In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare and those who have produced and performed the play you are about to see deliver a comedy that is delightful and satisfying in its own right. It is also interesting to see the play’s rich connections both to traditions of comedy and to serious issues of social class in Shakespeare’s day that retain relevance today.
Most Renaissance comedies, in fact, are deeply involved with questions of class and social hierarchy, pitting the energies of subversion and social disruption against the claims of order and hierarchy. It is possible to see in these kinds of plays the very structure of medieval and Renaissance carnival: a licensed period of subversive activity that was clearly bounded by space and time and thus seen, by many authorities, as a way of redirecting wayward behavior back into established social structures. Renaissance England was extremely stratified, although less so than during the medieval period because commerce and early capitalism allowed increasing numbers of people, such as Shakespeare himself, to rise from one class to another.
Merry Wives represents the full social spectrum of Elizabethan England. Queen Elizabeth herself is indirectly evoked in the burlesque Fairy pageant performed at Falstaff’s expense in Act V, as is the aristocratic Order of the Garter, into which Shakespeare’s patron Lord Hunsdon was inducted on April 23, 1597, in a feast that might have occasioned the earliest version of the play. (It is against the high chivalric ideals of the Order of the Garter that the “humorous” knight Sir John Falstaff is critiqued.) Next, Shakespeare presents the gentleman class in Fenton and Slender, two of the three rivals for the hand of Anne Page, whose family belonged to the citizen/merchant class: one level below that of gentlemen. The inn host may be grouped in the laborer/artisan class, where the several servants may be roughly placed as well. The discharged, and somewhat dangerous soldiers Nym and Pistol can be seen to have fallen into the unemployed, impoverished underclass, once they sever themselves from Falstaff’s stingy service. Nym (the name means “steal, pilfer”) becomes a petty thief, mainly preying on other members of the underclass. The play’s feast of language, which includes Caius’ French, the Host’s Dutch, Mistress Quickly’s various assaults on English, Slender’s malapropisms, Pistol’s bombast, Nym’s thief’s jargon, and Falstaff’s incalculably rich style, all reflect the vast social, as well as international, range of the play.
It would be much harder to make the case that Merry Wives issues any kind of serious threat to the Elizabethan social order. If, as some scholars believe, the 1597 Order of the Garter ceremony provided the creative spark for the play, then the repeated pranks played on Falstaff (both entertaining comedy and effective public shaming) redeem the social order of knighthood by distinguishing between false knights such as Falstaff and true aristocrats such as Shakespeare’s patron. The citizen wives Mistress Ford and Mistress Page take pains to argue that the pranks they play on Falstaff fulfill a kind of moral purpose: “Against such lewdsters and their lechery / Those that betray them do no lechery” (5.3.21-22).
Although the only comedy of Shakespeare set in London, Merry Wives is one of his most Italianate plays. Italian Renaissance comedy, preceding and significantly influencing the development of comedy in France, Spain, and England, took the urban, domestic structures of ancient Roman comedy and extended its undeveloped erotic alliances into the complex emotions and intrigues generated by romantic love. Fenton’s intricate maneuverings for Anne Page, in competition with the foolish rivals preferred by her parents, and assisted by servants, closely follow plot structures and character relationships developed by Italian playwrights beginning in the early sixteenth century. Also typical of Italian Renaissance plays is the plotting generated by the obsessively jealous husband (Ford) and the mistaking of boys for girls perpetrated on Slender and Caius. Falstaff is a complex figure woven with many strands, but he has distinct affinities with the “Capitano,” or braggart soldier from the commedia dell’arte, the internationally famous Italian professional theater, well known to Shakespeare, which performed improvised drama based on modular plots and structured but flexible character types. Falstaff’s limitless wit and invention are no less delightful for being firmly grounded, in this particular play, by a reaffirmation of dominant Elizabethan values, both aristocratic (i.e., Order of the Garter) and middle-class, in the bourgeois values of “citizen comedy.”
Robert Henke
Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature
Chair, Performing Arts Department, Washington University