60 pages • 2-hour read
The Merry Wives of Windsor
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of gender discrimination.
Horns and Bucks
The Merry Wives of Windsor fuses hunting, sexuality, and household labor into a single emblem: the buck and its horns. In Elizabethan England, horns conventionally mark a cuckolded husband, a stigma men like Ford fear so much that they obsessively police their wives’ fidelity. Falstaff embraces the symbolism, casting himself as the virile “woodman”: the hunter who will mount antlers on other men’s brows and feast on their “deer.” The wives, however, flip the sign. They make Falstaff wear the horns himself at Herne’s Oak, converting a badge of male swagger into a crown of ridicule. What should announce dominance instead announces defeat. Thus, the motif of horns and bucks develops themes of Redefining Authority as Competence, The Complexities of Marriage, and Revenge and Ridicule as Tools of Social Correction.
The play extends the image through the buck-basket. As “buck” also means to wash with lye, the large laundry hamper servants carry is called a “buck-basket.” By packing Falstaff into foul linen and dumping him into the Thames, the wives enact a literal and symbolic cleansing that transforms their domestic labor into civic correction: The same routines that whiten cloth rinse away predation’s glamour. This compresses the play’s class and gender politics. A knight expects the privileges of the chase, but two housewives answer with the discipline of washing day—a challenge to aristocratic patriarchal authority but also an embrace of bourgeois gender norms.
Ford explicitly links the household chore to the stigma of cuckoldry. When Mistress Ford asks why he cares about the “buck-washing,” he snaps:
Buck? I would I could wash myself of the buck.
Buck, buck, buck! Ay, buck! I warrant you, buck;
and of the season too, it shall appear (3.3.155-57).
In that outburst, “buck” slides from laundry to deer to the horned emblem of a cuckold, yoking domestic work to his jealousy and turning washing-day into a search for proof.
Horns return in the midnight pageant. Herne the Hunter’s antlers give the prank a folkloric charge, but the wives keep the meaning squarely social. Falstaff, crowned with horns, appeals to myths of gods pursuing mortal women to justify his appetite; the “fairies” answer with pinches and song that remake the horns as instruments of public judgment. The joke culminates when the wives “bequeath” those horns back to Ford as wordplay only, refusing the logic that equates women’s merriment with infidelity. In that refusal lies the symbol’s final twist: Horns signify not female betrayal but male fantasy and anxiety.
Language
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, language operates as a symbolic system for power, class, and moral authority. The play’s upper classes, most notably Falstaff and Shallow, flaunt prestige registers. Falstaff’s rolling catalogues and mythic comparisons advertise his charisma and status; Shallow’s legalese performs his public office. However, these grand styles do not yield results—at least, not those the speakers intend. Falstaff’s twin love letters expose his rhetoric as mass-produced flattery and thus set the wives’ schemes in motion, while Shallow’s threats evaporate on contact with reality. Ornate language symbolizes empty authority when it cannot coordinate action.
By contrast, the wives speak to make things happen. Their plain, imperative sentences (“send,” “carry,” “lock,” “search,” “mask”) turn servants, space, and timing into instruments. Likewise, Mistress Quickly’s malapropisms signal a lack of formal education but do not detract from her effectiveness: Her messages arrive, the schedules she organizes hold, and the fairy masque starts on cue. Sir Hugh’s Welsh-accented speech never matches courtly English. However, he drills the children, gives the watchwords, and conducts a ritual that reforms Falstaff. In middle-class Windsor, “imperfect” English symbolizes inclusive civic authority: Language earns power by producing results.
Pedagogy and ritual frame this lesson. Sir Hugh’s Latin drill symbolizes Windsor’s belief that discipline in speech undergirds social order but, in its comedy, also further distances “discipline” from elite or “proper” speech. At Herne’s Oak, formal incantations (calls, responses, and “trial by fire”) convert performance into judgment: Speech assigns guilt, while a closing invitation to supper restores community. Even puns carry weight. The sliding meanings of “buck” (deer, wash) and “horns” (cuckoldry, costume) show how words can contaminate or cleanse, depending on who handles them and how effectively.
Play-Acting, Masks, and Disguises
Play-acting, masks, and disguises as a motif in The Merry Wives of Windsor operate as a civic technology: They let ordinary people redistribute power, test marriages, and correct bad behavior without violence or courts. Most plainly, disguise signals empty authority. Falstaff tries to play the swaggering “woodman,” but the wives answer by dressing him as the “old woman of Brentford” (4.2.85-86), stripping his swagger of force. Instead of catching a lover, Ford beats a phantom he already fears, and the joke exposes jealousy as performance rather than proof. Ford’s own alias as Brook further proves the point. He believes a borrowed name will grant investigative authority, yet the role traps him inside his suspicion.
Masks also mediate the complexities of marriage. Page and Mistress Page treat Anne’s wedding as a logistics problem, marking her with white for Slender and green for Caius. That color-coding reduces a person to a signal. The disguised-boy mix-ups punish this reduction: Both suitors seize the “right” costume and marry the wrong body. By contrast, Anne and Fenton use disguise to protect consent, borrowing the cover of the midnight pageant and securing a lawful ceremony. The play thus distinguishes between disguises that manipulate a partner and disguises that shield mutual choice until it can be publicly affirmed.
Finally, play-acting powers revenge and ridicule as tools of social correction. At the Herne’s Oak masque, children in fairy gear, Quickly as a queen, and Sir Hugh as choreographer enact a ritual that reforms Falstaff. The ridicule lands because the town sees him in a role that fits his offense: horned, encircled, and harmless. However, the same performance ends with reintegration (an invitation to supper), showing that theatrical punishment can close wounds rather than widen them.
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