Customer Reviews

The Merry Wives of Windsor: The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford World's Classics)

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One cannot do much better than the Oxford World Classics series for reading copies of Shakespeare's plays. The Oxford edition of 'Merry Wives' is especially satisfactory; Craik provides voluminous notes, which, especially those dealing with textual and linguistic issues, are excellent. An entire appendix is devoted to the issues surrounding the word 'luces' in Act I, and the lengthy introduction is very good reading. This is par for the course for the Oxford series.

As a play, 'Merry Wives' has never captured me; the humour often, though not always falls flat, the plot, though it is masterfully constructed (we can hardly expect anything else from Shakespeare in 1596ish) strikes me as trivial and banal compared to a masterpiece like 'Twelfth Night', and the characters of Evans and Caius seem to me more irritating than laughable. My low opinion of the play cannot have been bettered by the one ghastly production I have seen of 'Wives', in which half the characters were represented by oversize puppets; indeed, the play's sheer insubstantiality seems apt to lend itself to such vapid devices. Still, if you are embarking on a read through the entirety of Shakespeare's oeuvre, or are approaching the play for any other reason, the Oxford World Classics edition is an ideal choice.

Sir John Falstaff, the fat inveterate rogue, is surely the most enduring and best-known of Shakespeare's comic characters. A boaster, a corrupter of youth, a petty scoundrel at best, a coward besides, Falstaff is nevertheless the most "human' of characters in the two history plays, Henry IV and Heny V, where he first appears. Many a reader has felt his/her heart go out to the pitiable old lard-bucket when that cold opportunist "Hal" spurns his old friend. Odious as Falstaff is from any respectable point of view, "we" all love him, don't we? Honestly? And don't we secretly wish, at least once, to see him triumph over the lords of propriety?

Triumph is not his lot in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", where he is dumped in the river with a load of smelly laundry, beaten in the street, pinched and humiliated by children. Rather rough treatment for a 'character' who must be over 200 years old, having 'survived' from the reign of Henry IV to that of Elizabeth I ! There is a persistent legend that Queen Elizabeth commissioned Shakespeare to write a play in which Falstaff would be caught falling in love; the claim is that Falstaff was the Queen's favorite figure of drama. Whether that legend is true or not, it's very obvious that "Merry Wives" was intended for a sophisticated audience. For a work of bawdy slapstick, it's a remarkably intellectual comedy, replete with puns and allusions that only people of considerable education could have grasped even in Shakespeare's era. The humor of the first scene alone, with its absurdist parody of legal terms and its mockery of the Welsh accent of the character Evans, would take a whole scholarly essay to explicate. It's no wonder that the play is considered "weak" by some modern critics; they just don't get the jokes! And "Merry Wives" is impossible to stage for a modern audience without strenuous adaptation and cuts! People won't laugh at jokes which require footnotes. Frankly, after 400 years of being revered as a classic, "The Merry Wives of Windsor" -- like most of Shakespeare's plays -- is a Pleasure for the few educated readers who can appreciate its wit... and homework for the rest of us. (If you think I'm discounting the "universality" of the Bard, you're correct. Shakespeare wrote for his own time and audience, and most of his plays are meaningful only in the context of an Elizabethan world-view.)

I took out my musty copy of the Complete Works in one volume, which I've had for over half a century now, to re-read "Merry Wives" after watching the opera "Falstaff" by Antonio Salieri. I've reviewed that opera, as well as one production of Giuseppe Verdi's "Falstaff". Both operas extract one story, that of Falstaff's ill-fated wooing of two wealthy wives, from Shakespeare's comedy. That is, they simplify the play, reducing it to elegant slapstick, replacing the poet's "play of words" with the playing of the orchestra. Most modern stagings of the full play, even those that present the full text, give it roughly the same treatment. Inevitably, I suppose! But an edition like this Oxford World's Classic -- with print large enough for aging eyes, with ample notes, and without the stench of mildew -- can make READING "Merry Wives" a laundry basket full of laughs, as it should be.