The Merry Readers of Windsor

A few months ago we decided as a book club that we’d pre-choose our last play. We had a few guidelines:

• We wanted it to be new, so nothing any of us had read before.
• It had to be a comedy. If we’d ended on Titus Andronicus, we may have spent most of our reunion angry and bitter.
• We really wanted a good one. All’s Well That Ends Well would not have left us on a happy note.

With those parameters set, we all agreed on The Merry Wives of Windsor. While a little concerned by the presence of the ever-obnoxious Falstaff, we decided it was worth the gamble.

Mistress Ford (Heidi Kettenring) and Mistress Page (Kelli Fox) from Chicago Shakespeare Theater

Merry Wives didn’t disappoint. It’s a fun, lighthearted play, made even better in light of Shakespeare’s entire canon. Perhaps we’d appreciate any last play because of the ability to compare and contrast it with the others; yet this one especially seemed significant because it addresses the same themes and issues seen throughout the canon, but with a much different approach and outcome.

Themes of revenge, jealousy, adultery, and marriage are all covered in Merry Wives, just as in other plays. Like in Cymbeline and Othello, jealousy and assumed adultery go hand in hand. Revenge is constantly discussed, as in plays like Othello and Merchant of Venice. Marriage without the parents’ consent, reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, provides the Anne subplot. The issues are hardly new.

Yet Merry Wives doesn’t feel like Othello, Cymbeline, Merchant of Venice, or Romeo and Juliet. The stakes aren’t so high, and as a reader or listener, you can feel the ease of tension. In most of our former plays, whether comedy or romance or tragedy, the threat of death hung over characters like an ever-present fog. Jealousy almost always resulted in a murder attempt, broken relationships, or suicide. Unblessed marriage resulted in pain, suffering, or suicide. Revenge ended in humiliation or death. In the tale of Windsor, however, death is never an option. Falstaff is disciplined, but not in any permanent way. Slender and Doctor Caius are humiliated, but with no real lasting harm. We feel the freedom to relax and enjoy ourselves. What’s more, the play ends in a true unity rarely seen in Shakespeare’s plays. Even in comedies like Much Ado About Nothing, at least one character ends disgraced or something doesn’t feel quite right. This unresolved feeling is completely absent from Merry Wives.

I believe part of the reason for these differences in Merry Wives (if not the entire reason) is that this play deals with the middle-class, the average people who are never given the spotlight in Shakespeare’s other plays. The histories and tragedies naturally featured political and military leaders, and consequently they dealt with much greater problems with much greater effects. Yet in Merry Wives the cast is on the fringes of both the lowest and highest classes, so their problems aren’t nearly as great. As one of our BBC members pointed out, the characters in this play are part of a normal society, and in a normal society you need to follow societal standards in order to survive. Differences must be resolved, people forgiven, and revenge proportionate to the crime. Individuals must embrace unity for the good of the community.

The society’s togetherness is demonstrated through the language of the play as well. For most of Merry Wives, the language is scarred by malapropisms and horrible accents. We rarely see verse, much less perfect iambic pentameter. Then, as the action comes to a head in the final revenge scene, the speech becomes perfectly clear and poetic. The characters can suddenly dance and sing and speak beautifully. They accomplish something that no other Shakespeare cast has done—they have performed a perfect play-within-a-play in their Herne’s Oak deception. Moreover, while in other plays language mainly disassociated the upper class from the lower class and never reconciled, in this play we see the verbal disconnection pushed aside. The foreigners are embraced as part of the community when they take part in the final ruse. The Fords’ marriage is saved by clear communication, while usually we’d expect it to be ruined by a lack thereof. For once, a daughter and son-in-law’s pleas for mercy actually move hearts, and the Fords accept Anne’s marriage. It’s through words that the society is saved. As everyone is brought together in unity, it’s only fitting that their speech becomes unclouded as well.

It’s this unity that sets The Merry Wives of Windsor apart. In this play, balance is restored. Falstaff will not attempt to steal a man’s wife again. Ford trusts his wife completely. Anne has married the man whom she has chosen, and no one is fighting over her anymore. Everyone is invited to the celebrations, and life can move forward. As Mistress Page says,

Good husband, let us every one go home,
And laugh this sport o’er by the country fire;
Sir John and all. (V.v.246-248)

It’s bittersweet, really. As we ended our discussion, I couldn’t help but think how fitting it was that we end with a play about unity. Even if we don’t live in Windsor, our shared experiences have knit the four of us closely together. We’ve established rules, showed grace, laughed, and even feasted together. The end of The Merry Wives of Windsor hints that life will continue, and friendship will last. I believe that’s true for us, as well.

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Love’s Labor’s Lost, along with the need for those handy plot-mapping worksheets we had in elementary school

Due to the travails of the holiday season, the four of us met a little late to talk about this play. We were due to finish reading the play on Christmas Eve. Typically, we discuss by the end of the week, but what with visiting families, road trips, and New Year’s Eve parties, we couldn’t find a time until three weeks after we supposedly finished. As it was, I read up to Act IV, Scene 3 before Christmas… and then read the rest the day before we met. Thus, I had a difficult time picking out particularly interesting bits from this one, but I’ll do my best.

During that last reading session—amidst the seemingly endless dialogue about who loves whom, my sidelined pondering about how I should feel about the treatment of women in the play, and the realization that very few significant events have taken place and I’m nearly to the end of the play—a frightening thought crossed my mind.  I hope that this play wasn’t the Twilight of the early seventeenth century. Wouldn’t that be terrible? That we revere as a father of the English language a man who produced something akin to poorly-written, misogynistic teenage vampire literature? And we think it’s great now merely because he uses words like “sirrah” and “i'” (short for “in,” of course)?

In order to say and write something sensible about this work, I’ll just have to suspend my doubts. All four of us agreed that there isn’t much plot. We could summarize what actually happens somewhat like this:

1. King and three buddies take rather unreasonable oath not to do anything fun, including sleep, and just study for three years.
2. Uh-oh! Princess and her three friends arrive to see king (sadly, must camp outside as they aren’t allowed in the court due to oath).
3. All four men fall in love with all four women but are embarrassed about it in front of each other and also (very slightly) perturbed that they took an oath not to have anything to do with women for four years.
4. Men say, “Tough!” to oath and decide to woo women.
5. Women will have nothing to do with it, but men keep trying.
6. Princess’s father dies and her whole party must go back to France. Women tell men that if they’re good for a year, they have a chance.

I’m not leaving a lot out. Here is much the same thing written into a plot diagram. Note that I didn’t run out of boxes.

I just realized that I left the “conflict” box (oval, rather) empty. I won’t fix it now, though, because it is difficult to get words to fit right in Paint. Use your intelligence, or, if that fails, your imagination.

The point is: if we decide that Shakespeare is actually an at least passable writer, why would he write an entire play that could be told in the space of  a children’s board book? The key to answering this question lies in all that stuff that makes the play look like it’s substantive: all those words.

Language is a huge part of this play. Liz remarked that we might have gotten more out of it had we seen rather than read it, and I think that’s true. Of course, as twenty-first-century readers, we understand more when we read out of our annotated editions, but it seems that the vast majority of the play consists of witty banter that is best perceived and appreciated when spoken. Almost every character is full of words, insults, and retorts, with the exception of some very minor characters like Dull and Mote; even Costard the clown has a surprising store of puns and euphemisms. This constant play with words gives the illusion that something is actually happening in the play, which, as we reviewed, isn’t true. There are some categories of banter according to who is providing it. The men are often insensitive; Holofernes and Nathaniel use it to exclude; and the women tend to be encouraging but will bite back when necessary. Especially visible in the women’s use, Shakespeare implies that language, no matter how brilliant or flourishing, isn’t always good. Biron (as spelled in my edition but more commonly as “Berowne”), the most vicious of the men with his words, has a special penance to pay in order to win Rosaline: while the others must merely wait a year in solitude, Biron must spend his year with hospital patients—clearly not an appropriate venue for his degrading sort of wit. When he learns to use his speech with conscience and kindness, he will make a suitable groom.

The case of Holofernes and Nathaniel provides another angle of the language/action issue. Until the end, these two literally don’t do anything. Biron can at least say that he’s written some poems, spied on his friends, etc., but the pedants do nothing but talk (and, for the most part, I can’t remember anything they talk about). Anne Barton, in her introduction to the play in the Riverside edition of Shakespeare’s works, points out that Holofernes is the end result of what the king wants to do at the beginning of the play, that is, study almost without ceasing. Holofernes has a great deal of knowledge, certainly, but he can hardly relate to anyone but the almost-as-learned curate and seems to have no hobbies or, for that matter, joy. I can’t imagine what sort of woman would want to marry him, either. With this example, the play suggests that loving learning and especially loving language so much that it excludes everything else reaps the reward of a life void of many very important things: family, true friendship, and charity, to name a few.

To get back to the original point—why hardly anything happens in Love’s Labor’s Lost—if we consider the relationship between the lack of the plot and the proliferation of dialogue, we see that it comments on our tendency to cover up voids, especially voids of our own making. There are a few voids that I see in this play, the least of which is the very real space between the king’s court and the princess’s tent. We can infer a void in the original oath: surely if the king and his men had something better to do—say, spend time with their wives and children—they wouldn’t want to give all that up for three years. The men’s love also reveals itself as empty when they go to court the women. None realize that the women have switched favors and are talking to the wrong man, and I would suspect a person genuinely in love to recognize the voice of his or her paramour and to have some idea of what he or she looks like even without the face. But they think they’re doing okay in part because they have fancy speeches and declarations of love to win the ladies; never mind which lady, as such words should work equally well on each of them. Shakespeare invites us to compare these interchangeable vows with the women’s descriptions of what each of the men is like at the beginning of Act II. When substance is lacking, humans often talk to fill up the space and make it look real. The whole play, in a sense, has been lacking, and that is perhaps the reason that this comedy ends with an unusually marriage-free resolution.

Next week we will take a look at Hamlet, a play so full of everything that we may not know where to start.

As an item of interest related only loosely to this post, I searched in vain for a plot diagram of Twilight. How can no one have done that yet? (I am not going to; sorry.) But I did find a diagram on someone’s blog that includes the binary of comedy/tragedy (pertinent to Shakespeare and thus pertinent to this blog). Clicking on it goes to the blog from whence it came. I did not read more than two paragraphs of the “essay” because it seemed to take Twilight as literature.

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