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MISTRESS PAGE I’ll entertain myself like one that I am not acquainted withal; for, sure, unless he know some strain in me that I know not myself, he would never have boarded me in this fury.
MISTRESS FORD “Boarding” call you it? I’ll be sure to keep him above deck.
MISTRESS PAGE So will I. If he come under my hatches, I’ll never to sea again. Let’s be revenged on him. (2.1.85–93).
When Falstaff and his entourage first arrive in Windsor, they are dangerously short on funds. Falstaff therefore decides to seduce two local women who he believes control their husband’s money. Being the ridiculous—and ridiculously incompetent—figure that he is, Falstaff sends an identical letter to each woman. As it turns out, the women he targets are close friends. When they receive these letters, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page immediately come together to discuss them and discover the knight’s lazy ruse. These women are both dismayed by the knight’s amorous advances. As honorable wives, they are upset by his forwardness. However, they are also disturbed by the idea of having sex with a man so obscenely overweight. Thus, even as they forge a plan to teach Falstaff a lesson, they make jokes at his expense.
The joke they share in the exchange quoted here is surprisingly bawdy. Mistress Page starts by pledging never to let the knight “board” her. Picking up on her friend’s nautical metaphor, Mistress Ford makes a joke of her own, vowing “to keep him above deck” and therefore refusing him entrance to the quarters below. Taking the joke one step further, Mistress Page suggests that if he were to breach her “hatches,” she would never be sea-worthy again. The implication here is that if Falstaff were to succeed in penetrating her sexually, the infidelity would ruin her standing as an honorable woman. This brief exchange nicely demonstrates the Mistresses’ shrewdness in plotting against Falstaff. However, it also shows that, even as they guard against their own virtue, they enjoy a bit of coarse humor. It is this combination of honor and liveliness that defines these two “merry wives.” As Mistress Page puts it later in the play, “Wives may be merry and yet honest too” (4.2.105).
MISTRESS FORD Why, what have you to do whither they bear it? You were best meddle with buck-washing!
FORD Buck? I would I could wash myself of the buck. Buck, buck, buck! Ay, buck! I warrant you, buck and of the season too, it shall appear. (3.3.153–57)
The plot to humiliate Falstaff begins by inviting the knight to Mistress Ford’s house, luring him in with the implicit promise of a sexual tryst. Soon after he arrives, however, Mistress Page interrupts with news that Master Ford is on his way home. They must therefore find a way to sneak Mistress Ford’s male visitor out of the house without her husband noticing. The device that has been prepared for this escape is the “buck-basket,” which is designated for the household’s laundry, also known as the “bucking.” The women coerce Falstaff into the basket, which can barely contain his bulk, and they stuff in soiled sheets and clothes to cover him. Next, they summon two servants to carry the basket down to the river, where they’ve been instructed to dump the contents. But just as they are about to leave, Master Ford arrives. He knows that Falstaff has arranged to meet his wife at this time, and he’s hoping to catch them in an adulterous act. It is for this reason that he’s suspicious about the buck-basket and asks his wife about it, resulting in the exchange quoted above.
Mistress Ford tells her husband that he needn’t “meddle with buck-washing,” presumably because this is a matter belonging to the feminine domain of domestic labor. Master Ford’s response reflects a hint of hysteria, consumed as he is with a jealous rage. His use of the word buck shifts the meaning from “laundry” to “male deer.” In this case, the buck references the man he suspects of being in the house with Mistress Ford. Essentially, he has cast himself as the hunter who has come to shoot the buck. Yet Ford inadvertently makes a fool of himself with this language. For one thing, his reference to the male deer conjures the image of antlers, and, thus, the horns of the cuckold. In this regard, he is the one apparently wearing the horns, not Falstaff. For another thing, the word buck also carries a secondary meaning: in Shakespeare’s time it was also slang for “to copulate.” Thus, in repeating this word again and again, Ford inadvertently produces a series of obscenities. The mockery he makes of himself here showcases the absurdity—as well as the danger—of his lack of trust in his wife’s fidelity.
Has Page any brains? Hath he any eyes? Hath he any thinking? Sure they sleep; he hath no use of them. . . . He pieces out his wife’s inclination. He gives her folly motion and advantage. And now she’s going to my wife, and Falstaff’s boy with her. A man may hear this shower sing in the wind. . . . Good plots they are laid, and our revolted wives share damnation together. (3.2.27–37)
Back in act 2, scene 1, when Master Ford first learns from Pistol that Falstaff has set his intentions on seducing his wife, he discusses the matter with Master Page, who has just heard the same message from Nym. The news doesn’t startle Page, who has complete faith that his wife would never succumb to the overweight knight’s advances. He is sure that, even if he were to leave his wife alone with Falstaff, her sharp tongue would be more than enough to fend him off. Ford, by contrast, isn’t so sure. At this point in the play, he says he doesn’t distrust his wife. Even so, he’s clearly worried about Falstaff, so he dons a disguise and goes to the knight to investigate. He learns that Mistress Ford has already responded to Falstaff’s letter of seduction and that she’s arranged to have him visit her the next morning, while Ford is out. Ford is incensed by this discovery, and he plans to catch the adulterers in the act. The next day, as he is making his way home, confident that his wife is being unfaithful to him, he speaks the words quoted above to himself.
Ford’s commentary here certainly demonstrates that he doesn’t trust his wife. As we have already learned, he is a man who’s predisposed to jealousy, and it took very little convincing for him to question his wife’s virtue. However, it’s also notable that Ford’s jealousy is also laced with self-righteousness. Though it makes sense that Ford might be angry about his situation, there is also a hint of pride in his emphasis on how wrong Page was to trust his own wife. He insists to himself that Page isn’t paying close-enough attention, and that he’s essentially given his wife all the leeway she needs to make a cuckold of him. And because Mistress Page is close friends with Mistress Ford, it’s likely the case that if she succumbs to Falstaff, then his wife will as well. Hence, he concludes with a final exclamation of self-righteous indignation: “our revolted wives share damnation together.”
Remember, Jove, thou wast a bull for thy Europa; love set on thy horns. O powerful love, that in some respects makes a beast a man, in some other a man a beast! You were also, Jupiter, a swan for the love of Leda. O omnipotent love, how near the god drew to the complexion of a goose! A fault done first in the form of a beast; O Jove, a beastly fault! . . . For me, I am here a Windsor stag, and the fattest, I think, i’ th’ forest. Send me a cool rut-time, Jove, or who can blame me to piss my tallow? (5.5.3–15)
At the top of the play’s final scene, Falstaff enters wearing the head of a buck. He has dressed himself in the guise of “Herne the Hunter” (5.5.30), the legendary figure who, according to local tradition, presided over the oak where he is scheduled to rendezvous with Mistress Ford. Dressed in this way, he compares himself favorably to the god Zeus, whom he alternately refers to as “Jove” and “Jupiter.” Zeus is famous for having transformed himself into a variety of animals to seduce mortal women. Falstaff references several famous examples, including his transformation into a bull so he could carry Europa off to Crete. He also mentions the princess Leda, whom Zeus raped in the guise of a swan. Falstaff makes a couple of jokes about the latter example, which involved the “beastly fault” not only of forced copulation but also of the choice of animal, the swan being uncomfortably near “the complexion of a goose.” For his part, Falstaff has taken on the form of a buck, which he glorifies as “a Windsor stag” that is in “rut”—that is, the annual period of sexual activity in which deer mate.
Falstaff’s self-comparison to the king of the gods is characteristically self-aggrandizing, though it clearly relates to the large appetite he has for sexual pursuits. As a stag in rut, he is primed for a primal encounter with Mistress Ford. He keeps up the lascivious role-play when Mistress Ford appears, calling her his “doe with the black scut” (5.5.19), where scut means “tail” and carries a connotation of sexual organs. Seeing that Mistress Page has also come along, Falstaff suggestively invites them to carve him up “like a bribed buck,” with each woman taking “a haunch” (5.5.26). With this implicit reference to butchery, Falstaff inadvertently signals a shift in the significance of his costume. Though he has come dressed as a hunter wearing the horns of a buck, he will turn out to be the deer that others hunt for sport. And following his humiliation by the hoard of pinching fairies and goblins, he will cease to be an animal symbolically associated with virile masculinity. As he later exclaims in defeat: “I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass” (5.5.126).
Fie on sinful fantasy!
Fie on lust and luxury!
Lust is but a bloody fire
Kindled with unchaste desire,
Fed in heart whose flames aspire
As thoughts do blow them higher and higher.
Pinch him, fairies, mutually;
Pinch him for his villainy.
Pinch him and burn him and turn him about,
Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out. (5.5.99–108)
After Mistress Ford and Mistress Page reveal to their husbands how they have schemed to humiliate Falstaff, the men express a willingness to join in the fun. Thus, they work together to orchestrate the knight’s final, public shaming. The result is a fairy masque that they plan to coincide with one last meeting between Falstaff and Mistress Ford, to take place at Herne’s oak. As Mistress Page explains, this tree is the locus of a local legend: “There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter, / Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest, / Doth all the wintertime, at still midnight, / Walk round about an oak” (4.4.29–32). Taking advantage of this legend, they arrange for Falstaff to meet Mistress Ford at Herne’s oak precisely at midnight. Their rendezvous is soon interrupted when a host of fairies and goblins (the town’s children in disguise) emerge from their hiding places, swarm around Falstaff, and torture him with the abuse traditionally associated with fairy folk: pinches. The lines quoted here are chanted collectively by the fairy host as they sentence Falstaff for his crimes and deliver his punishment.
The elaborate fairy masque staged in the play’s final scene echoes other examples from Shakespeare’s canon where he features plays within plays. Admittedly, the masque doesn’t perfectly qualify for the designation of “play within a play,” since there isn’t a clear audience within the play—other than Falstaff, that is, though the performance is meant to trick him. Even so, a flexible understanding of this concept allows for the viewer to see this event as a performative eruption within the normal events of the play. The characters we’ve followed throughout the previous four acts have all donned costumes and adopted new personas. Mistress Quickly, for example, has apparently been given the role of the Fairy Queen. This casting is only apparent, since it may be the case that Shakespeare simply meant for the same actor who played Quickly to play the Fairy Queen. Regardless, she plays the role with great feeling, just as Pistol, Evans, and the others do in their roles as hobgoblins and fairies. The explosion of fairy magic brings a hint of enchantment to the goings-on of an ordinary market town, providing a supernatural event that nicely punctuates the public shaming of the roguish knight.
