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In Windsor, Justice Shallow threatens Falstaff for poaching deer. Falstaff cheerily admits his misdemeanors and trouble is averted. Shallow’s nephew Slender is advised to marry young Anne Page for her money. At the Garter Inn, Falstaff laments his lack of funds, and plans to send letters to mistresses Page and Ford in a bid to get at their husbands’ money.
Dr. Caius is enraged when he sees a letter from parson Evans backing Slender’s hopes to marry Anne Page. Caius is hoping to marry Anne himself.
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
Young Fenton then arrives, also hoping to marry Anne. Mistresses Page and Ford receive identical love letters from Falstaff and decide to teach the fat knight a lesson.
Pistol, annoyed by being sacked by Falstaff, tells Ford about Falstaff’s letter to his wife, while Nim tells Page. Page is not bothered, but the enraged Ford disguises himself as
“Brooke” to meet Falstaff at the Garter Inn.
Mistress Ford invites Falstaff to her house when her husband is out.
Brooke pretends to be a suitor of Mistress Ford himself and offers to
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Mistress Margaret Page The first “wife.”
Master George Page Margaret’s husband.
Anne Page Their daughter.
William Page Their young son, a schoolboy.
Mistress Alice Ford The second “wife.”
Master Frank Ford Alice’s husband, sometimes
disguised as Brooke.
John, Robert Ford’s servants.
The Host of the Garter Inn Sir Hugh Evans
A Welsh parson.
Doctor Caius A French physician.
John Rugby His servant.
Mistress Quickly
Housekeeper of Doctor Caius, and Anne Page’s go-between.
Robert Shallow A justice of the peace.
Master Abraham Slender Nephew of Robert Shallow, Anne’s unlikely suitor.
Master Fenton A young gentleman, Anne Page’s lover.
Peter Simple Slender’s servant.
Sir John Falstaff The fat knight of the Henry IV plays.
He is lodging at the Garter Inn.
Bardolph, Pistol, Nim Followers of Falstaff.
1.3
1.3 1.1
1.1
2.1
In need of money, Falstaff resolves to seduce mistresses Page and Ford, who he
thinks fancy him.
After Justice Shallow pompously threatens legal action against Falstaff, Falstaff gleefully
admits poaching deer.
Shallow instructs his nephew Slender to court young Anne Page, who is due to inherit 700 crowns.
Mistresses Page and Ford find they have both received the same letter from Falstaff. They decide
to play along and bankrupt him.
Caius finds out from Mistress Quickly that parson Evans is backing Slender’s suit of Anne and
challenges him to a duel.
Act 1
143
pay Falstaff to seduce his wife on his behalf. Unaware of the plans the mistresses Ford and Page have for Falstaff, Ford angrily follows him on his assignation with Mistress Ford. As Ford comes home, Mistress Ford (as planned) tells Falstaff to hide in a basket of filthy linen, which is then dumped in the river. Recovering later at the Garter, Falstaff is told by Mistress Quickly that it was all a big mistake and Mistress Ford wants to meet again. Ford (as Brooke) finds out. At Mistress Ford’s house, Falstaff is persuaded to dress as an
old woman in order to escape Ford, but Ford thinks it’s his hated aunt and beats him black and blue.
Mistresses Ford and Page tell their husbands what has been going on, and together they plot Falstaff’s final humiliation. They invite him to dress as the mythical stag spirit Herne the Hunter, and to meet them at night in the forest.
Page arranges for Slender to elope with Anne, while Mistress Page, unaware, arranges for Caius to elope with Anne. Meanwhile, Anne elopes with Fenton. Page tells Slender that Anne will be in the
THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S MAN
2.2
2.2 3.3 4.2
3.2 3.5 4.4
Mistress Quickly tells Falstaff that Mistress
Ford wishes him to visit her at home.
Falstaff boasts to Master Ford
(disguised as Brooke) that he
will show how Mistress Ford can be seduced.
As instructed by Mistress Ford, Falstaff hides in a basket of stinking laundry
to escape her husband and is dumped in the river.
Falstaff tries to escape Mistress
Ford’s house dressed as an old woman. Ford is baffled about how he
could have missed Falstaff once again.
The Host of the Garter sends Evans
and Caius to different locations
for their duel.
While pretending to support all three of
Anne’s suitors, Mistress Quickly encourages Anne in
her own choice of young Fenton.
Mistresses Ford and Page tell their husbands
about Falstaff and plan a final lesson for him in Windsor Forest.
5.5
Falstaff dressed as Herne is attacked by
“fairies” in the forest and mocked by all.
Act 2 Act 3 Act 4 Act 5
forest dressed in white. Mistress Page tells Caius that Anne will be in the forest dressed in green.
In the forest, Falstaff is terrified by “fairies” (really children trained by Evans), who pinch him while Pistol and Nim tease him with burning candles. Caius runs off with a boy dressed in green and Slender with a boy dressed in white.
The wives reveal their pranks to Falstaff who admits he has been made a complete ass—as Caius and Slender return to acknowledge that they too have been made fools of.
Fenton arrives, married to Anne. ❯❯
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The Merry Wives Of Windsor is one of the most enjoyed but least celebrated of Shakespeare’s plays. Its tale of a lovable rogue getting his comeuppance at the hands of the women he hopes to take advantage of is a comic formula that has been recycled again and again, in everything from Restoration comedies to stage farces and TV sitcoms. The rogue is, of course, Shakespeare’s unique creation, the “fat knight” Sir John Falstaff.
Suburban comedy
The remarkable thing, however, is that Shakespeare’s play was one of the originals, the blueprint for all these later comedies. At the time Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives, plays were mostly about aristocratic, mythical, or heroic figures. The idea of a comedy about the foibles of a “suburban” middle class was unheard of. Although younger English playwrights such as John Fletcher and Ben Jonson quickly followed with sharp “city”
satires, the suburban comedy was Shakespeare’s idea.
A story goes that Elizabeth I so liked the character of Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV part 2 that she wanted to see “Falstaff in love,” and
The Merry Wives was Shakespeare’s rather off-beat response. There is no reliable source for this story, however.
Another speculative theory is that the play was performed in front of the queen in April 1597 in Windsor, prior to the annual feast for the knights of the Garter at Windsor Castle, or that The Merry Wives makes good the promise in the epilogue for Henry IV Part 2 to “continue the story, with Sir John in it.”
The fat knight’s frolics Scholars have debated the question of when in Falstaff’s life the story is set. It’s clearly before his reported death in Henry V, but is it before his drinking days in Eastcheap with Prince Hal in Henry IV, or after? It probably doesn’t matter, because Shakespeare omits any reference to 15th-century historical events in The Merry Wives—it really feels as if Falstaff has been plucked from his own century and dropped amid the citizens of Shakespeare’s time.
Falstaff is definitely the star of the play, and the comedy comes from this rambunctious character, who drops into the dull world of Windsor life and causes chaos. He imagines he is going to lord it over this provincial backwater with his
IN CONTEXT THEMES
Love, fidelity, forgiveness SETTING
Windsor, a town on the River Thames near London SOURCES
There are no direct sources for the play, which was largely a spin-off from the Henry IV plays.
It is one of the very few of Shakespeare’s plays to be set wholly in England, and much of the comedy draws from English in-jokes of the period.
LEGACY
1597 The play was probably first performed in April before Elizabeth I at Windsor.
1623 The Folio version purges the play’s “profanities.”
1786 A Russian adaptation, by Catherine the Great herself, is one of the rare non-English successes of the play.
1799 Italian court composer Antonio Salieri adapts the play as an opera, as does Guiseppe Verdi in 1893.
1902 A spectacular London production celebrates the coronation of Edward VII.
1985 British theater director Bill Alexander stages an RSC
“new Elizabethan” production set in 1950s suburbia.
2012 The play is performed in Kiswahili at the Globe to Globe Festival in London, which hosted 37 productions of Shakespeare’s plays in 37 different languages.
THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
…here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the
King’s English!
Mistress Quickly
Act 1, Scene 4
Why then, the world’s mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.
Pistol
Act 2, Scene 2
145
knighthood and his eloquence but he’s in for a surprise. The very biddable housewives who he thinks will make easy pickings, mistresses Page and Ford, quickly turn the tables on him and he is humiliated again and again.
What makes Falstaff so appealing is the manner in which he bounces back from each setback with irrepressible optimism. Even at the end, when made a complete fool in the forest, he has a comeback—
“Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English?” (5.5.141–142). Throughout the play, his wit shines while all the other men mangle language so badly that it is often impossible for modern audiences to follow.
Mangled words
There are malapropisms and mispronunciations galore—and they are frequently bawdy. Mistress Quickly laments, “she does so take
on with her men; they mistook their erection” (presumably meaning
“direction”), to which Falstaff ruefully responds, “So did I mine, to build upon a foolish woman’s promise” (3.5.39–40). While when Hugh Evans is teaching the boy William his Latin, he talks of the
“focative” case, not the vocative, saying, “Remember, William, focative is caret”—to which
Mistress Quickly knowingly replies,
“And that’s a good root” (4.1.48–49).
Most of the play is about the wives asserting their control over the town. They are not easily fooled, and they are worthy of more respect than their husbands give them. They show, too, that they have a great sense of fun. But having fun does not make them disreputable; they do not have to be melancholy nuns or unattractive prudes to be good wives. As Mistress Page says, “Wives may be merry, and yet honest, too” (4.2.95).
THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN’S MAN
A triumph for love
Yet even as the wives come out on top with their husband’s apologies and Falstaff’s humiliation, they are caught by surprise, as Fenton and Anne show the real victor to be love. While the wives have been off teaching the men a lesson and the Pages have been trying to set up their daughter Anne in marriages she doesn’t want, Anne has eloped with Fenton. “You would have married [Anne], most shamefully, / Where there was no proportion held in love” (5.5.213–214), Fenton tells them, and stresses how their love match will save Anne from “A thousand irreligious cursèd hours / Which forcèd marriage would have brought upon her” (5.5.221–222).
The message still resonates today. ■ In this 2008 production at the Globe Theatre, London, Christopher Benjamin’s self-deluding Falstaff thinks he sees the “leer of invitation.”