Merry Wives of Windsor, The, is a five-act comedy by the English dramatist William Shakespeare. It dates from the second period of Shakespeare’s artistic development. It may have been written for performance in April 1597 at a ceremony in which an English nobleman, Lord Hunsdon, became a knight of the Garter, but this has not been proved. The play first appeared in print in 1602 in a flawed and shortened form and was not published in a full, corrected version until 1623. No obvious source is known for this play, but it is set in the England of the early 1400’s. Its main character is Sir John Falstaff, the jolly rogue who was a major figure in Henry IV, Parts I and II, two plays that Shakespeare was working on in the late 1590’s.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of Shakespeare’s most uproarious comedies. It represents his only attempt to write a realistic comedy. It is played for laughs and contains no fantasy elements or serious content. According to a popular though unproved story, Queen Elizabeth I requested the play. She so enjoyed the comic character Sir John Falstaff in the Henry IV plays that she asked Shakespeare to write a comedy portraying Falstaff in love.
Two plots are cleverly linked together. In the main narrative, Falstaff tries to make love to Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, two honest middle-class housewives in the town of Windsor. Instead of achieving his desire, Falstaff ends up the victim of a number of comical practical jokes invented by the two married women. In one, Mistress Ford makes Falstaff hide from her husband under a pile of dirty washing in a laundry basket. The contents of the basket including the knight are then tipped into a muddy ditch. On another occasion, the two women disguise Falstaff as the “fat woman of Brainford,” who is then soundly beaten by Mistress Ford’s husband.
In the subplot, Mistress Page’s daughter, Anne, is being wooed by three suitors—Dr. Caius, a French physician; Slender, the horrible cousin of Justice Shallow, a local magistrate; and Fenton, a wild young man whom Anne loves. Mistress Quickly, Dr. Caius’s servant, carries messages between Anne and each of the three suitors. The plots come together in the last scene, set in Windsor Forest, during which Falstaff is exposed for the rogue that he is and, amid glorious confusion, Anne elopes with Fenton.
Although The Merry Wives of Windsor lacks the romantic poetry of most Shakespearean comedies, the play is highly entertaining. The Falstaff in this work has less imagination and wit than the Falstaff in the Henry IV plays. But the character remains theatrically effective, even though the audience laughs at him rather than with him, as in the earlier plays.
