A knight writes two identical love letters and both women compare them
Mistress Ford and Mistress Page discover the duplicate letters and plot together
Shakespeare · Comedies
The Merry Wives of Windsor
c. 1597–1602
Comedy — a citizen farce, borrowing its Falstaff from the Henry IV plays
Short of money, the fat knight Falstaff sends identical love letters to two respectable Windsor housewives, who compare notes and spend the play taking their revenge. He is carried out in a basket of dirty linen and tipped into the Thames, beaten while disguised as an old woman, and finally pinched by children dressed as fairies in Windsor Park. It is the only Shakespeare play set wholly in contemporary England, and almost all of it is in prose.
How to spot them
- ▸Windsor, in Shakespeare's own day, with the Garter Inn and Datchet Mead
- ▸Two wives receive the same love letter, word for word, from the same man
- ▸A fat knight is smuggled out of a house in a buck-basket of foul laundry and thrown in the river
- ▸A jealous husband visits his rival in disguise under the name Brook
- ▸A midnight ambush at an oak by children dressed as fairies
Scenes, characters & lines
A suitor is tipped into the Thames in a basket of dirty washing
Falstaff hidden in the buck-basket and emptied into the muddy ditch at Datchet Mead
A jealous husband calls himself Brook and pays his rival to seduce his own wife
Frank Ford's disguise, which lets him hear every detail of the attempt
A man escapes a search disguised as the fat woman of Brentford and is beaten for a witch
Falstaff dressed as Mother Prat, Ford's second humiliation
A knight wears a stag's horns at an oak and is pinched by children playing fairies
The Herne the Hunter scene in Windsor Park, and the final exposure
A daughter elopes while two rival suitors carry off boys in green and in white
Anne Page marries Fenton while Slender and Doctor Caius are each fobbed off with a page
A Welsh parson and a French doctor are tricked into meeting for a duel in the wrong fields
The Host of the Garter sets Sir Hugh Evans and Doctor Caius against each other
Key ideas
- It is Shakespeare's one full-scale English domestic comedy: middle-class households, no court, no foreign city
- The wives are the moral centre — 'Wives may be merry, and yet honest too' — and the jealous husband is punished as hard as the seducer
Quick-fire facts
- •Roughly 87 per cent of the play is in prose, the highest proportion in the canon
- •A memorial or 'bad' quarto appeared in 1602; the good text is the First Folio of 1623
- •A tradition first recorded by John Dennis in 1702, and repeated by Nicholas Rowe, claims Elizabeth I asked to see Falstaff in love
- •Verdi's last opera, Falstaff (1893), with a libretto by Boito, combines this play with scenes from Henry IV
- •Otto Nicolai's Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (1849) and Vaughan Williams's Sir John in Love (1929) are also based on it
- •Falstaff's companions Bardolph, Pistol and Nym and the hostess-like Mistress Quickly reappear from the history plays
- •It is the only Shakespeare play set entirely in England in his own time
- •The play contains a Latin grammar lesson for young William Page, teased by Mistress Quickly's mishearings
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — The Merry Wives of Windsor
- Royal Shakespeare Company — The Merry Wives of Windsor