The Merry Wives of Windsor

New Critical Essays

Evelyn Gajowski, Phyllis Rackin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317698340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

The Merry Wives of Windsor has recently experienced a resurgence of critical interest. At times considered one of Shakespeare's weaker plays, it is often dismissed or marginalized; however, developments in feminist, ecocritical and new historicist criticism have opened up new perspectives and this collection of 18 essays by top Shakespeare scholars sheds fresh light on the play. The detailed introduction by Phyllis Rackin and Evelyn Gajowski provides a historical survey of the play and ties into an evolving critical and cultural context. The book's sections look in turn at female community/female agency; theatrical alternatives; social and theatrical contexts; desire/sexuality; nature and performance to provide a contemporary critical analysis of the play.

Part I

Female community/female agency

1 Agonistic scenes of provincial life

Catherine Belsey

I

The Merry Wives of Windsor was hugely popular in Edwardian England. With the exception of 1906–7, the comedy was staged every year between 1901 and 1916 at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. In London, Herbert Beerbohm Tree played Falstaff in Merry Wives at regular intervals from 1889 to 1912, putting on a special production to celebrate the coronation of Edward VII in 1902. None of this should surprise us. Here were middle-class ascendancy, merry England with a dash of folklore, a funny foreigner, a Welsh windbag, and the comic comeuppance of a rogue knight in the shadow of the oldest royal residence, official home of that highest mark of true chivalry, the Order of the Garter. What could be more gratifying? No wonder the play was staged to boost the Second-World-War effort in London by Donald Wolfit in 1940 and 1942 and at Stratford in 1940, 1943 and 1945. It was one of two Shakespeare plays chosen to tour the garrisons in 50-minute versions in 1940.¹ More recently, as heritage and Englishness have lost something of their lustre, the number of productions has declined. An eighteenth-century story that Shakespeare composed the play in two weeks at the queen’s request has tended to stick, since it confirms the comedy as no more than a pot-boiler, put together more to appease the court than out of conviction. Merry Wives is no longer so highly rated by the public, although the Royal Shakespeare Company scored a hit with its 2012 version, a topical satire on current bourgeois mores.

Is there anything more to this play than either celebration or mockery of the emerging middle class and its nationalist convictions? I take my cue from the editor of Arden 3 who, taking his in turn from essays by Elizabeth Pittenger (1991) and Patricia Parker (1991),² sees the English language itself as the play’s central comic concern. Giorgio Melchiori draws attention to the bombast, verbal tags, and recurrent wordplay, as well as the involuntary puns of those who have a less than adequate purchase on the conventions of meaning or pronunciation. As he points out, no other play of Shakespeare’s refers so insistently to the language that composes it: Falstaff calls the Welsh schoolmaster ‘one that makes fritters of English’ (5.5.142);³ ‘here’s a fellow frights English out of his wits’, Page observes of poor Nim, who can barely complete a sentence without invoking ‘the humour of it’ (2.1.124–25); Mistress Quickly expects from Dr Caius ‘an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English’ (1.4.4–5); the Host of the Garter Inn comments that Parson Evans and Dr Caius would do better not to fight, but to keep their limbs whole and (continue to) hack the language instead (3.1.70–71) (Melchiori 2000: 5–9).

Hacking the language, or exploiting its potential for error, is arguably what Shakespeare does best, and nowhere more playfully than in Merry Wives. From this perspective, the Latin lesson is pivotal. Although it makes no contribution to the plot, the scene draws together the comic obstacles to transparency language presents. William Page, who would be about seven or eight at this stage of his education, is shown at the mercy of an impenetrable Latin grammar book, a Welsh schoolmaster who is not in full command of Windsor English, and an intrusive bystander who, with no knowledge of Latin, indignantly finds sex in all she hears. To an audience brought up on the same Latin grammar by William Lilly and John Colet, the wit of this scene at the expense of the textbook, Sir Hugh Evans, and Mistress Quickly must have been all but irresistible. On the other hand, the pleasures of dramatic irony should not blind us to the bullying these exchanges bring out. A little boy is required to internalize instructions that make no sense. ‘What is he, William, that does lend articles?’ And William stolidly rehearses what he has evidently learnt by rote: Articles are borrowed of the pronoun’, he correctly replies (4.1.33–35). Such gobbledygook must be committed to memory, since the penalty for error is a beating: ‘If you forget your quis, your quaes, and your quods, you must be preeches’ (69–70). Eventually, the unlearned but irrepressible Quickly is temporarily silenced, but not before the parson has put her down as ‘a very simplicity ‘oman’ and ‘foolish’ (26, 63). Both Latin and English are seen here as locations of a conflict for possession, where authority, however tenuously justified, means power over others. And the audience is given momentary access to the perspective of the child, whose place is not to reason why but to absorb and reproduce whatever absurdities are backed by the powers that be.⁴ The comedy of the scene makes a serious point. Language is not, indeed, amenable to rationality: its ‘correct’ (that is, conventional) usage is subject not to reason but to the prevailing authorities, however confused or self-interested they may be.

The Merry Wives of Windsor consistently makes comedy out of linguistic conflicts. The play opens on a scene of projected combat, as Justice Shallow threatens to have the law on Falstaff. He has a case against him, but 100 lines of dialogue are exchanged before we learn what it is (1.1.104–5), as Shallow and Slender jostle with the parson for position. Slender asserts his own standing by supporting his relative’s in malapropisms (12–13) and garbled legal Latin (4–9), while Evans fails to grasp the heraldic value of ‘the dozen white luces’ in the Justice’s coat of arms. ‘It is an old coat’, confirms Shallow complacently, prompting Evans to note the likelihood of finding a dozen lice in such a time-worn garment (14–17). Now it is Slender’s turn to affirm his own gentlemanly status: ‘I may quarter, coz’ (21). He could indeed quarter their coat of arms by marrying a wife from a family with other armorial bearings, but the parson will have none of it: Shallow will then have only three-quarters of his old coat left (23–27). The comedy depends on reciprocal incomprehension, as each speaker reinscribes the other’s utterances to mean something new.

The contest for control of meaning remains unresolved. Instead, in the hope of distracting the gentry from their ‘pribbles and prabbles’ (50), the parson now suggests a marriage between Slender and the well dowered Anne Page. This is the audience’s cue to sit back in the comfortable expectation of further misunderstandings: whoever heard of a stage courtship without pribbles and prabbles? We shall not be disappointed but, in the meantime, the play has already established its concern with the conflicts for supremacy that also take place in language. The play is not just social satire (though it is that) and not just designed to mock the deformation of an emerging standard English (though it does that too). It also draws attention to the propensity of language itself to obstruct the exchange of information. There are – perfectly legitimately – coats and coats, or shared terms with disparate meanings, as well as other hazards in the way of mutual understanding.

II

Common-sense linguistic theory relies on the assumption that language acts as an instrument of communication. The project of speech is taken to be transparency, understood as direct access to the speaker’s meaning. You say, ‘turn the page’; I turn over; communication works. But, as anyone who reflects on language knows, it is never that simple: all we have access to is the signifier, which takes the place of the imagined intention. Most obviously, as any dictionary will show, many words have a range of usages, leaving meaning potentially unresolved: pages are attendants, as well as leaves. In addition, much signification may be implicit: nuance, connotation, what isn’t said, or goes without saying, may count for as much as denotation. Perhaps you were implicitly urging me not to look at that page because it contained secrets or obscenities? Meanwhile, figurative language, so formidable a component of everyday speech, distracts from the topic at the same time as it clarifies, by redefining one thing in terms of another. Perhaps you really meant me to turn over a new leaf and change my way of life? Of course, the context would help to confirm this, but the context in itself also invites interpretation, so that the possible uncertainties are endless. And Jacques Derrida would say that, since a term is defined by its difference, the repudiated other inevitably intrudes into the selfsame, and meaning is left ultimately undecidable.

Can you be sure that you understand what I say? Suppose I am not in perfect control of the linguistic conventions. I might earnestly assure you, as we often hear, that the influence of religion in world affairs cannot be underestimated. You might think I am out of touch, or you might silently construe an intention contrary to the literal meaning of the words I have used. Alternatively, I might nudge you towards a conclusion without stating what I meant at all – by means of irony, or by leaving a significant omission, expecting you to reverse the surface meaning or fill the gap. Philosophers of language, confronting the perpetual danger of misunderstanding, have sought out ways of saving the possibility of communication. H. P. Grice, for instance, adduces a cooperative principle (or Cooperative Principle: he invests it with capitals) shared by participants in a conversation. Acceptance of this principle entails the observance of certain maxims: a contribution must be to the point, honest, and perspicuous, avoiding obscurity and ambiguity, for example.⁵

When it comes to the evidential basis for the existence of the cooperative principle, however, Grice is less sure. It is an empirical fact that most participants in a conversation do in practice behave in this way, he notes; it is reasonable, he declares, to continue to maintain the cooperative principle, because conversation advances the topic in a way profitable to all the speakers only if is observed (Grice 1989). But there is an element of tautology in these affirmations: communication can be counted on if, and only if, the rules governing communication are observed. Meanwhile, the imperative to marshal an everyday habit in line with such rules constitutes an oblique acknowledgement that, left to its own devices, dialogue is wayward and subject to disorder. In other words, the contributions of individual speakers to a conversation might in practice be digressive, dishonest, anything but perspicuous, and replete with obscurity and ambiguity.

What if in this light Shakespeare, as one of language’s most compelling exponents, had come to regard it as less an instrument of communication than a weapon of war? The author of Titus Andronicus and the history plays had long exploited the agonistic potential of discursive exchange. The Merry Wives of Windsor is set in peacetime but the action still depends on local conflicts. Suitors compete with each other in their courtship of Anne Page; her father contests his wife’s choice of husband; Ford aggressively monitors his wife’s fidelity; everyone is committed to frustrating the predatory Falstaff in one way or another, even his followers Pistol and Nim. Then there is a subplot concerning further beguilers beguiled in the form of the ghost-Germans, who steal the Host’s horses. Verbal sparring enacts many of these efforts to thwart the projects of others, and insults stand in for violence when Bardolph calls Slender a Banbury cheese (1.1.120), Pistol taunts Evans as a ‘mountain-foreigner’ (148) or Caius less fluently addresses the parson as ‘coward’, ‘Jack-dog’, ‘John-ape’ (3.1.75). Behind their backs, characters are variously ‘Herod of Jewry’ and ‘Flemish drunkard’, ‘unwholesome humidity’, ‘gross watery pumpion’ (Falstaff: 2.1.16, 19; 3.3.35–36), ‘a scurvy jackanape priest’ (Evans: 1.4.102), ‘a drawling-affecting rogue’ (Nim: 2.1.127–28), ‘a cowardly knave’ (Caius: 3.1.62), ‘foolish carrion’ (Mistress Quickly: 3.3.178), and more in this kind.

In addition, however, the dialogue introduces obstacles of its own. Again and again, speech deflects communication or blocks transmission of the message, not so much by hostile design as by its own unruly nature. In the course of the play, speakers hurl into the fray proverbs and quasi-proverbs, biblical quotations or misquotations, classical allusions, apt or not, as well as mistranslations, malapropisms and puns, without regard to whether their contribution profitably advances the topic ostensibly under discussion. The project, if there is one, seems to owe more to competition for control than cooperation to develop a theme.

Nearly four centuries later, Jean-François Lyotard was to catch up with this Shakespearean insight: ‘to speak’, he proposed, ‘is to fight, in the sense of playing, and speech acts fall within the domain of a general agonistics’. He continues:

This does not necessarily mean that one plays in order to win. A move can be made for the sheer pleasure of its invention: what else is involved in that labor of language harassment undertaken by popular speech and by literature? Great joy is had in the endless invention of turns of phrase, of words and meanings. … But undoubtedly even this pleasure depends on a feeling of success won at the expense of an adversary – at least one adversary, and a formidable one: the accepted language, or connotation.

(Lyotard 1984: 10)

Doesn’t ‘language harassment’, or interference with the normal exercise of verbal exchange, perfectly define the opening exchanges among Shallow, Slender, and Evans, or the interventions of Mistress Quickly in the Latin test that already harasses William Page?

To speak is to fight in the sense of playing when characters compete for mastery of the discourse. Falstaff’s exposition of his seduction plan begins by promising transparency (1.3.35–47). ‘My honest lads, I will tell you what I am about’, where about signifies busy with (and has none of its modern connection with identity). At once, however, Pistol interrupts with a pun on about as circumference: ‘Two yards, and more’. Falstaff is irritated – not so much by the allusion to his waist measurement as by the deflection of his announcement: ‘No quips now, Pistol’. Ever since 1930, when William Empson rehabilitated the multiplication of meanings in Seven Types of Ambiguity, critics have been given to lyricism about Shakespeare’s puns, rightly pointing out that they expand and enrich the range of possible interpretations.⁶ Actual or possible double and sometimes treble meanings pervade his work, and perhaps most notably the Sonnets, extending connotations, multiplying resonances, and withholding finality. Shakespeare’s quibbles are among the reasons why the texts continue to yield new readings even to experienced playgoers or scholars. But puns can also be infuriating to an interlocutor on the occasions when they block the exchange of information by introducing a meaning that does nothing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• General Editor’s introduction
• Introduction: A historical survey
• Part I Female Community/Female Agency
• Part II Theatrical alternatives
• Part III Social and theatrical contexts
• Part IV Desire/sexuality
• Part V Nature
• Part VI Performance
• Bibliography
• Index