Theater, Revision, and The Merry Wives of Windsor

Abstract

Surveying several centuries of debate about the relationship of Q (1602) and F (1623) Merry Wives, Jeanne Addison Roberts concluded in 1975 that textual criticism’s “major insight” was that “F is not a revision of Q—an insight now almost completely and apparently finally accepted. The second major insight is seen in [W. W.] Greg’s enunciation of the idea that Q is a memorial reconstruction of F prepared chiefly by the Host—a view that has been developed and challenged but appears to hold its ground quite firmly.”1 What is striking about Roberts’s conclusion is how stable it has remained across the almost five decades of change in editorial theory and practice associated with the new textual criticism. As recently as 2013, Martin Wiggins could describe Q as “a memorial reconstruction probably compiled in or after 1601 by the actor who played the Host; this version has also been abridged and adapted for theatrical use.”2 Although all current editions of Merry Wives acknowledge the textual unorthodoxies of both Q and F, and agree that there has been some specific, purposeful intervention to produce the Folio’s final scene and in particular the Garter-specific speech at TLN 2315, they all more or less subscribe to Roberts’s summary.3 As we will see, the current editorial consensus is that F Merry Wives became Q by some combination of theatrical, memorial, and print depredations and sometimes via a lost intermediary or Ur-text. In a recent survey of editorial practice, Andrew Murphy notes that despite the challenges of 1980s New Textualism, it is “remarkable how much of the old edifice of the New Bibliography remains standing.”4 In this light, W. W. Greg’s foundational work on the texts of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and its editorial influence on recent editions, deserves further attention.