60 pages • 2-hour read
The Merry Wives of Windsor
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Background
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use and gender discrimination.
Literary Context: Sir John Falstaff
Sir John Falstaff enters The Merry Wives of Windsor with a rich literary history: The character also appears in Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, published in 1598 and 1600, respectively. In the history plays, he embodies tavern vitality, rhetorical brilliance, and opportunistic amorality. He drinks sack, dodges battle, embellishes language, and treats “honor” as a word to be cashed rather than a virtue to be lived. He also functions as Prince Hal’s comic tutor in vice, a foil whose charms make Hal’s eventual rejection both politically necessary and theatrically cruel. Around him cluster the roguish figures Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, whose verbal tics and petty schemes deepen Falstaff’s Eastcheap world.
The Merry Wives of Windsor transposes this figure into a different genre and social frame. This creates a degree of anachronism. Falstaff belongs to the reign of Henry IV in the early 1400s, yet in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the world around him resembles Shakespeare’s own early 1600s society, Windsor’s tradespeople and household routines taking center stage. However, Shakespeare keeps Falstaff consistent, from his immense appetite to his tavern entourage. His speech still brims with lists, mythic allusions, and shameless self-justification. He again seeks profit through other people’s purses, now by attempting to seduce two respectable wives for access to their husbands’ money, his old cons here becoming domestic.
The shift alters his dramatic function. In the histories, Falstaff often creates chaos; in The Merry Wives of Windsor, the town manages him without defeating his bravado. Middle-class women, not a reforming prince, set the terms. Where Hal’s rejection supplies a tragic undertone, Windsor offers a corrective spectacle: the laundry basket, the cudgel, and the fairy masque turn Falstaff from a charismatic corrupter into a teachable braggart. Falstaff praises his own “mettle,” capers in antlers, and invokes Jupiter’s animal disguises, but his tactics meet domestic logistics that outwit him at every turn. He becomes a vehicle for social satire—a domestic farce that resembles Much Ado About Nothing or A Comedy of Errors more than Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2. The tradition that Queen Elizabeth requested “Falstaff in love” (though unprovable) suits this bourgeois sequel (Mowat, Barbara and Paul Werstine. “About Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Folger Shakespeare Library).
Thus, Merry Wives does not betray Falstaff; it reframes him. Shakespeare preserves his language, appetites, and parasitic ingenuity but relocates them to a civic comedy where female wit and neighborhood order contain, mock, and finally reintegrate the great rogue.
Historical Context: Elizabethan Middle Class
Elizabethan England witnessed the rise of an urban, provincial middle class (merchants, guild masters, innkeepers, professionals, etc.) whose wealth came not from land but from trade, craft skill, and credit (Korda, Natasha. “A Modern Perspective: The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Folger Shakespeare Library). In this world, marriage functioned as an economic strategy and social insurance: Dowries, jointures, and kin alliances moved money and reputation as surely as they joined households (Korda). Gender roles remained formally patriarchal, with the husband the legal authority and public voice, but the household economy gave wives consequential power in managing servants, accounts, and reputation. Social mobility was possible, though precarious: Cash and conduct could raise a family’s standing, while scandal or bad debt could sink it (Korda).
The Merry Wives of Windsor turns that social fabric into comedy. Shakespeare relocates Sir John Falstaff, an aristocratic parasite from the history plays, into a town where middle-class prudence sets the rules. His plot to seduce Mistress Ford and Mistress Page is less romantic than fiscal: He seeks access to their rich husbands’ purses. The wives’ response reveals the power of the household sphere. They orchestrate servants, schedules, and space to defend both chastity and credit, demonstrating how women’s managerial authority underwrites middle-class stability.
The Anne Page marriage plot stages middle-class attitudes toward status and wealth. Master Page favors Slender for his property and kin, while Mistress Page favors Doctor Caius for his professional rank, but both read marriage as an alliance that consolidates position. Fenton, gentry by birth but poor, embodies downwardly mobile nobility seeking restoration through a wealthy match. Anne’s eventual choice insists that consent must sit alongside material concerns, echoing an emerging bourgeois understanding of marriage in which feeling, practicality, and community assent all matter.
Ford’s jealousy dramatizes the fragility of household reputation: Cuckoldry threatens the appearance that keeps a man’s standing intact. The town corrects him not with law but with public ritual, showing a community that polices itself through spectacle, gossip, and laughter. Around them, figures like the Host of the Garter Inn, Bardolph, and the German “cozeners” suggest a marketplace culture alert to profit and fraud. The Merry Wives of Windsor thus reflects an Elizabethan middle class that values money and reputation, marriages brokered by both purse and preference, and households run by women whose practical intelligence secures the town’s social order.
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