Windsor: The Town

Windsor is thirty (30) miles west of central London, just beyond Heathrow airport. It is often linked to London but is officially within the Royal County of Berkshire. Historically it has been associated with two major institutions: Windsor Castle, built 1070-86 by William the Conqueror; and Eton College, founded in 1440 by King Henry VI and alma mater of Boris Johnson. Now it is also associated with the M4 motorway and Legoland.

In Shakespeare’s time the population of Windsor would have changed throughout the year, swelling when Elizabeth 1 was in residence. It is difficult to estimate the number of citizens since there was no census until the 19th century. but Tim Lambert, author of ‘A Brief History of Windsor, Berkshire, England’, estimates that “by the late 17th century the population of Windsor had probably exceeded 2,000”. (http://www.localhistories.org/windsor.html) The economy of Windsor was driven by three major forces: the court, the school and the market. Firstly, there was the court, which would have brought a major influx of people into the town and employed a range of trades and professions, including of course that of doctor. Indeed Dr Caius hints at a courtly array of patients when he speaks to the Hostess in Act 2, Scene 3: “By Gar, I love you, and I shall procure-a you de good guest; de earl, de knight, de lords, de gentlemen, my patients.” (82-4) Elizabeth apparently preferred Windsor over other royal palaces, despite (or perhaps because of) its being smaller in physical size. There is no easily accessible record of the amount of time she spent there but when she was in residence the town was full of courtiers, diplomats, foreign politicians and representatives and the itinerant band of entertainers, hustlers, tradespeople and so on that accompanied the court.

The school was relatively self-contained, and there was that old British tradition of the distinction between town and gown. but it would have provided some employment to townspeople as cleaners, stable hands, cooks and so on.

Windsor is often described as relatively poor, yet it contained a rich merchant class. The Elizabethan period was a time of burgeoning mercantile adventure for England, much of it sea-based, which might account for the proliferation of shipping imagery in the play. Page and Ford are both wealthy, and though the play does not identify the source of their wealth it most likely came from food, spices, textiles and minerals from Africa and the New World. They might even have dealt in slaves, though to my mind it is likely that if so, the Shakespeare who wrote The Merchant of Venice and Othello would have made something of it.

It may be of significance that some 35-40 years after Merry Wives was written a law was enacted in the town to prevent residents from allowing their pigs to wander freely in the streets.

/by

Merry Wives Editions and Critical Resources

EDITIONS

There are many editions of The Merry Wives of Windsor and what you choose will depend on the content you want and the format. I tend to use two editions: firstly, the Arden, which is the most scholarly and provides a comprehensive gloss on words, phrases and editorial choices; and secondly, the RSC version which is aimed at performers and feels easier to read. I have given details of these below. There are other excellent editions (Folger, World Library, Cambridge, Penguin) all with something to offer. Avoid editions published as part of a Collected Works, since the text usually predates modern scholarship and the notes tend to be either minimal or unreliable or both. Online versions are similar to the editions in Collected Works.

William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Giorgio Melchiori, London and New York, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2000.
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, Basingstoke, Macmillan for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 2011.
William Shakespeare, Sonnets, ed. Katherine Duncan Jones, London and New York, Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2010.

One difference between these two editions of Merry Wives is that in the Arden, as in most editions, Master Ford’s name when he is in disguise is Brook, while in the RSC version it is Broom. Brook was the name used in the Quarto edition of 1602, and as such provided a pun on the relationship between a ‘brook’ or creek and a ‘ford’, or crossing. In the Folio version of 1623 the name was changed to Broom, perhaps to avoid giving offence to Lord Cobham, whose family name was Brooke and who had already objected to the original name given to Falstaff (Sir John Oldcastle).

THE BOOK OF SONGS AND SONNETS

In the opening scene of the play Slender, in his ineffectual courtship of Anne Page, turns to the audience and says “I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of Songs and Sonnets here.” He’s referring to Tottel’s Miscellany, the anthology compiled by Richard Tottel that introduced the sonnet form and the work of the poets Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey to the Elizabethans. Shakespeare learned a great deal of his poetic method from Wyatt in particular. One of Wyatt’s best known quotes is:

They flee from me, that sometime did me seke
With naked fote stalking within my chamber.

A modern edition of Tottel’s Miscellany is published by Penguin:
Richard Tottel, Miscellany: Songs and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others, ed. Amanda Holton and Tom MacFaul, London, Penguin, 2011.

A GREAT RESOURCE

Knowledge about Shakespeare is always useful, though the absence of evidence from his personal life has lead to a proliferation of theories and speculations. The following website, managed by the Folger Library in partnership with others such as the Bodleian Library (University of Oxford), makes available a wide range of primary documents.

Shakespeare Documented: https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/

CRITICAL TEXTS

There are many discussions of Shakespeare’s work in general and individual plays in particular. The edition of the play you use will offer a bibliography and your local library may have its own selection. I suggest two books. The collection of new critical essays brings together some of the recent critical work that has led to a re-thinking of the importance of the play in the Shakespeare canon not least because it recognizes the centrality to the play of the two wives rather than seeing it simply as an additional riff on Falstaff. And the book on popular culture helps us to understand the English-ness of the play and its use of pagan beliefs.

Evelyn Gajowski and Phyllis Rackin, eds., The Merry Wives of Windsor: New critical essays, London, Routledge, 2015.
Mary Ellen Lamb, The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, London, Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 2, 2006.
George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, first published in 1589 by Richard Field, now available as a public domain e-book.
Clare Colebrook, Irony, London, Routledge, 2004.
D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic, 2nd edition, London and New York, Methuen, 1970 &1982.

The critical texts are expensive and local libraries are not guaranteed to have them. I have copies of the three mentioned above, as well as of the Arden and RSC editions, and members of the cast and crew are welcome to consult them.

/by

Merry Wives and the Sonnets

 

In Sonnet 129 Shakespeare explores the theme:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight:
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

 One of the aesthetic tensions in Merry Wives is between the deceptive unrest of Falstaff in his pursuit of the two women, and the self-destructive unrest of Master Ford’s jealous obsession with his wife’s imagined unfaithfulness.

This high tensile unrest is one of the central features of the sonnets written, supposedly, to Shakespeare’s Dark Lady. It is something that Shakespeare never tired of, the way all those complex rationalizations, emotional thrusts, understandings and misunderstandings work together to create human interaction and its treatment in art.

Here are two of the Dark Lady sonnets that take us right to the heart of perception and deception, to the point where the impact of love and of sexual desire is to distort our perception of the truth and even the truth itself.

Sonnet 137

Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.
If eyes corrupt by over-partial looks
Be anchor’d in the bay where all men ride,
Why of eyes’ falsehood hast thou forged hooks,
Whereto the judgment of my heart is tied?
Why should my heart think that a several plot
Which my heart knows the wide world’s common place?
Or mine eyes seeing this, say this is not,
To put fair truth upon so foul a face?
In things right true my heart and eyes have erred,
And to this false plague are they now transferr’d. 

Sonnet 138

When my love swears that she is made of truth
I do believe her, though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutor’d youth,
Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppress’d.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.

/by

Herne The Hunter and the Fairies

In the fifth act of Merry Wives the play turns into a carnival of English folklore. The children of the town, with Sir Hugh as their coach and Mistress Quickly as the Faerie Queen, become fairies who torment Falstaff as punishment for his lust-fueled pursuit of two of Windsor’s upstanding middle-class wives. The only other play in which fairies feature so prominently is A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where their role is somewhat different, though comparably dark. Falstaff himself, at the suggestion of the Windsor wives, is dressed as a character in English pagan mythology, Herne the Hunter. With horns on his head he suffers the fate that Master Ford imagined for himself: a cuckold – traditionally wearing horns – being physically tortured and publicly humiliated. He is removed from the town, which embodies the values of rationality and moral certainty, to the country, in which the bestial forces of desire and greed are exposed. As Mistress Page says to her husband: “Do not these fair yokes / Become the forest better than the town?” (5.5.103-4)

It is interesting that for the wives there is no doubt, not even a shred of superstitious emotional doubt, that the stories of Herne and fairies have no reality in their town lives. Falstaff, on the other hand, willfully gives himself up to playing the buck, a bestial version of his self-image, and confesses to a fear that the fairies are real.

Mary Ellen Lamb, in her book The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, (see Critical Texts) discusses the plot hatched by the merry wives to deal publicly with the difficult position Falstaff has put them in. I do not agree with everything Lamb says, especially her use of the term ‘sort’ to replace ‘class’, as in ‘middling sort’ and ‘lower sort’. But she takes us into a territory that is is not often discussed fully in editions of the play. Here are some of the things she says in the section “Old wives’ tales” on Merry Wives:

“As Mistress Page turns to the tale of Herne the Hunter as a means of conning Falstaff into one last assignation, she first expertly enacts the role of storyteller, and then rejects that role as she carefully delineates her social and intellectual differences from its earlier tellers:

MRS. PAGE
There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest
Doth all the winter time at still midnight
Walk round about an oak with great ragg’d horns;
And then he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle’
And makes the milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know,
The superstitious, idle-headed eld
Received, and did deliver to our age,
This tale of Herne the Hunter for a truth. (4.4.26-36)

The first seven lines of this passage weave a spell of pleasurable terror that is the essence of ghost stories. Especially thrilling is the detail that he “makes the milch-kine yield blood.” Then, as if catching herself, she addresses the group as would a commentator or an early sociologist rather than as a participant in this oral tradition. Her description affords little respect to those who transmitted this tale: they were “eld,” and the association with “eld” and “idle-headed” suggests senility. Rather than creators, they were merely transmitters, receiving and then delivering the narrative without any inventions of their own. Most damning, they were ignorant enough to believe this tale “for a truth.” This representation implies the superiority of Mistress Page and her audience, consisting of the Pages, the Fords, and Hugh Evans. Unlike the “eld” they are youthful and modern. Rather than superstitious and idle-headed, they are rational pragmatists, their minds laboring with useful schemes, their feet firmly on the ground, and never so foolish as to believe the tale of Herne the hunter. Mistress Page’s confident knowledge that the “eld” truly believed this tale itself exposes her alienation from these traditional storytellers. Their level of credulity is impossible to determine, since conveying a sense of the veracity of ghost stories, no matter how fantastic, was a convention designed to elicit a frisson from listeners.

This supposed belief in absurd superstition is not limited to the “idle headed eld.” “Many” still act as if they accept these stories. As Mr. Page observes, “Why, yet there want not many that do fear / In deep of night to walk by this Herne’s Oak” (4.4.37-8). Who are these ignorant souls who still fear, or pretend to fear, a walk by Herne’s Oak at midnight? And who would have told this old tale to Mistress Page? Her most apparent contact with such a low narrator would have been through unnamed women of a lower sort, women such as Mistress Quickly, who could tell a tale even of the wart over Fenton’s eyebrow, and the fat woman of Brentford, who traded in superstitions and the fears they elicited. It was to these old wives to whom such superstitious tales, in their rough and unedited form, in some sense, most belonged. The source of Mistress Page’s alienation would seem then to be social as well as intellectual, directed toward a low aesthetic circulated by the allegedly ignorant poor. The unlike treatment of Mistresses Quickly and Brentford suggests conflicting relationships among the middling sort to the oral tales traditionally performed by old wives in front of a winter’s fire. While neither woman earned respect, the old woman of Brentford, in the person of Falstaff, was beaten as an outsider, while Mistress Quickly was readily absorbed into the citizen enactment of this tale as the fairy queen herself. However much she rendered herself of practical use to the citizens of Windsor, Mistress Quickly yet retained an identification with the low – as did tales of Herne the hunter and fairies.

Fairies

…..the charivari staged in Merry Wives is far removed from the boisterous event described in historical accounts. It is uniquely bourgeois. Windsor has tamed the traditionally course charivari into a children’s performance, staged before the gaze of proud and indulgent parents. There is no charivari on record that mentions any participants costumed as fairies. Children were never featured as participants. This strikingly unusual adaptation reveals not only the homogenization of popular culture, through which very different practices become mingled under one category of the “low”, but also an urge to create roles appropriate to children. The community takes their children’s achievements seriously. To sing and dance together and on cue, they must attend rehearsals conducted by their schoolmaster and parson Hugh Evans for, as Mr. Ford remarks, “The children must be / Practiced well to this, or they’ll ne’er do’t” 4.5.63-4). Just before their performance, Evans’ direction conveys his tension that they might fall short of a polished performance: “Trib, trib fairies! Come! And remember your parts.” The reluctance of the children to project their voices motivates his anxious direction to “Be bold, I pray you.” They must watch him for cues: “Follow me into the pit, and when I give the watch-ords, do as I pid you. Come, come; trib, Trib!” (5.4.1-3), This degree of stage anxiety – or indeed any stage anxiety at all – is utterly foreign to accounts of charivaris, loud and rowdy affairs conducted by adults intending to shame, not to impress. Creating rough music by banging utensils on pans did not require watching for cues from a conductor. This citizen intervention in the concept of charivari foregrounds the importance of well-trained children in the self-narratives of the middling sort. As the children burn Falstaff’s fingers with tapers and turn him about, they dance and sing in what emerges as an uncannily graceful performance of torture. As their discipline of Falstaff’s “sinful fantasy” surely impresses in their memories the absolute necessity for sexual chastity, it also subordinates his very real pain to the demands of the aesthetic. The children’s role in the charivari not only validates the imposition of physical harm on anyone, whether vagrant or knight, who violates the moral norms of Windsor; it also teaches them that this pain does not matter.”

Lamb goes on to compare this fairy performance with the kind of masque that might have been staged before an aristocratic audience. It is an interesting exploration of the distinctions in popular culture in the Elizabethan and Stuart theater. It reminds me that one of the things that Shakespeare does extraordinarily – and radically – well is to bring together the tone and method of literary drama, tragedy or comedy, with popular entertainment. And it reminds me of how well he listened to the way ordinary people spoke to each other in pairs or in groups.

/by