Merry Wives Research Articles

Meanings Behind the Names of the ‘Fairies’ in Merry Wives of Windsor—An Explanation for ‘Bede’ and ‘Peane’ Leading to an Uncovering of Two Distinct Versions of the Taper-Trial Episode and a New Proposal for the Relationship Between the Quarto and Folio Versions

Meanings Behind the Names of the ‘Fairies’ in <i>Merry Wives of Windsor—</i>An Explanation for ‘Bede’ and ‘Peane’ Leading to an Uncovering of Two Distinct Versions of the Taper-Trial Episode and a New Proposal for the Relationship Between the Quarto and Folio Versions

‘[S]he-Mercury’: Broadening Female Neighbourly Networks in The Merry Wives of Windsor

ABSTRACT Recent critical attention to The Merry Wives of Windsor has emphasised the feminist impulse of the play, stressing the way it celebrates female gossip networks. Important as they are, those studies, however, privilege the gossip network between the two prosperous, middling-sorts wives of the title, in the process marginalising the many working women the play depicts as members of a wider female neighbourly network and occluding the crucial roles they play in the success of the wives’ plots. When critics do attempt to attend to a wider female network, they often link the wives to the (off-stage) queen, thus further isolating them from their immediate neighbourly interactions. This article redresses this imbalance by showing that female neighbourly networks in the play, as they were in early modern culture, are much broader and socially diverse than has hitherto been acknowledged. Challenging dominant critical readings of Mistress Quickly as a garrulous, busybody, and drawing on the findings of social historians’ recent research into the lived experiences of early modern female servants, I argue that she is positioned in the play as a social actor, an active participant in her neighbourhood, an ingenious manipulator, and a significant member of the local female networks.

Listening to First Quartos: The Women of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V

ABSTRACT The so-called ‘bad’ quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays have long been treated as superfluous. However, recent debates suggest that these publications are not corrupt but may instead be Shakespeare’s early drafts, opening up a conversation about how to treat the textual disparities between the early quartos and the 1623 folio. This article examines two variant texts in light of this assessment. The early quartos of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1602) and Henry V (1600) offer moments where female characters display an agency that is silenced and controlled in the more canonical texts of the folio, suggesting that, as he revised the plays, Shakespeare moved to restrict women’s behaviour. For example, the titular Merry Wives design and orchestrate the final masque in the quarto text of that play, while they cede artistic control to their husbands in the later folio version. So too, in Henry V, Katherine’s final scene in the quarto gives her the opportunity to speak more and to assert an equality with Henry in a passage unique to that text. Attention to the gender dynamics of revision demonstrates that, to understand the full range of feminist potential within Shakespeare’s canon, scholars must explore his plays’ textual variation.

‘Heaven guide him to thy husband’s cudgel’

This essay argues that in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, when the merry wives dress Falstaff as the old woman of Brentford, they reveal his true character by visually associating him with a witch and thus force the men of Windsor to punish him for his crimes. Falstaff’s behaviour matches the social disruption of the male witch; furthermore, his position as a new and unestablished member of a community, his gender, and the fact that the authorities of Windsor are inept make it difficult for the merry wives to successfully accuse him without appealing to popular witchcraft belief.

"A Fair House built on another man's ground": Public Shakespeare at Seneca Village

Abstract: Though scholars have sought to highlight how artists employ Shakespeare as an instrument of radical resistance, this essay reconsiders the relationship between Shakespeare and artistic subversion. We use Anna Watkins Fisher's concept of parasitic resistance to frame our analysis of the Public Theater's 2021 adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor . Rather than advocate for Shakespeare as either complicit or resistant to the corporatization of public theater, we suggest a spectrum of possibilities within this binary, possibilities which operationalize tactics that strategically place complicity and resistance in relation to one another. Merry Wives thus illuminates how performance can subtly subvert the intertwined pressures of capitalism and white patriarchy by appropriating and wielding the tools of performance itself, the specific cultural authority of the Shakespeare system, and the linguistic and artistic cultural capital imagined as inherent to that system, in order to lay bare some of the palimpsest historicities of settler colonialism.

Food Symbolism and Imagery in the Polish Translations of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

The paper presents Polish equivalents of William Shakespeare’s food vocabulary based on The Merry Wives of Windsor. The analysis entails all Polish versions of the comedy, both its nineteenth-century renditions and contemporary post-war readings. The research aims to demonstrate how the lexical choices of Polish authors affect the interpretation of the play; in particular, it seeks to answer the question of how the imagery and symbolism of Shakespeare’s food vocabulary were altered in the process of translation.

ИСТОРИЯ СОЗДАНИЯ ОПЕРЫ ДЖ. ВЕРДИ «ФАЛЬСТАФ» СКВОЗЬ ПРИЗМУ ЭПИСТОЛЯРИЯ (к 210-летию со дня рождения композитора)

The year 2023 marks the 210th anniversary of the birth of the opera reformer, Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi. Through the prism of the composer's correspondence and the memoirs of his contemporaries, the article traces his work on the last opus, the opera “Falstaff ”. In this work, Verdi turns to the comic genre for the second time — his first comic opera “The King for a Day”, created during the most tragic period of the composer's life, was not a success. The libretto of “Falstaff ” was based on Shakespeare's comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and fragments from his chronicle “Henry IV”. The composer and librettist A. Boito did not intend to create a purely comic opera similar to opera buffa. Boito wrote for Verdi a lyrical comedy, unlike any other, where the protagonist was a Shakespearean character — a fat, good-natured and cowardly drunkard. Verdi did not seek to resurrect in “Falstaff ” the naive gaiety of the old comic opera. He went his own way, without rejecting the traditions laid down by his predecessors (especially Rossini), but also without imitating them, achieving greater psychological intensity. The composer's letters reveal his amazing character — his modesty and selfdoubt, his mercy and optimism, his thorough approach to all the details of the production and his incredible capacity for work.

Falstaff on Tour: County, Town and Country in the Late Elizabethan Theatre

AbstractWhy does Falstaff travel to York via Gloucestershire in Henry the Fourth, part two? And why does Shakespeare interrupt his second tetralogy of history plays to take his most famous comic character to Windsor in the Merry Wives? This article uses Falstaff's tour of England in these two plays to explore an idea of the country founded upon local identities rather than on the overarching appeal of nationhood. Drawing upon chorography and social history, it focusses on the association of people and place and offers a view of England from the ground up rather than through the more imposing structures of political narrative and symbolic form.

Theater, Revision, and The Merry Wives of Windsor

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.

Spatial Reconfigurations of Power: From Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor to Verdi’s Falstaff Staged by the Metropolitan Opera, New York (2013)

Spatial Reconfigurations of Power: From Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor to Verdi’s Falstaff Staged by the Metropolitan Opera, New York (2013)

“Rule, Supremacy and Sway”: The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, the Wife of Bath’s Prologe, Tale and the Frankeleyn’s Tale

ABSTRACT This article focuses on marital relationships in The Taming of the Shrew and The Merry Wives of Windsor and the assumptions governing those relationships. It examines the predicament of the female sex in a patriarchal society where men exercise “rule, supremacy and sway” and explores the ways in which women negotiate the situation and their position in it. Behind every discussion about marriage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lie the Wife of Bath’s Prologe and Tale and others in the “marriage group” of The Canterbury Tales, which deal with the all-important question of “maistrye”, and provide insights into the strategies employed by the protagonists in both Shakespeare comedies. The Taming asks who tames whom and who is the “Shrew” of the title. The Merry Wives examines the conjugal relationship, the attitudes of the sexes towards each other, and redefines marriage through the hitherto neglected Anne-Fenton relationship.

Merry Wives

Reviewed by: Merry Wives Ali Madani Merry Wives Presented by The Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater, New York City, NY. 6 July–18 September 2021. Directed by Saheem Ali. Adapted by Jocelyn Bioh. Costume design by Dede Ayite. Scenic design by Beowulf Boritt. Lighting Design by Jiyoun Chang. Sound design by Kai Harada and Palmer Hefferan. Original music by Michael Thurber. Original drum compositions Farai Malianga. Fight direction by Rocío Mendez. Choreography by Darrell Grand Moultrie. Hair, wigs, and makeup design by Cookie Jordan. Production stage manager Narda E. Alcorn. Stage Manager Benjamin E. C. Pfister. Sound system design by Jessic Paz. With Abena (Anne Page), Gbenga Akin-nagbe (Mister Nduka Ford), Pascale Armand (Madam Ekua Page), MaYaa Boateng (Fenton/Simple), Phillip James Brannon (Pastor Evans), Joshua Echebiri (Slender/Pistol), Angela Grovey (Mama Quickly), Jacob Ming-Trent (Falstaff), Susan Kelechi Watson (Madam Nkechi Ford), Julian Rozzell, Jr. (Shallow), Kyle Scatliffe (Mister Kwame Page), David Ryan Smith (Doctor Caius), and others. “The Public Theater,” promotional material announced, “is theater of, by, and for all people.” On public transit to the Delacorte Theater I encountered a man walking the subway A-train selling tasers and stunguns, [End Page 152] another entering in a hospital gown, and a third wearing a track suit, reading Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and smirking (he wasn’t wearing a mask despite official mandates). Are these minor spectacles relevant or merely remarkable? After some eighteen months of drastically reduced time witnessing the New York City public, it can be difficult to distinguish. The Public Theater’s staging of Merry Wives (July–September 2021) was the first production of Shakespeare at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park since the 2019 performances of Much Ado about Nothing and Coriolanus. Like much of the theater planned for 2020, The Public’s production of Shaina Taub and Laurie Woolery’s musical adaptation of As You Like It, scheduled to return to the Delacorte during the first summer of COVID-19, was cancelled in deference to public health, and their planned production of Richard II became a radio play. Merry Wives was my first experience of live in-person theater in the pandemic era. This production would also have been my first opportunity since March 2020 to participate in a crowd, were it not for the mass demonstrations against anti-Blackness and police brutality that had spurred a sequestered public to collective action. In New York City those mass demonstrations were followed promptly by mass arrests, further police brutality, and swarms of nocturnal police helicopters hovering just overhead. The effect of the City’s militarized response was to deny rest to those who most needed it, to dissuade the public from further action. It was out of this dizzying urban scene that Jocelyn Bioh’s adaptation of Merry Wives appeared. A celebration of Black joy, The Public’s performance of Shakespeare’s city comedy was keyed to the time and location of its staging. Beowulf Boritt’s fabricated block of contemporary Harlem, complete with Citi Bikes and a Black Lives Matter mural, served as backdrop to the action of the play’s West African-descended characters. Directed by Saheem Ali, Merry Wives radiated joy and “Black Aliveness,” a term I borrow from Kevin Quashie’s recent monograph of the same name. To imagine Black being in reprieve from the threat of anti-Black violence, as this performance managed with exuberance and style, participates in the worldmaking of Blackness as capacious and relational. The production insisted on the relational nature of the theater, organizing seating based on vaccination status, ability, and seniority. Those audience members at greatest risk from COVID-19 were seated in a section preserving physical distance and requiring masks. I and my viewing companion, a friend visiting from out of town whom I had not seen in two years, sat in the “full capacity” zone designated for the vaccinated. Before the performance began, ushers invited audience members in the [End Page 153] vaccinated section to remove masks. (Performances were cancelled the following week due to a production member’s positive COVID-19 test.) On this night, Bioh and Ali invited to the stage Helen...

Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

Reviewed by: Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton Tom Rutter Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness. By Margaret Tudeau-Clayton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2020. ix+245 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–49373–4. The title of Shakespeare’s Englishes: Against Englishness neatly encapsulates Margaret Tudeau-Clayton’s argument: that Shakespeare’s dramas stage a clash between a view of the English language (and of Englishness) that values plainness, uniformity, and restraint, and another one open to extravagance, diversity, and play. In Shakespeare’s time, this clash reflected a wider cultural shift that would ultimately produce a sense of national and linguistic identity at whose centre was ‘the plain-speaking, plainly dressed virtuous citizen’ p. 3) as opposed to the cosmopolitan courtier, the naturalized stranger, or the lower-class Englishman (still less Englishwoman). Tudeau-Clayton’s survey focuses primarily on Shakespeare’s Elizabethan plays: the second tetralogy and The Merry Wives of Windsor in particular, but with substantial discussion of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Merchant of Venice. It is also informed by some excellent research into the history of a range of cultural tropes. One is ‘the King’s English’, whose early usage turns out to be as a means of excluding those who do not speak it. Another is the use of financial metaphors (‘clipping the King’s English’, ‘counterfeit’ words; p. 82), which Tudeau-Clayton links to the Elizabethan monetary reforms overseen by Thomas Gresham. A third is ‘the figure of the elite Englishman dressed in a motley of foreign fashions’ (p. 97), which she traces from Andrew Boorde’s Introduction of Knowledge (1547) through Protestant reformers and the chorographer William Harrison to the anonymous play Woodstock and [End Page 112] Shakespeare’s Richard II and The Merchant of Venice. Readers interested in the development of these notions will find Tudeau-Clayton’s work invaluable. However, she is also keen to delineate the broader cultural contest—between inclusivity and exclusion—in which they were made to serve. She identifies the banishment of the ‘extravagant, nomadic’ Falstaff in 2 Henry IV as the victory of a ‘plainness’ (p. 178) that is, in Hal/Henry, merely the cover for a cynical will to power. By contrast, she finds in Shakespeare’s contribution to Sir Thomas More a sympathy for the straying and the strange that is both in keeping with his documented relationships with foreigners and his own status as a migrant to London, and informed by parliamentary debates about the treatment of ‘strangers’ (p. 135). The second tetralogy, with its stress on regional, stylistic, and lexical diversity, depicts the English as ‘a nation of strangers’ (p. 146), while the early comedies evoke a Christian sense of all humanity being both pilgrims and members of the city of God. Other than a brief reference to Brexit, Tudeau-Clayton wisely soft-pedals the modern relevance of these ideas, but the hospitable, diverse version of Englishness with which she aligns Shakespeare will be appealing to many readers. However, she also notes the exclusion of Parolles in All’s Well that Ends Well and the ambivalence with which Othello’s verbal extravagance is treated, wondering if these indicate a ‘shift towards cultural reformation ideology’ as the dramatist aged (p. 130). This point left me wondering, though, whether the openness to diversity that she discusses may stem from the inherently dialogic nature of drama as much as from Shakespeare’s own attitudes. Nor was I entirely convinced by the contrast she draws between Shakespeare and allegedly more xenophobic dramatists such as William Haughton, whose Englishmen for my Money is certainly exclusionary in some respects but which in depicting ‘the triumph of three English citizen daughters’ over foreigners (p. 66) also depicts (from another perspective) the success of three daughters of a Portuguese immigrant, possibly of Jewish descent, in marrying into English gentry. Critical elevation of Shakespeare depends, perhaps, on its own acts of exclusion. Nevertheless, the vision of Shakespeare’s drama that this book offers is a timely and generous one, underpinned by careful scholarship and nuanced critical analysis. Tom Rutter University of Sheffield Copyright © 2022...

On the Image of Doctors in Shakespeare’s Plays and the Ideological Evolution of Shakespeare

Because the doctor profession has a special and important position in human society, the role of doctors has come into the field of literature from time to time as a unique image that bears special social significance and carries the writer’s aesthetic ideal. With the development of society and the evolution of writers’ thoughts, the image and connotation of doctors in literary works of the same writer in different periods are also changing. This paper intends to analyze the image of doctors in Shakespeare’s early comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor, the mid-term tragedy Macbeth and the later legendary drama Pericles, Prince of Tyre focusing on the specific social and historical situation of drama creation, and points out that the image of the doctors in Shakespeare’s plays is a kind of character carefully set by Shakespeare, carrying the author’s own ideology. The image of doctors in the works of different periods reflects Shakespeare’s own ideological development process.

«Зеленый человек»: трансформация образа в литературе англоязычных стран

The purpose of the study is to identify the paradigm of the Green Man’s transformed folklore images recorded in the texts belonging to the literature of the English-speaking countries. The article clarifies mythological and folklore prototypes of most representation variants of the Green Man’s image in the poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”, W. Shakespeare’s comedy “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, W. H. Ainsworth’s novel “Windsor Castle” and W. Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and also identifies models of their functioning in each text. Scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the issue of the Green Man’s (Cernunnos’s) image representation and transformation has remained on the margins of literary criticism. As a result, it is proved that the images found in the English-language literature, ranging from the Green Knight to the Headless Horseman, go back to traditional cyclical forms of god Lugh.

Volume 51 (2021)

Volume 51 (2021)

Windsor’s World of Words: Multilingualism inThe Merry Wives of Windsor

AbstractOn account of its setting and its emphasis on domesticity, critics traditionally recognize The Merry Wives of Windsor as Shakespeare’s “English comedy.” Building on the work of scholars int...

Four-Character Idioms and the Rhetoric of Japanese Shakespeare Translation

Yoji jukugo are idioms comprised of four characters (kanji) that can be used to enhance the textuality of a Japanese Shakespeare translation, whether in response to Shakespeare’s rhetoric or as compensation for the tendency of translation to be carried out at a lower textual register than the source. This article examines their use in two translations each of Julius Caesar by Matsuoka Kazuko (2014) and Fukuda Tsuneari (1960) and of The Merry Wives of Windsor by Matsuoka (2001) and Odashima Yūshi (1983); in both cases Matsuoka uses significantly more yoji jukugo than her predecessors. In the Julius Caesar translations their usage is noticeable in the set speeches by Antony and Brutus in 3.2, and commonly denote baseness or barbarity. In the Merry Wives translations they commonly denote dissolute behaviour, often for comic effect, and can even be used malapropistically in the target language.

The Transformation of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and his Allusion in 5.1.1-4 to the Treble Goddess

The Transformation of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor and his Allusion in 5.1.1-4 to the Treble Goddess

Othello

Reviewed by: Othello Tom Ue Othello Presented by the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario. 3 May–27 October 2019. Directed for the stage by Nigel Shawn Williams and for film by Barry Avrich. Design by Denyse Karn. Lighting design by Kaileigh Krysztofiak. Music and sound design by Verne Good. Fight direction by Anita Nittoly. Intimacy direction by Siobhan Richardson. With Michael Blake (Othello), Laura Condlln (Emilia), Amelia Sargisson (Desdemona), Gordon S. Miller (Iago), Johnathan Sousa (Cassio), Farhang Ghajar (Roderigo), Michelle Giroux (Duchess of Venice), Randy Hughson (Brabantio), and Shruti Kothari (Bianca). [End Page 286] It seems rather late in the day to say that Othello makes audiences uncomfortable. And yet social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo expose how topical—and, indeed, pressing—Shakespeare’s tragedy can be. Stratford Festival’s 2019 season brought together Othello and The Merry Wives of Windsor, a pair of plays that take sexual jealousy as their foci. The film of Othello, directed for the screen by Barry Avrich, preserves the way in which the 2019 theatrical production, directed by Nigel Shawn Williams, used staging techniques to reflect closely on our present racial and social climate. With the help of Denyse Karn’s designs and Kaileigh Krysztofiak’s lighting, Williams takes a minimalist approach, and most of the designs are rendered by means of projections. Accordingly, the columns closely resemble the bars of a prison—an apt visual metaphor for the “web” (2.1.166) with which Iago (Gordon S. Miller) ensnares Othello (Michael Blake) and so many of the play’s characters. Othello is caught in many senses. In an early scene, for instance, he barely manages to circumvent crossfire between the Duchess of Venice’s officers and Brabantio’s staff. Brabantio accuses him of stealing away his daughter Desdemona: O thou foul thief, where hast thou stowed my daughter?Damned as thou art, thou hast enchanted her, . . .I therefore apprehend and do attach theeFor an abuser of the word, a practiserOf arts inhibited and out of warrant.Lay hold upon him; if he do resist,Subdue him at his peril! (1.2.62–81; excisions in production) Williams’s omissions are revealing: he leaves out Brabantio’s surmises that Desdemona would not willingly have chosen Othello amongst her suitors: that, in short, she had been “enchanted.” Brabantio feels wronged, but he goes too far both in denying his daughter agency and in wishing incarceration and punishment for Othello: “To prison, till fit time / Of law, and course of direct session / Call thee to answer” (1.2.85–7). Othello disputes these claims by characterizing Desdemona as an active audience to his stories and by giving partial explanation for why she loves him: “She thanked me / And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, / I should but teach him how to tell my story / And that would woo her” (1.3.164–7). What is striking here is how Williams shows the very real threat that Othello faces: both his men and Brabantio’s are trigger-happy, and it is all he can do to restrain them. [End Page 287] Williams makes productive use of the play’s subplots, as evidenced, for instance, by his treatment of Iago’s and Emilia’s (Laura Condlln) troubled and troubling marriage. In Cyprus, Iago watches as Cassio (Johnathan Sousa) kisses Emilia, clad in military uniform in this production, when he welcomes her. Someone teases, “Uh, oh,” after which Cassio jokingly consoles Iago: “Let it not gall your patience, good Iago, / That I extend my manners; ’tis my breeding / That gives me this bold show of courtesy” (2.1.97–9). In a play shorn of characters “good” or “honest,” it is ironic that the former word appears a staggering ninety-eight times and the latter fifty-two. According to Michael Neill, though, we do well to dwell on Cassio’s comment in performance here: Cassio’s flowery explanation of his “courtesy” and “breeding” is [. . .] even more insulting, implying as it does that the kiss which he gives Iago’s wife is a refinement of courtly manners which a rough soldier like Iago could not possibly understand. An actor will have...