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The Comic Messiness of Romance
The Merry Wives of Windsor is one of Shakespeare’s most farcical comedies, and it features numerous scenes involving humor that we today might associate with slapstick films of the early twentieth century. The play’s farcical qualities help underscore a key theme related to the comic messiness of romance. At the heart of the play’s comedy is the plot involving Falstaff’s attempts to seduce Mistresses Ford and Page. This plot brings together a mess of issues related to sexual desire, fidelity, and marital trust. Falstaff is a man of great appetites, and his lust for the two “merry wives” leads him to try to seduce them. The women, however, are both firm in their commitments to their husbands and have no romantic or sexual interest in Falstaff. Yet even if they maintain their fidelity, that doesn’t guarantee that they will retain their husbands’ trust. Mistress Ford is particularly unfortunate, in that her husband is predisposed to jealousy and actively distrusts her faithfulness. This tangle of misdirection and misperception leads to a sequence of scenes in which the women deftly humiliate Falstaff and aggravate Master Ford’s jealousy. Their purpose is never simply to be cruel. Rather, they are sorting out the messiness that make romance so complicated.
Shakespeare also explores this theme in the marriage plot surrounding Anne Page. Anne is pursued by three very different suitors: the wealthy but foolish Slender, the well-connected but ridiculous Doctor Caius, and the suave but impoverished Fenton. Though Anne herself has long been in love with Fenton, her father prefers Slender, and her mother prefers Caius. But the messiness of the situation isn’t confined to the family. Indeed, everyone in Windsor is somehow involved in lobbying for their preferred suitor. The most extreme case is Mistress Quickly, who has promised to press each suitor’s case with Anne, with whom she is quite close. Of course, by agreeing to help all, she effectively helps none. Anne must therefore take control of the situation and create her own order from the madness. The climax of this plot arises just as the fairy masque staged to humiliate Falstaff comes to an end. Slender and Caius, who were separately instructed by Master and Mistress Page to elope with Anne during the masque, both turn out to have run off with young boys Anne had set up as decoys. After they each give their report of being humiliated at the marriage altar, Anne enters triumphant with her new husband, Fenton.
The Danger of Distrust
Distrust drives much of the action in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The prime example is, of course, that of Master Ford, whose predisposition to jealous outrage makes it easy for him to distrust his wife’s fidelity. Although early in the play he insists that he doesn’t distrust her honor, it soon becomes clear that this isn’t exactly true. For example, when he goes to Falstaff in disguise as “Master Brook,” he hires the knight to sleep with his wife. Though the goal of his visit is ostensibly just to find intel on his wife’s fidelity, Ford seems to presuppose her adultery. The anger he exudes after this meeting further suggests that he was always suspicious of his wife’s untrustworthiness. As everyone around him observes, Ford’s jealousy endangers his marriage, since his wife is clearly trustworthy. Even so, he nearly drives himself to madness over it. Meanwhile, another form of distrust arises in the play’s marriage plot. Neither Master Page nor Mistress Page trust their daughter, Anne, to make a wise decision about whom to marry. As such, they each identify their own preferred suitor and attempt to coerce her into marrying him, thus endangering their daughter with loveless misery.
In addition to the conflicts among the citizens of Windsor, Shakespeare emphasizes the theme of distrust through his numerous references to the famous Order of the Garter. The Order was an institution of chivalry that King Edward III established in the fourteenth century. The story goes that Edward was dancing with a countess who dropped her garter, which he picked up and tied to his leg. This act could have been interpreted as flirtation, but Edward warned his courtiers against jumping to conclusions. Trust and honor therefore became key values enshrined in his chivalric order, the motto of which references the scene with Edward and the garter: Honi soit qui mal y pense, meaning “Shame on him who thinks evil of it.” This history is present throughout the play, mainly because Windsor’s main inn is the Garter Inn, which commemorates the fact that this town is the place where knights were once formally inducted into the order. It’s also notable that, during the fairy masque in act 5, the Fairy Queen directly references the Garter and quotes its motto (see 5.5.70–77). The reference is fitting for a scene meant to punish Falstaff for having sown so much distrust among Windsor’s citizens.
The Slippery Nature of Translation
Translation is a notoriously slippery endeavor, and Shakespeare explores this slipperiness in various ways throughout The Merry Wives of Windsor. Perhaps the most obvious example in the play comes in the first scene of act 4, where Sir Hugh Evans quizzes the young William Page on his Latin grammar. As the two work through various declensions, the uneducated Mistress Quickly listens in. She consistently mishears the words as versions of English. For instance, she hears caret as “carrot” and horum as “whorum.” She also misunderstands the grammatical term “genitive case” as “Ginny’s case,” where case is slang for “vagina.” Hilarity ensues as she condemns Evans for teaching a young man such foul language. The slippery nature of translation also comes up in the frequent mockery made of the play’s two foreign characters: Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson, and Caius, the French doctor. Both men have thick accents that the provincial citizens of Windsor accuse of “abusing . . . the King’s English” (1.4.5–6). At one point, the Host of the Garter takes advantage of Caius’s poor English to mock him openly while pretending to praise him. Addressing the doctor as “Monsieur Mockwater,” he glosses the unfamiliar term: “‘Mockwater,’ in our English tongue, is ‘valor,’ bully” (2.3.60–61).
In addition to the matter of moving between languages, other forms of translation are at play in Merry Wives. For instance, the play features many instances of disguise, whereby one character is metaphorically “translated” into another. A good example is when Master Ford adopts the persona of “Master Brook,” taking on a name that translates him into a slightly different version of himself—a ford being a shallow section of a brook where a person can easily cross. Perhaps more significant in the play are the various “translations” of Falstaff. Though he is in fact a knight who carries the title “sir,” he acts like a lustful and irresponsible rogue. His attempt to seduce Mistress Ford leads to a series of transformations. First, he’s treated like Mistress Ford’s “bucking” and gets tossed in the Thames for laundering. Later, he’s transformed into the “fat woman of Brentford” (4.2.75–76). Then, in the play’s final scene, he dresses himself up as “Herne the Hunter” (5.5.30). The costume includes horns that initially associate him with a buck ready to rut, though it soon turns out he’s little more than a deer who’s being hunted for sport. Finally, when his humiliation is complete, he acknowledges that he’s been “made an ass” (5.5.126).
