The Merry Wives of Windsor

By William Shakespeare and Paul Werstine

Shakespeare’s “merry wives” are Mistress Ford and Mistress Page of the town of Windsor. The two play practical jokes on Mistress Ford’s jealous husband and a visiting knight, Sir John Falstaff.

Merry wives, jealous husbands, and predatory knights were common in a kind of play called “citizen comedy” or “city comedy.” In such plays, courtiers, gentlemen, or knights use social superiority to seduce citizens’ wives.

The Windsor wives, though, do not follow that pattern. Instead, Falstaff’s offer of himself as lover inspires their torment of him. Falstaff responds with the same linguistic facility that Shakespeare gives him in the history plays in which he appears, making him the “hero” of the play for many audiences.

The authoritative edition of The Merry Wives of Windsor from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:

-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading

Essay by Natasha Korda

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Release date: Mar 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501136870

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

Book preview

About this eBook

This eBook contains special symbols that are important for reading and understanding the text. In order to view them correctly, please activate your device’s Publisher Font or Original font setting; use of optional fonts on your device may result in missing, or incorrect, special symbols.

Also, please keep in mind that Shakespeare wrote his plays and poems over four hundred years ago, during a time when the English language was in many ways different than it is today. Because the built-in dictionary on many devices is designed for modern English, be advised that the definitions it provides may not apply to the words as Shakespeare uses them. Whenever available, always check the glosses linked to the text for a proper definition before consulting the built-in dictionary.

THE NEW FOLGER LIBRARY

SHAKESPEARE

Designed to make Shakespeare’s great plays available to all readers, the New Folger Library edition of Shakespeare’s plays provides accurate texts in modern spelling and punctuation, as well as scene-by-scene action summaries, full explanatory notes, many pictures clarifying Shakespeare’s language, and notes recording all significant departures from the early printed versions. Each play is prefaced by a brief introduction, by a guide to reading Shakespeare’s language, and by accounts of his life and theater. Each play is followed by an annotated list of further readings and by a Modern Perspective written by an expert on that particular play.

Barbara A. Mowat is Director of Research emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Consulting Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and author of The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances and of essays on Shakespeare’s plays and their editing.

Paul Werstine is Professor of English at the Graduate School and at King’s University College at Western University. He is a general editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare and author of Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare and of many papers and articles on the printing and editing of Shakespeare’s plays.

Folger Shakespeare Library

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is a privately funded research library dedicated to Shakespeare and the civilization of early modern Europe. It was founded in 1932 by Henry Clay and Emily Jordan Folger, and incorporated as part of Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, one of the nation’s oldest liberal arts colleges, from which Henry Folger had graduated in 1879. In addition to its role as the world’s preeminent Shakespeare collection and its emergence as a leading center for Renaissance studies, the Folger Shakespeare Library offers a wide array of cultural and educational programs and services for the general public.

EDITORS

BARBARA A. MOWAT

Director of Research emerita

Folger Shakespeare Library

PAUL WERSTINE

Professor of English

King’s University College at Western University, Canada

From the Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library

It is hard to imagine a world without Shakespeare. Since their composition more than four hundred years ago, Shakespeare’s plays and poems have traveled the globe, inviting those who see and read his works to make them their own.

Readers of the New Folger Editions are part of this ongoing process of taking up Shakespeare, finding our own thoughts and feelings in language that strikes us as old or unusual and, for that very reason, new. We still struggle to keep up with a writer who could think a mile a minute, whose words paint pictures that shift like clouds. These expertly edited texts are presented as a resource for study, artistic exploration, and enjoyment. As a new generation of readers engages Shakespeare in eBook form, they will encounter the classic texts of the New Folger Editions, with trusted notes and up-to-date critical essays available at their fingertips. Now readers can enjoy expertly edited, modern editions of Shakespeare anywhere they bring their e-reading devices, allowing readers not simply to keep up, but to engage deeply with a writer whose works invite us to think, and think again.

The New Folger Editions of Shakespeare’s plays, which are the basis for the texts realized here in digital form, are special because of their origin. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is the single greatest documentary source of Shakespeare’s works. An unparalleled collection of early modern books, manuscripts, and artwork connected to Shakespeare, the Folger’s holdings have been consulted extensively in the preparation of these texts. The Editions also reflect the expertise gained through the regular performance of Shakespeare’s works in the Folger’s Elizabethan Theater.

I want to express my deep thanks to editors Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine for creating these indispensable editions of Shakespeare’s works, which incorporate the best of textual scholarship with a richness of commentary that is both inspired and engaging. Readers who want to know more about Shakespeare and his plays can follow the paths these distinguished scholars have tread by visiting the Folger either in person or online, where a range of physical and digital resources exist to supplement the material in these texts. I commend to you these words, and hope that they inspire.

Michael Witmore

Director, Folger Shakespeare Library

Contents

Editors’ Preface

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

Reading Shakespeare’s Language: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare’s Life

Shakespeare’s Theater

The Publication of Shakespeare’s Plays

An Introduction to This Text

Characters in the Play

The Merry Wives of Windsor

Text of the Play with Commentary

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Act 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Longer Notes

Textual Notes

The Merry Wives of Windsor: A Modern

Perspective by Natasha Korda

Further Reading

Key to Famous Lines and Phrases

Commentary

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Act 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Editors’ Preface

In recent years, ways of dealing with Shakespeare’s texts and with the interpretation of his plays have been undergoing significant change. This edition, while retaining many of the features that have always made the Folger Shakespeare so attractive to the general reader, at the same time reflects these current ways of thinking about Shakespeare. For example, modern readers, actors, and teachers have become interested in the differences between, on the one hand, the early forms in which Shakespeare’s plays were first published and, on the other hand, the forms in which editors through the centuries have presented them. In response to this interest, we have based our edition on what we consider the best early printed version of a particular play (explaining our rationale in a section called An Introduction to This Text) and have marked our changes in the text—unobtrusively, we hope, but in such a way that the curious reader can be aware that a change has been made and can consult the Textual Notes to discover what appeared in the early printed version.

Current ways of looking at the plays are reflected in our brief introductions, in many of the commentary notes, in the annotated lists of Further Reading, and especially in each play’s Modern Perspective, an essay written by an outstanding scholar who brings to the reader his or her fresh assessment of the play in the light of today’s interests and concerns.

As in the Folger Library General Reader’s Shakespeare, which the New Folger Library Shakespeare replaces, we include explanatory notes designed to help make Shakespeare’s language clearer to a modern reader, and we hyperlink notes to the lines that they explain. We also follow the earlier edition in including illustrations—of objects, of clothing, of mythological figures—from books and manuscripts in the Folger Shakespeare Library collection. We provide fresh accounts of the life of Shakespeare, of the publishing of his plays, and of the theaters in which his plays were performed, as well as an introduction to the text itself. We also include a section called Reading Shakespeare’s Language, in which we try to help readers learn to break the code of Elizabethan poetic language.

For each section of each volume, we are indebted to a host of generous experts and fellow scholars. The Reading Shakespeare’s Language sections, for example, could not have been written had not Arthur King, of Brigham Young University, and Randal Robinson, author of Unlocking Shakespeare’s Language, led the way in untangling Shakespearean language puzzles and shared their insights and methodologies generously with us. Shakespeare’s Life profited by the careful reading given it by the late S. Schoenbaum; Shakespeare’s Theater was read and strengthened by Andrew Gurr, John Astington, and William Ingram; and The Publication of Shakespeare’s Plays is indebted to the comments of Peter W. M. Blayney. We, as editors, take sole responsibility for any errors in our editions.

We are grateful to the authors of the Modern Perspectives; to Leeds Barroll and David Bevington for their generous encouragement; to the Huntington and Newberry Libraries for fellowship support; to King’s University College for the grants it has provided to Paul Werstine; to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which provided him with a Research Time Stipend for 1990–91; to R. J. Shroyer of the University of Western Ontario for essential computer support; to the Folger Institute’s Center for Shakespeare Studies for its sponsorship of a workshop on Shakespeare’s Texts for Students and Teachers (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and led by Richard Knowles of the University of Wisconsin), a workshop from which we learned an enormous amount about what is wanted by college and high-school teachers of Shakespeare today; to Alice Falk for her expert copyediting; and especially to Stephen Llano, our production editor at Washington Square Press.

Our biggest debt is to the Folger Shakespeare Library: to Michael Witmore, Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library, who brings to our work a gratifying enthusiasm and vision; to Gail Kern Paster, Director of the Library from 2002 until July 2011, whose interest and support have been unfailing and whose scholarly expertise continues to be an invaluable resource; and to Werner Gundersheimer, the Library’s Director from 1984 to 2002, who made possible our edition; to Deborah Curren-Aquino, who provides extensive editorial and production support; to Jean Miller, the Library’s former Art Curator, who combs the Library holdings for illustrations, and to Julie Ainsworth, Head of the Photography Department, who carefully photographs them; to Peggy O’Brien, former Director of Education at the Folger and now Director of Education Programs at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, who gave us expert advice about the needs being expressed by Shakespeare teachers and students (and to Martha Christian and other master teachers who used our texts in manuscript in their classrooms); to Allan Shnerson and Mary Bloodworth for their expert computer support; to the staff of the Academic Programs Division, especially Solvei Robertson (whose help is crucial), Mary Tonkinson, Kathleen Lynch, Carol Brobeck, Liz Pohland, Owen Williams, and Dan Busey; and, finally, to the generously supportive staff of the Library’s Reading Room.

Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine

A prospect of Windsor Castle.

From Elias Ashmole, The institution, laws & ceremonies of the . . . Order of the Garter . . . (1672).

Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

Shakespeare’s merry wives are Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, both married to well-to-do citizens of Windsor, a town near London best known for its royal castle and its parks. (Mistress, in their case, means what Mrs. later came to mean.) The two are fast friends who cooperate with and completely trust each other, and who join together to play elaborate practical jokes on Mistress Ford’s jealous husband and on the knight Sir John Falstaff, a visitor staying at Windsor’s Garter Inn. As a collection of characters in a play, merry wives, jealous husbands, and predatory knights would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s audience. This is a group found over and over again in a particular kind of popular play of Shakespeare’s time called citizen comedy or city comedy. The staple of such comedy, found throughout the seventeenth century, is a kind of class warfare in which courtiers, gentlemen, or knights prey on married citizens by using social superiority to seduce the wives, thereby gaining access to the married couples’ money and turning the citizen-husbands into figures of scorn called cuckolds (a name for men whose wives are unfaithful). In these plays, proper wives stand out against such seducers and maintain a posture of silence, chastity, and obedience, but merry wives—those who enjoy and are animated by feasting and entertainment—often give in to the pleasures offered by their male social superiors.

Shakespeare’s merry wives, though, do not follow the usual pattern. Instead, Falstaff’s offer of himself as lover to both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford becomes the occasion of their extended torment of him. No matter how much they enjoy having fun, these wives are individually and collectively offended by his offer. They immediately turn their attention to taking revenge for his presuming to approach them. And when one of the husbands, Ford, is overcome by jealousy and seeks to expose what he believes is his wife’s infidelity, he too becomes the target of the wives’ merry schemes.

But the combination of Mistress Page and Mistress Ford is not the only comic engine in this play. While Falstaff is the butt of their jokes, he nonetheless responds to his plight with comic speeches filled with the same linguistic facility that Shakespeare gives this character in the history plays in which he also appears. There is a long, if quite groundless, tradition that Queen Elizabeth so enjoyed Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2 that she commanded the dramatist to write a play about Falstaff in love, a command that Shakespeare purportedly fulfilled in just two weeks. While the tradition has nothing factual to support it, it reflects the fact that Falstaff through the centuries has been regarded by audiences as the hero of the play.

After finishing the play, we invite you to read the essay titled "The Merry Wives of Windsor: A Modern Perspective," by Professor Natasha Korda of Wesleyan University, contained within this eBook.

Reading Shakespeare’s Language: The Merry Wives of Windsor

For many people today, reading Shakespeare’s language can be a problem—but it is a problem that can be solved. More than four hundred years of static intervene between his speaking and our hearing. Most of his immense vocabulary is still in use, but a few of his words are not, and, worse, some of his words now have meanings quite different from those they had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the theater, most of these difficulties are solved for us by actors who study the language and articulate it for us so that the essential meaning is heard—or, when combined with stage action, is at least felt. When reading on one’s own, one must do what each actor does: go over the lines (often with a dictionary close at hand) until the puzzles are solved and the characters speak in words and phrases that are, suddenly, rewarding and wonderfully memorable.

Shakespeare’s Words

As you begin to read the opening scenes of a play by Shakespeare, you may notice occasional unfamiliar words. Some are unfamiliar simply because we no longer use them. In the opening scenes of The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, you will find the words fallow (i.e., light brown), cony-catching (i.e., cheating), pickpurse (i.e., pickpocket), and fap (i.e., drunk). Words of this kind are explained in notes to the text and will become familiar the more of Shakespeare’s plays you read.

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, as in all of Shakespeare’s writing, more problematic are the words that we still use but that we use with a different meaning. In the opening scenes, for example, the word marry has the meaning of indeed, demands is used where we would say requests, fair is used where we would say beautiful, conceited where we would say ingenious, and shift where we would say improvise. Such words will be explained in the notes to the text, but they, too, will become familiar as you continue to read Shakespeare’s language.

Some words are strange not because of the static introduced by changes in language over the past centuries but because these are words that Shakespeare is having characters misuse. While Falstaff, late in the play, describes Sir Hugh Evans as one who makes fritters of English (5.5.151), Sir Hugh is not alone in his comic misspeaking. Slender, for example, very early in the play, transposes successors and ancestors: "All his successors gone before him hath done ’t, and all his ancestors that come after him may (1.1.14–16). By including in the line itself the correct meanings of the abused English words, Shakespeare establishes in the clearest possible way the severe limitations of Slender’s command of his native language. In this respect Slender greatly resembles Doctor Caius’s servant Mistress Quickly, who as often as not chooses the wrong word. When, for example, she promises Fenton to tell [him] more . . . the next time [they] have confidence" (1.4.166–67), the word she needs is not confidence but conference (which at that time meant conversation). Mistress Quickly also makes up words that were no more current in Shakespeare’s time than in ours; she says, for instance, that Anne Page is given too much to allicholy and musing (1.4.158–59). Allicholy has never been an English word, but its sound and its pairing here with musing suggest that Quickly is using it for the word melancholy.

Among other prominent misusers of words are the Welsh parson Sir Hugh and the French Doctor Caius, each of whom is given, among other language characteristics, a distinctive foreign accent. Sir Hugh’s accent becomes apparent in the play’s first scene as Shakespeare gradually introduces it with py for by in Sir Hugh’s third speech and Got for God in his fourth, thickening it in his next speech with petter for better, prain for brain, and prings for brings. Beyond this Welsh accent, Sir Hugh’s speeches are also characterized by erroneous word choices; for instance, he calls Anne Page a pretty virginity. Unlike Sir Hugh’s, Doctor Caius’s accent and his foreign-seeming syntax are heavy from the very beginning: Vat [i.e., what] is you sing? I do not like dese [i.e., these] toys (1.4.44). Doctor Caius’s speeches also challenge the reader with their occasional use of French words and of English words that carry not their English meanings but those of the French words from which they derive. When, for example, he asks Quickly Do intend vat I speak? (46), intend has the sense hear. Though this seems by Shakespeare’s time no longer to have been a meaning of the word in English, it is the meaning of the French word entendre, from which intend ultimately derives. Among other speakers in The Merry Wives of Windsor who frequently use words in highly unusual ways are Pistol, Nym, and the Host of the Garter Inn. Notes to the text will explain as many of the misused words as seems helpful.

Shakespeare’s Sentences

In most of Shakespeare’s plays, speeches are predominantly in blank verse; this is not true of The Merry Wives of Windsor, where blank verse is to be found mainly in a few speeches by Master Fenton and in the play’s last scene with the fairies. Master Fenton’s first extensive speech to Anne Page, in which he tells her of her father’s objections to him as her future husband, can serve as an example of the kind of dramatic verse that Shakespeare typically writes:

FENTON          Why, thou must be thyself.

He doth object I am too great of birth,

And that, my state being galled with my expense,

I seek to heal it only by his wealth.

Besides these, other bars he lays before me—

My riots past, my wild societies—

And tells me ’tis a thing impossible

I should love thee but as a property.

(3.4.4–11)

In the above speech, as is his practice, Shakespeare shifts his sentences away from normal English arrangements—often to create the rhythm he seeks, sometimes to use a line’s meter to emphasize a particular word. The first short sentence in this speech follows normal English word order, as does the beginning of the second sentence. After the verb (doth object), however, the second sentence becomes elliptical (i.e., leaves something out). The word that is omitted at the beginning of the first object