inner circle, and then to the pure center of the world.

The center is always supernatural, usually either a shrine … or the dwelling of a magician. It may be the actual dwelling place of the god, who may reveal himself … there.⁶

The spectacle of a fat old man with deer antlers tied to his head being pinched by a motley assortment of villagers got up as fairies obviously is a long way from Calidore's vision of the Graces dancing on Mount Alcidale in Spenser's Legend of Courtesy, yet, for all its absurdity, the scene at Herne's oak functions much as the visit to a supernatural centre does in more orthodox pastorals. Calidore, who withdraws from his heroic quest into a pastoral world and then happens upon the Graces dancing to Colin Clout's piping, gains momentary access to the poet's vision of perfect order that embraces the natural and human worlds while transcending them. Falstaff witnesses a humbler artistic production, but even Mistress Quickly is unexpectedly dignified in her role as fairy queen and evokes quite eloquently an image of natural and social order:

And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,
Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring:
Th'expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;
And Honi soit qui mal y pense write
In em'rald tufts, flowers purple, blue, and white,
Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery
Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee:
Fairies use flowers for their charactery.

(V.v.66-74)

The basic action of the pastoral romance, according to Davis, consists of the hero's journey from the heroic world of the outer circle to the peaceful pastoral world, and then to the supernatural centre, where the hero resolves his internal conflicts and is prepared for his return to the outer world.⁷ Sometimes the resolution is simply the supernatural gift of a god, but sometimes the illumination is gained more painfully. In Sidney's Arcadia, for example, the centre is not a shrine but a cave, which serves as a focus for events that are “degrading and even shameful as well as instructive and humiliating.”⁸ For Falstaff the process is painful and increasingly humiliating. First, the “fairies” taunt and torture him for the sinful fantasies of his corrupted heart. After the fairy vision vanishes, the mockery of the assembled company forces him to realize that the only metamorphosis to occur at Hearne's oak is, as he ruefully admits, that “I am made an ass” (l. 120). What most astonishes him is his own gullibility—that he, witty Jack Falstaff, “in despite of the teeth of all rhyme and reason” took the villagers for fairies: “See now how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent, when 'tis upon ill employment!” (ll. 126-29). The Fords and the Pages taunt and insult him, but it is Parson Evans's voice that Falstaff reacts to most strongly:

Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English? This is enough to be the decay of lust and late-walking through the realm.

(ll. 143-46)

The chorus of ridicule culminates with Evans's denunciation, which elicits Falstaff's surrender:

Well, I am your theme: you have the start of me. I am dejected; I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel; ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me; use me as you will.

(ll. 162-65)

When Falstaff's wit is humbled to Evans's ignorance, the pastoral values of simplicity and humility have triumphed over wit and worldliness, communality has triumphed over selfish individualism, and Falstaff's punishment is over. He has been exposed, humiliated, and hence controlled. The goal has not been ostracism or even conversion but rather integration, and the Pages begin the process by extending yet one more hospitable invitation, including “Sir John and all” (l. 240). Once the threat of adultery has been defeated, the group turns its attention to celebrating marriage—sexuality in its socially controlled form. Anne Page's elopement is discovered and forgiven, and the play ends with a joking reference to middle-aged, married sexuality:

FORD.
                                                                                                              Sir John,
To Master Brook you yet shall hold your word,
For he to-night shall lie with Mistress Ford.

(ll. 240-42)

In this way, Windsor combines two traditions: the pastoral world as a place of innocence and chastity and the pastoral world as a place of full sensual gratification.

While The Merry Wives ends happily with plans for everyone to return to town and “laugh this sport o'er by a country fire” (l. 239), mockery, the weapon that brings Falstaff's greed and lust under social control, also can be socially divisive. Suffering scorn and ridicule creates the desire to mock others in revenge. Thus when the Host ridicules Caius and Evans, they abandon their duel rather than be laughingstocks only to ally themselves in a plot to have revenge on him. Poor Master Ford's double fear, of being revealed to public scorn as a cuckold and of being ridiculed by Page as a “jealous fool” (IV.ii.120) for unwarranted suspicion, drives him to the absurd position of wanting to prove his wife guilty of adultery so that he can “be revenged on Falstaff, and laugh at Page” (II.ii.299-300). This potentially destructive process of mockery begetting mockery does not develop into an uncontrolled cycle of revenge largely because of its communal nature. No one pursues a goal of private vengeance; instead, each person who feels aggrieved enlists friends and neighbours in his scheme, whose end is always public ridicule. No one rejects the group judgment or perpetuates his grudge beyond the public acknowledgement of guilt. For example, Ford explicitly submits himself to the judgment of the group each time he sets out to prove Falstaff's adultery (III.iii.138-40; IV.ii.147-51) and admits his fault and asks for forgiveness when his suspicions prove wrong (III.iii.210; IV.iv.6-9). Although Parson Evans occasionally reminds him of his weakness, Mistress Ford asks no additional penance, and Master Page, rather than gloating, exemplifies characteristic Windsor moderation by warning Ford against being “as extreme in submission / As in offence” (IV.iv.11-12).

The pattern works out most clearly, indeed almost schematically, in the three plots against Falstaff. The first involves only the women—Mistress Ford, Mistress Page, and Mistress Quickly. In the second, the men co-operate unwittingly: Ford beats Falstaff without knowing it. Significantly, as the group opposing Falstaff widens, Falstaff's sub-group disintegrates, and the men's involvement results directly from his followers' revenge against him for turning them away. Finally, the men, women, and children of Windsor all participate in the last plot. In the first episode, the women Falstaff has most directly misjudged and insulted punish him. In the second, the agent of persecution is Master Ford, the man he has consciously tried to injure. In the third, that role is taken by Parson Evans, a disinterested representative of the community. Once Falstaff has submitted, he is invited to participate in the favourite communal activities of feasting and shared laughter.

On the whole, then, social solidarity and co-operation operate beneficently in the Windsor of Shakespeare's imagination, defeating anti-social aggression and controlling the use of the powerfully coercive weapons of social pressure. But the play also acknowledges the danger to individuality inherent in the power of social coercion. Abraham Slender, who is perfectly willing to marry anyone Justice Shallow tells him to but cannot comprehend the idea that his own feelings could be at all relevant to the matter, is a potent warning of how the individual mind and will can be stunted in a tightly knit society. Still, Slender is the only happy and hopeless victim of this power we see. If the threat of divisive individualism is defeated by social cohesion, the possible tyranny of this cohesion is prevented by its fluidity and informality. Anne Page can disobey her parents and marry the man she wants because her mother and father disagree. They close ranks to defeat a common enemy but pursue their goals for Anne singly and secretly. This division enables Anne to act independently and justifies her doing so. Mistress Page's attempt to outwit her husband and Anne's success in outwitting both her parents do not constitute a direct assault on ideas of patriarchal, hierarchical authority, but they suggest, perhaps even more subversively, that such orthodoxies are irrelevant abstractions with little relation to the actual functioning of a harmonious society. When Anne and Fenton return and defer obediently to Anne's parents, the group rallies to reconcile the Pages to the marriage, and the rebellious marriage becomes part of the “sport” that “Sir John and all” will laugh over by their country fire.

The narrative patterns of The Merry Wives draw heavily on the conventions of the pastoral tradition and dramatize its assumption that outside the pressures and rigidities of sophisticated society people can achieve natural freedom and harmony with their environment. In one line of action, a man embroiled in conflict retires to a natural setting where, after a period of contemplation, he puts away his sword, makes peace with his enemy, and re-enters society as a peacemaker and moral instructor. In another plot line, a young aristocrat, who is good at heart but corrupted by worldly society (indicated by his mercenary motives and reputation for profligacy), falls in love with a village lass. Purified by the experience, he overcomes obstacles and wins her hand in marriage. In the main plot, a knightly exile from court enters a rural society where, although evil exists, moral issues are simplified and clarified and where his pride is humbled. Impelled by disappointment in love, he moves further from man-made institutions into the natural world until he reaches a sacred place where the human and divine meet. Here he experiences humiliation and a revelation about the natural sources of social harmony and then re-enters society a sadder but wiser man.

While the play's plot structure and symbolic motifs derive from the highly artificial, conventionalized traditions of pastoral literature, the tone and texture of the dramatic action are realistic, farcical, and unromanticized. The action on stage is often rowdy and boisterously physical. The setting is rural England, not a remote and glamorous Arcadia. The cast of characters includes popular comic fictional characters and ordinary bourgeois English men and women rather than lovelorn shepherds. The prose dialogue contains a good deal of “hack[ing] our English” (III.i.72) and very little of the rhetorical elegance of Sidnean or Spenserian pastoral. This incongruous combination is doubly satirical, pointing at once to the pastoral conventions' distance from reality and to ordinary life's banality and pettiness in comparison with the idylls of the poetic imagination. But the parodic tension between pastoral framework and low-comedy rendering does not destroy the connection between them. After all, poetry typically works by disjunctions, disrupting familiar associations and established connections and forging new ones. In The Merry Wives the disparity offers an interpretation of the pastoral ideal of human harmony compatible with recognizing the imperfections of human nature. The harmony in this imaginative model may derive from nothing more exalted than natural human sociability (the desire to belong that is the other side of the fear of mockery and isolation), but, for all that, the amity and unity of its attainment should not be despised. In Shakespeare's Windsor the pastoral values of simplicity, humility, and fidelity are elusive and transitory but always accessible; dramatic action grows out of the struggle by the inhabitants to maintain this equilibrium.

Notes

1. I quote throughout from the New Arden edition, ed. H. J. Oliver (London: Methuen, 1971).

2. Ronald Huebert, “Levels of Parody in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” English Studies in Canada, 3, 2 (Summer 1977), 136-52. For useful discussion of the evidence for dating the play 1597, see Oliver's New Arden introduction, pp. lii-lvi, and Jeanne Addison Roberts, Shakespeare's English Comedy: ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ in Context (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 41-50.

3. Thomas Sternhold and John Hopkins, The Whole Booke of Davids Psalmes (London: John Daye, 1582), pp. 343-44.

4. Huebert argues that since Psalm 137 concludes by calling for God's vengeance on the enemies of Israel, Evans implicitly is invoking divine wrath on Doctor Caius, and “the threatening rumble of the Babylon Psalm is the bugle-call of the knight-at-arms.” Because Evans as knight is more notable for discretion than valour, the effect is mock heroic (Huebert, p. 141). I think that the original audience, like the modern, would have associated Psalm 137 with waters, willows, harps, and tears more readily than with bugles, that is, with elegaic pastoral rather than with heroic poetry or epic.

5. Barbara Freedman, “Falstaff's Punishment: Buffoonery as Defensive Posture in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Shakespeare Studies, 14 (1981), 167.

6. Walter R. Davis and R. A. Lanham, Sidney's ‘Arcadia’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 35.

7. Davis, pp. 38-39.

8. Davis, p. 175.