Flattery or Memory: Windsor and its Merry Wives

In the eighteenth century, two hundred years after it was written, local lore began to spread that Queen Elizabeth had liked the character of Falstaff (from the Henry IV and Henry V plays) so much that she had commanded a play about him in love, to be written in fourteen days. Whether this is true or not, The Merry Wives of Windsor sticks out as a uniquely written play for several reasons. The characters' transitions from history to comedy changes them, particularly Mistress Quickly who goes from being a powerless widow simply supplying Falstaff with booze and women in the histories to a strong, single woman who plays a major role in duping him. But it's not simply the characters that change in the translation; the entire world of the play changes.

If the play was written for the court, it makes sense that Shakespeare placed it in Windsor, a locale well known to all in the court. But the locale comes alive in this play even more than in his others: this is not a hazy, general wood that could be anywhere. This is a specific place, in a specific locale, with a specific joke. When, for example, the servants are told to dump Falstaff out of the laundry basket and into the river, they are not simply told to dump him into the river, or even to dump him into a specific river (the Thames), but to dump him into an exact location in the Thames, a location known well to all familiar with Windsor.

Perhaps the specificity of the world of the play is a tip of the hat to the court, but perhaps there's something more to it. Unlike most of his other plays, The Merry Wives of Windsor follows the lives of the common people. The merry wives, Ford and Page, are not aristocratic women with whom the court ladies would have associated; they are women caught in the burgeoning middle class, running households on a budget, but still able to play a prank or two on a braggart knight. Here, the emerging middle class is not relegated to the subplot, but a large part of the lives of the main characters. So, if not a tip of the hat to the court, what is the liveliness of the locale a tribute to?

To find the answer to that question, I like to look at a scene with one of the two William's in Shakespeare's plays. (A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on the other one, a shepherd in As You Like It.) In Act IV, scene 1 of Merry Wives, Mistress Page's son William, a schoolboy, is drilled on his Latin lessons. The quick question-and-answer session between William and Evans, interrupted only by Mistress Quickly's bawdy comments, could be taken almost word-for-word out of the country grammar schools of the day, including the one at Stratford attended by young William Shakespeare. In fact, the characters in Merry Wives are all middle class people, working similar jobs and leading similar lives to the ones he grew up surrounded by, in a town close to the one he grew up in.

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