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The Merry Wives of Windsor is conventionally known as a “citizen comedy,” or sometimes a “city comedy,” meaning that instead of focusing on kings, nobles, and other figures associated with the aristocracy, the play concerns ordinary people in an ordinary town. Being Shakespeare’s most middle-class play, it’s perhaps no surprise that Merry Wives was heartily admired by Friedrich Engels, co-author of The Communist Manifesto. Perhaps Engels enjoyed the way Shakespeare dramatized the formation of the middle class out of disparate social tensions. The play’s farcical, comic intrigues create a jovial tone, which suspends hierarchies, reconciles upper- and lower-class characters, and draws them together into the burgeoning bourgeoisie. Shakespeare underscores the matter of class by writing most of the dialogue in prose instead of verse. The only characters who consistently speak in iambic pentameter are the noble Fenton and the pretentious Pistol. With few exceptions, everyone else—including Falstaff the knight—speaks in an earthy prose.
The play’s main plot surrounds the lively but virtuous behavior of Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, who are married to two prosperous men of Windsor. They become the targets of a scheme devised by the rotund knight Sir John Falstaff, who is short on cash and high on lust. He aims to seduce each of these women in the hopes of sneaking money from their husbands’ purses. In the face of Falstaff’s advances, these women must maneuver in a way that will maintain their honor. Their challenge is thus to find a balance between duping the sexually predatory Falstaff without calling their fidelity into question. This is an unusual balancing act for a citizen comedy, since this genre often divides women into proper wives and merry wives. Proper wives are chaste yet humorless, whereas merry wives are joyful and lustful. The “merry wives” of Shakespeare’s play are unique in that they are boisterous and faithful at the same time. Master Page believes such a balance is possible. Master Ford, by contrast, does not. Thus, the merry wives endeavor to kill two birds with one stone: fending off Falstaff while teaching Ford a lesson about misplaced jealousy.
Unfolding in parallel to this plot of mockery and humiliation is a second narrative thread: a classic marriage plot in which three suitors seek the hand of the virtuous and beautiful Anne Page. Though Anne’s father, Master Page, has no problem keeping faith in his wife’s fidelity, he seems incapable of trusting his daughter to make a wise decision about her future husband. Thus, he attempts to coerce her into marrying the appropriately named Slender, who, despite being financially well off, is rather slight of intellect. Meanwhile, Mistress Page, who proves entirely worthy of her husband’s trust, also fails to trust her daughter’s capacity to make a good decision. Yet she also disagrees with her husband’s choice of suitor and prefers the French Doctor Caius, whose wealth and court connections capture her interest. For her part, Anne has long been in love with a man named Fenton, who, despite being born into the nobility, has faced financial challenges with his estate. From the outside, it would appear that he’s pursuing Anne for the cash grab. However, his affection is genuine, and the audience roots for their love to win out.
Shakespeare draws the play’s two plots together in the remarkable fairy masque that takes place in the final act. After the Mistresses have satisfied themselves with two rounds of humiliation for Falstaff, they tell their husbands what they’ve been up to and why. Page’s trust in his wife is affirmed, and Ford’s increasingly rage-fueled jealousy is shown to have been misplaced. Once Ford reconciles himself with his wife, he and Page join their wives in planning a staged encounter between Falstaff and a host of supernatural beings. They lure Falstaff to an oak tree at midnight, under the guise that he will finally enjoy a lusty affair with Mistress Ford. But as soon as he appears, a host of fairies and goblins swarms around him, putting him on trial and terrorizing him with pinches. The fairy masque offers something like a play within the play, a technique that Shakespeare employs to great effect in many of his other plays. Here, all the characters dress up and take on new identities, enacting a carnivalesque inversion of hierarchy where the middle-class citizens subject the noble knight to humiliation.
The chaos of the fairy masque also provides an opportunity for the marriage plot to find its resolution, though not before additional comic hijinks ensue. Master and Mistress Page have each made separate plans with their suitor of choice, instructing them to find Anne at the fairy masque and elope with her. Slender is meant to identify Anne by her white gown, and Caius is meant to take away the figure dressed in green. But just as the Mistresses had done with Falstaff and Ford, Anne tricks both of her parents and their preferred suitors. The results of her deception are revealed immediately after the fairies have unmasked themselves and Falstaff has been suitably chastened. Slender and Caius each arrive to complain that they’ve been tricked into eloping with boys—an amusing meta-theatrical joke for audiences of the Elizabethan theater, where all the parts were played by males, resulting in no fundamental difference between Anne and the “lubberly boy[s]” (5.5.192) the suitors end up with. Then Anne and Fenton arrive and announce their marriage. The Pages are forced to accept the situation, and they each resolve to welcome Fenton to the family. The whole gang then prepares to return to Windsor, where they will celebrate with a feast.
