Feral in Windsor

Does The Merry Wives of Windsor configure as a farce, which is to say its characters and action are stylised as cartoons, the end being to prompt hilarity untouched by more complex response?

It is true the play has an almost widdershins pace in presenting its situations with extravagant confusions, outlandish disguises, a hectic plot. There are escapes from the “bedroom”, duckings in the river, beatings, pinchings and scorchings. A duel is called but remains unfought through mismanagement. The two wives, Ford and Page, are indeed merry in their ruses and govern the main impetus of the play’s action with the exception of one reversal. There is hilarity from the language itself, whether it is Falstaff flaunting his eloquence or Parson Evans, Doctor Caius and Mistress Quickly mangling their consonants. We meet archetypes such as the gormless lover, Slender, the sanguine humour of Master Page or the choleric-melancholy mix of Master Ford or the child William, cleverer than his teacher and his parent. Here is a comedy close to home (set with considerable geographical exactness in the environs of Windsor—Frogmore, Eton, Datchet Mead) with temporal reference to contemporary anecdote and gossip.

Yet there runs through the play a more searching meditation and sensibility than is usually found in farce, and this gathers about its leading character, Falstaff. Abundantly sociable, reflexively self- preoccupied, these contradictory aspects of the knight’s intelligence give his presence an elemental character, one that is in conflict with the Puritan spirit as personified by Ford and Page and which is subject to an exorcism in the final scene of the play at Herne’s Oak. That is to say, the comic characterisations overlap the individualities of the knight and the two merry furies to partake of the spiritual and political tension of late Tudor times. The humiliations visited upon Sir John in the park in Act V have a punitive and ritual thoroughgoing that exceeds farcical lightness to make our fun uneasy. Here is a fat man who excites both our affection and our sneers, who gets excessively downtrodden for his sins, and it is plainly his gross physiology as much as his misbehaviour that draws the vindictiveness from those who entrap him.

The play opens in medias res. Justice Shallow is much aggrieved with Falstaff and retinue for debts, burglaries, poaching and rough-house practised against him and his household, these offences belonging to the foreplay. In these opening exchanges between the justice, Slender and Parson Evans, the knight’s presence is invoked prior to his appearance. Falstaff is an anticipated presence, and the effect is to centre interest in him from the very opening lines.

Let me dwell on this anticipation for a moment, for charisma has attended Sir John’s presence prior to curtain-rise. The Tudor audience arrived at the theatre with knowledge of his rascally reputation from two immediately previous plays, namely the histories, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2. One tradition tells that Elizabeth I, so enjoying the character of Falstaff, directed there be a further play about him where he is portrayed “in love”, whereupon Shakespeare composed this comedy in a fortnight to satisfy the royal directive. The tradition is dubious, originating more than a century after the 1597 first performance, but it is also not required to establish the loom of Falstaff’s person before Shakespeare’s inner eye over the course of his composing the four plays in which he figures.

For it is one thing to consider Falstaff from Shakespeare’s resolved text, to which each actor will bring an expressive version as suits each distinct play, another to infer the pressure of a particularly energised figure in the playwright’s phantasia as it unfolds across a larger, untidier conception of character in several plays. To illustrate this, one might quiz the text biographically … If we know Falstaff was a highwayman at Gad’s Hill, present at the battle of Shrewsbury (1403) and the arrest of the rebel leaders at Gaultree Forest, as told in the two histories, when exactly do these events of Windsor take place in his life-story insofar as Shakespeare’s phantasia of the man’s existence pictures them?

They can be pinpointed, for we know he comes to The Merry Wives of Windsor directly from Act V of Henry IV Part 2. Released from military service, he and his three companions, Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, travel into Gloucestershire to be entertained by Justice Shallow. While they are inspecting Shallow’s orchard, news arrives of the succession of Prince Hal to the throne at his father’s death, prompting Falstaff and retinue to depart for London to attend the coronation procession. So the adventures in Windsor occur in the interlude of these two scenes of Act V in Henry IV Part 2, those between Falstaff’s quitting Shallow’s orchard and arriving on the London street to be so brutally rebuffed by Henry V as he rides by.

This means that The Merry Wives of Windsor is an island of comedy with a pageant of English history on either side of its action. Certainly the comedy takes trouble to locate itself as contemporary with “the wild Prince and Poins” when the canny Master Page guards his fortune against Fenton (III.ii.68–9), yet it is as if, at the level of the phantasia, Shakespeare unpicks a thread in his Plantagenet chronicle, adds a self-contained episode of Sir John’s colourful life into his conception of the man (one perhaps that touches ironically on his “being in love” while leaving him unscathed by actual passion because such a vulnerability would be to disarrange his pathos), then rejoins the fabric of the history that will take the knight to his deathbed offstage, Hal’s repudiation of him having crushed that rambunctious morale to precipitate his decline, as Mistress Quickly will recount in Henry V (II.i.91).

At the commencement of The Merry Wives, Falstaff’s morale is still vibrant. Deftly upon his first appearance he deals with the grievances of Shallow and Slender:

Falstaff: Now Master Shallow, you’ll complain of me to the king?

Shallow: Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.

Falstaff: But not kissed your keeper’s daughter?

Shallow: Tut, a pin! This shall be answered.

Falstaff: I will answer it straight. I have done all this. That is now answered.

(I.i.107–114)

In a moment he has seized the justice’s role by interrogating his own henchmen, his defence of them provocative, the dismissal of charges brazen. “You hear all these matters denied, gentlemen, you hear it” (I.i.180). And in the next moment he has kissed and made court to Mistress Ford.

For Falstaff’s genius, in this play and its predecessors, lies in being able to breed attitudes that answer to the immediate. His hope here is to appear loveable to the two merry wives, Mistresses Page and Ford, in order to win them adulterously and so repair his fortunes with their wealth, for each lady “has the rule of her husband’s purse”. His approach, an identical billet doux to both, is charmingly direct and peculiarly dim, and it must be said that, for all his wiliness, he is also credulous and susceptible to entrapment.

But Eros is entirely absent from his courtship and the vulnerability of his person is of another kind from the lovelorn. Part of the man’s appeal lies in his being able to conjure his physical self so voluptuously and make this endeared relationship with his own body collude with his desires, as here where he schemes to seduce Mistresses Ford and Page:

O she did so course o’er my exteriors with such a greedy intention that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning-glass … She bears the purse too. She is a region of Guiana, all gold and bounty. I will be cheater to them both, and they shall be exchequers to me. They shall be my East and West Indies and I will trade to them both.
(I.iii.64–71)

Falstaff’s rank allows him some authority over Pistol, Bardolph and Nym, but he can command no loyalty and has no friends. Instead he attracts relentless insult for his physical grossness and this makes his self-fondness all the more poignant. The malignity is twofold in its object, I suggest. It draws equivalence between his corpulence and his devilry. And it illumines a Puritan disenchantment with Nature as a chaotic system. “We two will still be the Ministers” (IV.ii.215)—Mistress Ford gives assurance to the parties there will be organisation as they plan Sir John’s third humiliation in the woods.

I’ll return to this identification of Falstaff with Nature presently, but first will note how his character gains definition by the characters of those around him, Slender and Pistol in particular. Falstaff and Slender are cast as obvious counterpoints, the one plump, eloquent, large and confident in his presence, the other meagre, shrinking, gormless. Falstaff woos boldly, adulterously, suffers for it, then recovers his morale. Slender woos timidly, chastely, ineffectually, remains small. The effect of the contrast is to swell the vigour and resilience of Sir John’s presence.

The contrast with Pistol makes a finer point. Falstaff’s “ancient” can adopt attitude as reflexively as his master, for all he sees the knight as a “dunghill”. Pistol has the soldier’s mindfulness that one part of his presence is inalienable from his weapon. When Falstaff enlists him to take a message to Mistress Ford he declares:

Shall I Sir Pandarus of Troy become,

And my side wear steel? Then Lucifer take all!

(I.iii.75–6)

Pistol espouses the devil’s party, and exhorts Sir John to liaisons knowing he has already betrayed the would-be philanderer to the husbands. While he has some justifiable resentment against his master for dismissal, his attendance on Falstaff reminds us that Falstaff is not vicious, while Pistol is both vicious and nihilist. Take his fantasy of courtship with Mistress Quickly (his future wife) where the bravura of the speech discloses the brute of the lover:

This punk is one of Cupid’s carriers. Clap on more sails; pursue; up with your fights; Give fire! She is my prize or ocean whelm them all!
(II.ii. 135–7)

By contrast, Falstaff, needing means, applies his wit to their acquisition, opportune as a fox applying cunning to the chicken coop. This is feral behaviour as opposed to brute, answering to neediness not a savouring of cruelty. For what is behaviour in the state-of-nature if not unmediated appetite, opportunism, a genius to adapt to circumstances as they are. Certainly the knight prepares himself to enjoy the company of the two wives for all his assignations are frustrated; the man relishes all company across the three plays where he has stage presence, his intelligence—his quick—being entirely self-centred no matter who this company is. Company is Falstaff’s habitat, and the fineness of the Shakespearean depiction of this lies in how this quite feral self-interest unfailingly draws our affection from its very outrageousness.

Falstaff: What made me love thee? … I cannot cog and say thou art this and that … I cannot. But I love thee, none but thee, and thou deserv’st it.

Mrs Ford: Do not betray me sir. I fear you love Mistress Page.

And in the next moment he is being both bundled into the basket of soiled laundry and confronted by the veritable Mistress Page with his identical billet doux. He manages as he can, responsive as nature affords.

Mrs Page: Are these your letters, knight?

 Falstaff: I love thee. Help me away.
(III.iii.137-8)

Does one call this “conduct”? Hardly. But Nature lies in the fluidity of its situations, so response must issue from a fluid moral character, turning disadvantage to advantage, opportunity to niche. Thus does a genius in breeding attitude become a survival attribute.

Like the Tudors who first watched this play, we have our anticipation of Falstaff that he will be a notorious amorality; he will thieve, lie, glutton, booze, cajole, traduce, and he possesses the wiliest eye for advantage in Shakespeare. Yet he remains ambivalently loveable to us in the very opportunism of his relationships and the mischief these bring, a mischief redounding usually upon his own person. For while his reputation is marked as luxurious, his situation is in fact usually penury and accords with the natural state in that. To say his presence dominates the play does not diminish the two wives’ control of most of the action. Successfully they thwart the seducer’s gold-digging and their menfolk’s suspicion. But his domination of the play is to identify uncomfortably the ambivalence of our fun in his discovery. Look, here is the fat man, watch for the high jinks. For Falstaff does not appeal as a leading man in any heroic sense; as audience, we do not hope he will win through. We recognise that his schemes to lure gold from the wives deserve being confounded; the dunking and drubbing are fair.

But after husbands and wives are reconciled, the plans laid for Falstaff’s third humiliation at Herne Oak “to make us public sport”, are simple entrapment as their victim recognises when, post-facto, he calls them “gross o’erreaching”. With its invocation of Jove and his ravishments, and the faery of the disguised children, the removal from Windsor Town to Windsor Park for this third temptation of the man takes the plot of The Merry Wives from a social milieu to sub-magical forest. Raw nature is the arena for unbridled lust and ravening opportunity such as Falstaff has shown in his pursuit of interest on his own behalf and Brooke’s. Love has been pursued impurely and cynically during the course of the play and it is fitting that impurity be exorcised beside Herne’s Oak with cuckold horns, invocations of Jove’s own amatory violations, and a Puritan vehemence, as Mistress Page prepares us:

Against such lewdsters and their lechery,

Those that betray them do no treachery. (V.iii.22–3)

So the “lewdster” is cozened, Puritan mind triumphs over raffish, opportunist Nature. But The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy and accordingly its conclusion is upbeat. Anne Page and Fenton marry, their candid affection defeating the Puritan party’s own cynical contrivances to arrange her match. An equilibrium is established, ending the play in a concord that will indulge appetite as the company go from the forest to Page’s table, Falstaff welcomed back into their society.

One motif in this play, intriguing and persistent from its opening scene to its last, is a self-consciousness in the usage of the English language itself. The play’s people assess their own eloquence as a comic tension that is played between exuberant and mangled expression. Falstaff has eloquence. Parson Evans, Doctor Caius and Mistress Quickly variously mangle their expression. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, usage itself is on exhibition, and there is a similar flaunt in the verbal music of this play, bandied for instance in the legalisms of its opening lines, “Peace and Coram … Custalorum … Ay and Ratalorum too.” Later, when Nym informs on his master to Ford, Page observes of Nym’s colloquiality, “here’s a fellow frights English out of his wits”. Assessing Mistress Ford, Falstaff says her ambition is to be “Englished rightly”, and by yielding to him this might occur. It is a brave attempt to give pro patria virtue to his intended mischief, and a poke at the more solemn patriotism in the History plays. But it also emphasises an intended Englishness of this play, contained in its title, in its familiar place-names and gossip, and the highlighting of the language itself by foreign distortions of it. And it identifies Falstaff, in all his large, impure person, with that patria. Even late in the play, pinched and scorched, he still can manage indignant protest at Evans’s Welsh barbarisms:

Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English? This is enough to be the decay of lust and late-walking through the realm.

(V.v.146–9)

The unease in our fun is that we enjoy the presence of Falstaff before us, delight in the spontaneity with which he empowers his eloquence and by which he confounds plodding. But this does not prompt us to wish him spared. Here is a nature, outside moral consideration, taking whatever resource of wit and language is to hand for its best prospect, self-absorbed but bounteously so, like Nature itself. Part of his presence in The Merry Wives of Windsor lies in our knowledge that he exists both within this comic play and outside it in the pageant of English history, and will inevitably speak up best when on his own behalf.

I would all the world might be cozened, for I have been cozened and beaten too. If it should come to the ear of court how I have been transformed, and how my transformation hath been washed and cudgelled, they would melt me out of my fat drop by drop, and liquor fishermen’s boots with me. I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits till I was as crestfall’n as a dried pear. I never prospered since I foreswore myself at primero. Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent.

(IV.v.92–102)