The Merry Wives of Windsor

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.