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Duplicate Letters
Soon after arriving at the Garter Inn, Falstaff sets upon the idea of seducing Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, both of whom allegedly control their respective husband’s purse strings. He’s hard up for cash, and, thinking himself irresistible, he believes he can both satisfy his lust and line his pockets at the same time. He instigates his plan by drafting twin letters, then sends them off to his targets. Soon after receiving these letters, Mistresses Ford and Page compare notes and discover that Falstaff has sent them the same message, identical “letter for letter, but that the name of Page and Ford differs” (2.1.69–70). Amusingly, both women are disgusted by the idea of having sex with Falstaff. As Mistress Page puts it, “I had rather be a giantess and lie under Mount Pelion” (2.1.79–80). But rather than reject his advances outright, they capitalize on the premise of his letters to teach him a lesson about sexual propriety. In this way, the shrewd Mistresses turn Falstaff’s duplicity against him, effectively making his duplicate letters into a comic symbol of his incompetence—sexual and otherwise.
Buck-Basket
In act 3, scene 3, Mistresses Ford and Page orchestrate their first scheme for humiliating Falstaff. They stage a scenario where he must be snuck out of the house urgently so that approaching Master Ford won’t find him there. The plan is to coerce him into a “buck-basket,” which is essentially a laundry basket. They will then have servants carry the basket out of the house and down to the Thames, where they will unload everything into the river. The events play out precisely as planned, with the added bonus that the scene piques Master Ford’s jealousy while also failing to prove his wife’s alleged infidelity. The buck-basket thus has two distinct but interrelated symbolic functions. On the one hand, it symbolizes a class reversal, where the gentleman knight literally gets taken out with the washing, tossed about “with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease” (3.5.115–16). On the other hand, it symbolizes Ford’s misplaced rage at being cuckolded. Upon seeing the buck-basket, Ford declares: “Buck? I could wash myself of the buck” (3.3.155). His use of buck refers not to laundry but to the animal, whose antlers resemble the horns of a cuckold and comically link to a secondary meaning of buck: “to copulate.”
Buck’s Head
As Falstaff sets out for his third and final meeting with Mistress Ford, he dons a buck’s head—either a full mask, or perhaps just a pair of horns. This disguise turns out to be a multivalent symbol with several meanings. Initially, it symbolizes Falstaff’s lustfulness. As he approaches the appointed place for the meeting, Falstaff muses on how he is like the gods of antiquity, who are said to have transformed into animals to seduce mortal woman. He, too, has transformed from man to beast in preparation for his own scene of seduction. However, as the scene makes a turn from romance to humiliation, the buck’s head takes on a new symbolic valence related to cuckoldry. At first, Falstaff jokes about giving the antlers to the Mistresses’ husbands as a sign of their being cuckolded. But when the fairy host emerges from the darkness and the ladies flee, it quickly becomes clear that Falstaff is the one who’s set to be humiliated. There is yet a third valence at work in the symbolism of the buck head. Falstaff enters the forest in the guise of the legendary “Herne the Hunter” (5.5.30), only to find that he is the one being hunted. This reversal is a marker of Falstaff’s sexual failure.
