The Merry Wives of Windsor

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.