60 pages • 2-hour read
The Merry Wives of Windsor
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Act VChapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination and graphic violence.
Act V, Scene 1 Summary
Falstaff meets Mistress Quickly and confirms the midnight rendezvous at Herne’s Oak. He treats the “third time” as a charm. He urges Quickly to manage the arrangements. Ford arrives in disguise as Master Brook. Falstaff reports his recent beating while dressed as the Brentford woman and mocks Ford’s jealousy. Promising Brook that the scheme will reach its climax that night, he directs Brook to wait at Herne’s Oak around midnight to witness wonders. Falstaff vows to take his revenge on Ford and to deliver Mistress Ford to Brook, and he hustles off to make final preparations.
Act V, Scene 2 Summary
Page, Shallow, and Slender sneak toward the castle ditch to lie in wait. Page reminds Slender of the plan, and Slender confirms that he and Anne share a code word to identify each other. Shallow scoffs that the color alone should suffice. The men move off to their positions as the hour approaches.
Act V, Scene 3 Summary
Mistress Page and Mistress Ford brief Doctor Caius. They tell him to seize Anne when he sees her dressed in green and to rush her to the deanery for marriage. Caius departs to take a position in the park. Mistress Page predicts that Page will care more about losing Anne to Caius than about Falstaff’s humiliation, but she judges a little scolding better than heartbreak. The wives confirm that Anne, William, and their troop of “fairies,” led by Sir Hugh, wait in a pit near Herne’s Oak with hidden lights. They time those lights to flare at the instant of the meeting so that they can astonish Falstaff. The women agree that whether Falstaff amazes easily or not at all, they will mock him thoroughly. They head to the oak to spring the trap.
Act V, Scene 4 Summary
Sir Hugh leads the costumed children. He reviews their parts, drills the watchwords, and encourages bravery. He moves the troupe into position near the pit, ready to encircle the oak and attack Falstaff on his cue.
Act V, Scene 5 Summary
Midnight strikes, and Falstaff appears at Herne’s Oak wearing a complete buck’s head with antlers. He swells with bravado, comparing himself to legendary bulls and swans of myth, and declares himself the fattest stag in Windsor Forest. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page arrive and coax him into a playful embrace beneath the oak. A sudden blast of horns interrupts the dalliance, and the women dash away in feigned terror, leaving Falstaff alone to face whatever comes.
Mistress Quickly, Pistol, Sir Hugh, Anne, and the children flood in as “fairies,” carrying candles and chanting. Quickly plays the Fairy Queen, Pistol plays Hobgoblin, and Sir Hugh leads the ritual as a Welsh sprite. The troupe blesses Windsor, vows to scour messy hearths, and turns to judgment. Falstaff crouches and covers his eyes, convinced that speaking or peeking will doom him. The fairies encircle him and perform a trial by fire. Sir Hugh touches Falstaff’s finger with a candle; Falstaff jerks away. The Queen pronounces him corrupt in desire. On the Fairy Queen’s command, the troop sings and pinches him in rhythm, burns him with their candles, and drives him in circles around the oak.
During the chaos, Doctor Caius slips in, grabs a figure dressed in white, and hurries away to the deanery. Slender rushes in from another direction, seizes a figure dressed in green, and bolts toward Eton. Fenton, moving more quietly, escorts Anne herself away from the oak. The fairies then scatter at a staged hunting cry. Falstaff pulls off the buck’s head and staggers up, sore from pinches and burns.
Page, Mistress Page, Mistress Ford, and Ford enter to complete the exposure. Page blocks Falstaff’s escape and announces that they have caught him. The wives display the antlers and return the ridicule that Falstaff earlier directed at their husbands, reclaiming the symbol of cuckoldry. Ford drops the Brook disguise, confronts Falstaff, and catalogs the losses: the basket humiliation, the cudgel beating, and the £20 that Falstaff squeezed from “Brook.” Ford declares that Falstaff has enjoyed nothing of his household except the punishments and that he will recover the money. Falstaff admits defeat and recognizes that the wives and their allies have made him look foolish.
Sir Hugh adds a moral. He tells Falstaff to serve God and abandon his appetites, and he tells Ford to abandon jealousy. Ford promises reform, joking that he will trust his wife until Sir Hugh can woo her in proper English. Falstaff groans that even a Welsh parson mocks him and blames his own overheated vanity for leaving him open to such a trick.
Page pivots to marriage news. He invites the company to his house for a marriage banquet, stating that Slender married Anne. Mistress Page claims that Doctor Caius has married Anne instead and that she has guided the match. Slender arrives and ruins both claims. He reports that he followed the plan, took the figure in green to Eton, and nearly married, only to discover that his “bride” was a stableboy dressed as a girl. He admits that he would have fought the impostor if the ceremony had not happened in a church. Page scolds him for ignoring the clothing signs, while Slender clings to the countersign exchange he had planned with Anne and cannot believe his misfortune.
Mistress Page explains that she foresaw Page’s scheme with Slender, changed her daughter’s costume to green, and delivered her to the doctor at the deanery. However, Doctor Caius then enters and reports an identical disaster. He grabbed the figure in white and married, only to find he married a country boy. He fumes, swears that someone has tricked him, and threatens to destroy the town.
Fenton and Anne enter together. When Page challenges them, Fenton admits that both parents pressed unfit matches and that he and Anne contracted themselves earlier. He argues that their marriage prevents a lifetime of misery and calls the “offense” holy. Page and Mistress Page absorb the news. Ford advises them to accept the marriage. Falstaff, relieved to no longer be the center of the town’s attention, remarks that its “arrow” glanced off him.
Page yields gracefully. He offers Fenton good wishes and acknowledges that some outcomes cannot be avoided and therefore can only be accepted. Mistress Page stops puzzling and blesses the couple. She asks her husband to bring everyone home so that they can warm themselves by the country fire and retell the night’s activities. Ford agrees. He turns once more to Falstaff and says that Falstaff must keep his promise to Master Brook, meaning that Falstaff must settle the debt he took under pretenses. The company exits together.
Act V Analysis
Act V shows Windsor completing its turn toward Redefining Authority as Competence. The wives and their allies do not plead for space within the patriarchal order; they engineer it. They choose the site (Herne’s Oak), appoint the time (midnight), recruit a cast (children, Sir Hugh, Quickly, Pistol), assemble props (horns, candles, colors), and write a script that strips the male, aristocratic authority Falstaff embodies of its pretenses. Because that authority has operated in large part through narrative rather than action, their effort coincides with a demystification of mythology itself. Falstaff arrives as a swaggering emblem of self-licensing male privilege, referring to mythology to excuse his appetite and crowning himself with antlers. The wives answer by rewriting the myth in such a way that Herne’s Oak becomes useful, first and foremost. As a legend transformed into a piece of civic infrastructure, it encapsulates the broader shift toward practical ability as a measure of authority.
Act V also resolves the theme of The Complexities of Marriage with a firm preference for consent. Anne’s parents try to move Anne like property, while Slender and Caius accept that framework without question. That the latter ultimately mistake clothing for a person exposes the weakness of applying a purely transactional logic to a relationship as intimate as marriage: They do not see Anne as a person in any real sense and therefore cannot know her, even in the most literal sense of recognizing her. Fenton and Anne’s relationship emerges as an alternative. Though rebellious in certain respects, the match is social in its orientation: They read the moment, recruit the Host, and secure a vicar. They also marry lawfully, plead their case openly, and accept whatever social cost may follow. Nor does the play entirely dismiss Page’s desire for social stability, or Mistress Page’s for a sound professional match, judging their methods rather than their motives: They trust signs over persons, plans over conversation. Anne and Fenton answer with a counterplan that honors affection without scorning order. In this way, the play privileges love while still depicting marriage as a social and familial project rather than a purely private matter.
This settlement also serves as a lesson for the Ford marriage. Ford has by this point been largely rehabilitated, as evidenced by his participation in the scheme to discipline Falstaff; he drops the “Brook” persona, pays his debt in laughter, and becomes part of the play’s moral center. Nevertheless, the terms of Anne’s marriage serve as a final reminder regarding marriage as mutual stewardship rather than a purely hierarchical or economic institution.
The fairy masque epitomizes Windsor’s preferred justice: Revenge and Ridicule as Tools of Social Correction. The town builds a ritual that shames Falstaff thoroughly and still invites him to supper afterward, a blend that underscores the punishment’s ultimate aim of rehabilitation. The play suggests that where retribution alone would satisfy anger and leave the social fabric thin, and where forgiveness alone would ignore the insult and teach nothing, ridicule strikes a balance—all the more because it also models proportionality. The “trial by fire” stings Falstaff but leaves no lasting wounds. Finally, Sir Hugh delivers a line of advice that treats jealousy and lust in parallel, striking a communal tone by presenting the various characters’ sins as commensurate with one another.
Act V thus completes the play’s civic thesis. Ordinary neighbors govern appetite and anxiety with logistics, folklore, and wit. The wives do not overthrow male authority; they teach it how to live among equals. The community does not assemble a court; it stages a judgment that everyone can see, remember, and retell by the fire. Parents do not auction a daughter; they learn to hear her chosen bond. The knight does not swagger off; he laughs, pays, and eats. In all of this, Windsor offers an alternative to force: carefully organized virtue. People who can plan, signal, rehearse, and forgive can also hold a town together, the play suggests.
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