Morning, everyone. Thanks for coming back to the third lecture in this series that I'm going to talk about, the merry wives of Windsor play. That was a great favourite in the 18th century, probably kind of right at the top of the list of Shakespeare plays for the 18th century, but one which has struggled a bit to find a place in the critical repertoire and in the theatrical repertoire ever since.
Try and talk to both those absences. So on the many wives of Windsor isn't the question that I want to try and focus my discussion on is why Windsor? Let's start, though, first by locating the play in Shakespeare's career. Firstly, obviously, it's got a really clear connexion to Shakespeare's history plays on the reign of Henry, the fourth and the fourth parts, one and two, because it transports their star character, Sir John Falstaff, into a different genre.
So it shares its central character with a major character in those history plays. It's probably therefore connected to the lead day. So perhaps it comes from around 15 '97, 15 Ninety-eight, something like that. So it's in amongst the history plays and comedies that mark this part of Shakespeare's career at the end of the 16th century. One of the things I want to focus on about many wives of Windsor is that it's a kind of bourgeois comedy. It circles around faux staff's antics first.
He's accused of poaching deer. Then the rest of it is in trying to get off with Windsor wives. He's completely unsuccessful, though, he's roundly tricked by two of the wives. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. And in the course of that trickery, the women make the jealous husband, Master Ford. See how one reasonable his behaviour has been. So there's a kind of etiquette to process around Falstaff, but also around masterful at both of those men that seem to have behaved inappropriately.
There's a romantic subplot in which a number of suitors jostle for the hand of the page. She pursues her own courtship of Fenton. Fenton is the person she wants to marry and eventually she does. There's quite a lot of comic scenes and japes that are mentioned as we go through the lecture. If you're someone who finds English with a foreign accent hilarious, you're going to love Merry Wives of Windsor. What I want to say, though, about this play is that basically is on quite a small scale.
A lot of what the play is about, a mundane or ordinary activities, the nickols of married life running a household, the interactions of a small, slightly caricatured community, which in some ways looks a bit like a soap opera, a kind of contained soap opera. And that's the place from which I want to investigate the significance of Windsor.
Firstly, though, I should acknowledge that most of the discussion about Merry Wives has not been about where the play takes place, but about when the priority of time over location has been all about that relation of this play to the history plays. And let's just talk a little bit more about that for a minute. So Falstaff had been the star of two history plays, Henry, the fourth part woman, too.
And it's his popularity, really. That means that we get part two because he is a runaway stage success, much the most popular stage character, Shaikh's Parental Rights, and comes back in a sequel. We might think of Merry Wives as a as another sequel. The title page of the Corto edition of Merry Wives, which is published in 16 02, makes it clear that Falstaff himself is the main attraction so that the name by which we know this play has changed over time.
And the title under which it was first printed in 60 NO2 is a most pleasant and excellent conceited comedy of Sir John Falstaff and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Now, it's a commonplace of historical serial narrative to put the two parts of Henry, the fourth together with Henry, the Fifth, perhaps with Richard, the second affront to produce a narrative of historical and character development.
We might call the Henry out or something like that, a serial which is organised either like of a Jilian epic or like an 18th and 19th century buildings romance, the kind of maturation of the young hero around the kind of testing of a central character, Mary Wykes, that gives us an alternative. In some ways, a more interesting sequence than that slightly clichéd cluster, a sequence that is more like a full stuffy at a sequence organised around Falstaff as a central protagonist.
That's what Verdi does in his opera. Falstaff is will. Also, Welles does, in his Falstaff focussed film on these plays, Chimes at Midnight In. Either of those might be interesting ways to think about how this play connects to the histories. When Prince Howe takes up the crown at the end of Henry, the fourth part two, you may remember that he wanted his first the first action of being a king. The way that he shows that he has repented from his prodigal youth is to banish Falstaff.
Till then, I banish thee on pain of death, as I have done the rest of my misleaders not to come near our person by 10 mile. So Falstaff is literally kind of relocated at the end of the fourth part, too. Windsor is not exactly 10 miles from anywhere. Henry is likely to be unless he's hanging out at Heathrow or High Wickham. But perhaps we don't need to be quite so literal in banishing false stuff from the court. Perhaps King Henry propels him into this provincial comedy.
But relatedly, if Falstaff is alive in the Henry the fourth place and seems the same kind of character here in Merry Wives, should we think that many wives of Windsor takes place in the early 15th century? So I don't think we should. I mean, Falstaff isn't really a historical figure in Henry the Fourth either. Part of what's powerful about him in those history plays is a kind of figure from outside history who doesn't believe in history,
play heroics like fighting and honour. He's a kind of counter to that ideology. So he's a figure, miss, misplaced or displaced, even when he's in a history play. But the transposition of this character into comedy, I think is more generically interesting than its historical meaningful, because to all intents and purposes, Merry Wives of Windsor looks as if it takes place in the contemporary Elizabethan world.
Now, of all Shakespeare's plays, only the induction to The Taming of the Shrew with its references to place names in Warwickshire, seems to take place in contemporary England. Shakespeare doesn't really do contemporary England, and maybe Mary Lives is the one place where he does so. Plans for me is more important than time in locating married wives. I think this is not primarily a historical play, but a topographical one.
Windsor seems then to matter. Let's come at this via a slightly larger view of Shakespeare's sense of place. Most of Shakespeare's plays, as you known, as we've discussed before, follow some preordained shape from written sources quite closely. Most of these sources are originally Italian, but sometimes French romance fiction. Shakespeare sources are not mostly native. And that tells you something about English literature more generally at the time when he's writing.
On many occasions, Shakespeare simply carries forward the location of his plays from the source. So the forest of Auden, sometimes our den in Astrid like it, comes from Thomas Lodge's prose story. Rosalind in the Robert Greene romance behind the Winter's Tale, the same places, Bohemia and Cecillia are the locations of the action. There's Shakespeare has flipped them, perhaps because he thinks hot tempered, jealous loyalty should be in a hot place like Sicily.
This has, of course, brought in area about the seacoast of Bohemia. Sources for the Merchant of Venice give Shakespeare not only the plot of the juice usurer, but also the location and the arguments that Shakespeare must have had to go to Venice for research. A completely bonkers. The author of Merchant of Venice has never been to Venice, nor does he need to.
Apart from the mention of the Rialto Bridge, which is hardly the hallmark of intimate knowledge of the city, there's no local experience here in the play at all, particularly given that everybody who went to Venice in this period was fascinated by the original ghetto. The gated suburb in which Jewish residents were shut up at night. It seems extraordinary that writing a play about how Jews are a darn part of Venice. If you knew about the ghetto, you wouldn't mention.
That is to say, place is fictional in Shakespeare in the literal sense that it comes from fiction, not from experience. Now there are a handful of plays nominally organised around plays, two gentlemen of Verona that are going to be talking about in a couple of weeks, parallelise, Prince of Tyre. If you remember that played on their parities, spends no time really in Tyre at all. That's the point of the play. It's on the moon. Look, it's a kind of picaresque for wandering story.
And Timon of Athens and Matt member time and moves from Athens into a kind of wild place in the second half of the play. The main waves of wings, I think, is different from these other examples in two ways. Firstly, we don't really have any attested major source for many wives of Windsor. So so far as we know, Shakespeare invented largely. And that makes Windsor a kind of invented place, an invented location, which is different from those inherited locations like Ardern or Venice.
And secondly, what's important about this place is its English. So the place, though, doesn't work to fix the play into an exotic or classical location. But then how does it work? It's going to be the exact opposite of exoticism. Is it like saying Scunthorpe or Slough?
This is the part of lecture. I am bound to offend someone. Is it like saying the only way is Winzer or is it something more like Martha's Vineyard or something which has a recognisable social topography or can social demographic, which is less a place and more a kind of demography? There are a couple of immediate contemporaneous associations of Windsor that I want to try and pick up for a minute.
Firstly, the market town of Windsor, Apple, which is, as you probably know, on the River Thames, about 20 miles outside London, the market town of Windsor was probably in decline in the later 16th century, not follows the drying up of the Reformation. Pilgrim Trade of the pre reformation. Pilgrim trade after after the Reformation. Eton next door to Windsor, just across the river, had an important Marian shrine which attracted lots of pilgrims, probably since it's Oxford.
There are lots of people who know that the full name of that school is actually the King's College of Our Lady at Eton, besides Windsor King's College of Our Lady of Eton. I didn't know that. But the Eton Shrine had brought lots of pilgrims tourism to the area around Windsor in the later Middle Ages. This is pretty much stopped by the period of the play. So the bit of this that I think I want to take away is that Windsor might have been a town that had seen better days,
a bit washed up, a bit down on his luck. Now, you might think is a good place for Falstaff, who's also looking a little bit shop soiled. I don't know if there is any relevance of the religious associations, those residual religious associations that Windsor might have had. Of course, Catholic England had its own geography and topography of monasteries and their lands of pilgrims sites and pilgrim roots.
And it's interesting to think how those erased geographies might persist in a kind of cultural memory. Maybe they have a topographical equivalent of the Hugh the Parson in the play whose opening remark is by our lady that invocation of the Virgin, which doesn't fit Protestant thought, but which is still a kind of verbal habit and natural verbal habit for many late 16th century Protestants. Secondly, the connotations of wounds are royal.
There had been a royal palace on this strategically important site on the Thames since the mediaeval period. The parkland was notable for the royal sport of hunting. Was a good place for the court to retreat to in times of plague from London. In London, the chapel at Windsor Castle was the centre of the Order of the Knights of the Garter. The Order of the Garter is a it's hard to really know what it is, but it's a royal honour anyway.
And there's long been an attempt to connect Mary Wines with some sort of garter installation ceremony. The taffin in the play is called The Garter. And at the end of many wives, Mr it quickly commands her fairies, who as will see our schoolboys in disguise to search Windsor Castle owls within and out. Now this association with royalty that attaches itself to Windsor is an interesting part of the play's ongoing reception that first quarto publication of Merry Wives in 60.
NO2 has royal performance associations as it has been diverse times acted by the Right Honourable, My Lord Chamberlain's servants before, both before Her Majesty and elsewhere. This performance claim is dropped when the play is republished in 16 19. Now, it is not the first of Shakespeare's plays to make this claim in print or to make royal performance part of its marketing strategy.
Love's Labour's Lost. Printed in 50, Ninety-eight also claims a royal performance and the quarto of King Lear in 60 No.8 records a Christmas performance before James the first. This information of title pages is all really easily available on the excellent Folger Library site, which is called a Shakespeare Documented dot org. Shakespeare documented dot org. It reproduces in digital facsimile.
All the documentary records relating to Shakespeare's theatre, including a title page of every extant edition. Now my wife has a crew, lots of royal associations, most notably following the early 18th century. Ed and Shakespeare. Biographer Nicholas. Row Row asserted.
We don't have any other evidence for this that the Queen was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry the forth that she commanded him to continue it for one play and more and to show up in love. Falstaff is not going to go to see. Falstaff is not really in love in many ways of Windsor. But this is the sort of unlikely it's unlikely to be true in a literal sense.
But of course, it's true in a sense of the kind of myths and stories we have wanted to tell ourselves about Shakespeare. I think Rose anecdote about Mary wives being written on Queen Elizabeth's commission speaks to a long fascination with potential encounters between Elizabeth and Shakespeare, which have animated a long kind of creative fiction which interweaves the two in the 18th century.
The forger, William Henry Ireland, forged a letter purportedly from Elizabeth thanking Shakespeare for his pretty verses. And we can see that the charge that the desire for it to be true, that Shakespearean is both intimate in some way, right through to the encounter between them in the form of Shakespeare in Love. So Windsor then has a really prominent association with royalty. But what I want to talk about, about the place, the way it pulls significantly in the opposite demographic direction.
What seems most important about the play now is less that it might have been written at the command of the queen or for the garter ceremony. And interestingly, these narratives look in retrospect like attempts to pimp the play towards a more socially elevated status as a kind of overcompensation for the fact that so resolutely middle class. So it's not really royal at all. So this is feeding this big effort to kind of make it more so.
What's most obvious, that's to say about Merry Wives is it's really only shakes chicks. It's only comedy of the middling sort. William Harrison, the Elizabethan writer writing his description of England, wrote very helpfully about a kind of premodern class or status distinction in England.
We in England, Harrison wrote, divide our people commonly into four sorts as gentlemen citizens or Burgess's yeomen and artifices or labourer's gentlemen citizens or Burgess's yeomen and artifices or Labour labourers. And the middling sort is the term historians tend to use about those people in the middle. Citizens Burgess's yeomen's. So neither gentleman or aristocrats. On the one hand, nor artifices. And labourers at the lower end of the spectrum, but the people in the middle.
Windsor is middling, sort central, even though Sir Mark's Falstaff as an ungentlemanly sort of gentleman. Let's look again at the title page. That includes that information about royal performance. I'm still with the quarter 60 note to a most pleasant and excellent conceited comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the merry wives of Windsor, as we've already heard. But then it goes on intermixed with some very valuable and pleasing humours of Sir Hugh.
The Welsh Welsh Knight Justice Shallow and his wise cousin, M. Slender, with the swaggering vein of H. A pistol and Corporal Negm. So this is a bustling, interconnected world with six named characters, plus the merry wives themselves as part of the title page. More, I think that we get on any other play by Shakespeare. This is a kind of social world, an interconnected world.
And it's a world resolutely bourgeois or middling sort the fairy queen at the end of the May Wykes of Windsor is really not Spencer's poetic allegory of Elizabeth, but the doctor's housekeeper mistress quickly wearing an elaborate costume and supervising a cast of malevolent juvenile fairies. The Merry Wives of Windsor is the play of Shakespeare's that most consistently ignores blank verse in favour of prose. The ordinary unhide and language of the everyday here.
There are no counts or dukes as in other comedies here. Middle class professionals, vicars, doctors, hotelier's, go to taverns, get their washing done, gossip, know each other's business swap books and reading recommendations, send their children to school and so on. Perhaps this small town bourgeois world is the equivalent of the market time politics of Stratford-Upon-Avon in which Shakespeare grew up.
It's striking that the classroom scene features a school boy called William Shakespeare, as I've already said, never sets a play in the contemporary London where he made his career. Modern productions have really amplified this sense of provincial and domestic life in Windsor, with lots of different stage business choirboys playing conkers.
Mock Tudor suburbia for wives plotting under hair salon Dryas in Bel Alexander's Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1985 with a cast of children, young people and older adults and a range of occupations and domestic locations. This play does seem to have a kind of provincial realism as the backdrop to its absurd plot.
So Windsor, although it had been associated with the Royal Castle since early mediaeval times and although royal rituals are part of this place, De Neumar seems in fact for Shakespeare, a community of ordinary ish people rather than the widely socially stratified world of Illyria or of messenger. In Much Ado or the fairy monarchy, we get A Midsummer Night's Dream.
So far then, we've addressed the wide Windsor question by acknowledging that it is a real English location and that crucially, it's provincial and middling sort rather than metropolitan. One of the things about Windsor residents is that they buy things, economic relationships are probably the most significant ones in this play. Property and propriety are closely linked.
The play opens with just a shallow complaining about how Falstaff disdains these values of ownership and respect for ownership, which he thinks offers definitive of Windsor. He threatens to go to the star chamber with the complaint that Falstaff has beaten my men, killed my dear, and broke open my lodge. We can see that this act of disrespect for to Justice cello's property anticipates Falstaff claim, on those merry wives of the town and his cat canted attempt to seduce them.
And it also anticipates the cuckold's forms with which he will be crowned in the weirdly phantasmagoric mock garter ceremony in Windsor Great Park with which the play ends. Establishing the plot on the basis of property and theft, that is to say, establishes one of its most important themes. Many wives pre-date the popular comic genre of the early 17th century.
That's all about city life and the economic self-interest to which human relationships have been cheerfully subordinated in the companion series to this lectures. These lectures are called Not Shakespeare. There are lectures on Middleton's chase made in Cheapside and Dekkers, the shoemaker's holiday, which might be relevant to this contemporary near contemporary genre.
So Many Wives isn't a city comedy because, as we've been saying, it's not set in the city and it predates those popular plays of the early 17th century, which are. But it does show with city comedy an interest in the material in stuff that has been of particular interest to contemporary critics. I want to try and think about that interest in relation to one particular episode in the play. The humiliation of Falstaff in the laundry basket.
This scene gives us some of the components we now associate with fast physical use of props for farcical purposes in the plot of Merry White. So far, Falstaff, in a kind of romantic version of spread betting, has sent identical and unsolicited love letters to two wives of the town, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. As the wives recognise letter for letter. But the name of Page and Ford differs.
There's some suggestion Archie Falstaff has got some printed love letters made with spaces for the name of the woman. These letters include the winning phrases. You are not young. No more am I. Go to them. There is sympathy. You are, Mary.
And so am I. You love Sack and so do I. If the love of a soldier can suffice, it struck me reading this letter that it's got a relation both to the lungs wooing scene of Henry the Fifth at the end of that play, and perhaps to Hamlet's curiously flat lover actor to Ophelia. That's right out in his. So Falstaff is short of money and his main interest in these women is economic rather than romantic.
And so the plot turns like those later city comedies on money or on sex as a commodity with a particular economic exchange value. Mr. Mrs. Ford and Paige, of course, confide in each other and they discover this double insult. Not only has he made advances to respectable married women, but he's done it to both of them at the same time.
And they said Falstaff up for punishment. One of the long discussed definitions of Shakespearean comedy connects it to festival traditions often related to the Russian critic Mikhail Back Tienes influential idea. The Carnival World for Bakhtin Carnival was a form of cultural subversion, which he argued, revelled in the suspension of norms and the indulgence of bodily and carnal impulses. But it's important that our idea of a festival doesn't over sentimentalise it over sentimentalising.
Carnival is particularly dangerous when coupled with the idea of Shakespeare, a combination that's long served the ideologic conservative myth of Mary England and nostalgic vision of a small town England, of thatched cottages and roast beef and good fellowship. That, of course, never existed and we can see the shared term. Mary in Mary, England. And here in Merry Wives connect this idealised national construct with Shakespeare's play.
And indeed the popularity of Merry Wives of Windsor in the 18th century probably coincided with the consolidation of this nostalgic idea to part of why Mary Wives as popular was it would seem to be super English in a way that people wanted to have presented. But in fact, if we look at festival and ritual traditions here in Merry Wives, they're actually rather bracing and also normative in their impulses.
Rituals like scapegoating or social expressions like the charity fari for kind of carting or procession that shames people in social communities. The charity VARI, these are designed to bring social behaviour towards the norm, that conservative, that is to say, rather than transgressive. They pick out behaviour that they don't think appropriate and they ridicule and humiliated in order to change it.
Now we tend to emphasise transgression and subversion in Shakespeare's comedies, not least because we want our artists to challenge rather than reinforce social norms.
It's good to remember that there's actually quite a lot of authoritarian and conservative discipline in Shakespeare's comedies, from the violence repeatedly meted out to the certain queens in comedy of errors to the thoroughgoing humiliation of the upwardly mobile Malvolio in Twelfth Night comedy here is less in the service of social subversion and more provides the shock troops of conservatism and moral order. I think the same is true in Merry Wives.
We see a kind of ritual humiliation devised by the wives and corroborated by the Windsor community against their would be seducer. Windsor itself in the final scene, which includes all its characters in the park in Windsor Great Park Thunder, one of the great symbols of Mary England Hurn, the Hunter's oak tree takes a comic but unmistakeable moral revenge against Falstaff schoolboys dressed as fairies singing a puritanical rhyme, fie on sinful fantasy, fie on lust and luxury.
Lust is but a bloody fire kindled with unchaste desire fagging heart whose flames as fire is thought to blow them higher and higher. Pinch him. Fairies mutually. Pinch him for his villainy. The fairies use the rhythm of the other world. That Shakespeare uses to designate man that's witches or the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream. But here they are knowingly performing the supernatural within a deeply mundane material world and enforcing bourgeois,
ultimately bourgeois behaviour. Fie on the sinful fantasy cry on lust luxury. Now discouraging a full stop begins earlier, though, here in the scene with a laundry basket. What happens to fall stuff in this scene is kind of a. fertility ritual. He arrives at the house of Mr. Sport thinking he's going to have sex with her. And instead, quite it's quite different and quite a different scene unfolds. The lover arrives full of compliments. Have I caught my heavenly jewel?
Why now? Let me die for I have lived long enough. Mistress Page arrives to this compromising assignation, Falstaff, as the stage direction has it, stands behind the iris. You can see that this is the in that fast, isn't it? That the B lover caught and having to hide in some piece of the wardrobe or in some piece of domestic furniture. Mr. Page informs them that M. Ford has heard that his wife is entertaining a man alone at home and he's coming back in a fury.
There's a general panic. Although this has, of course, all been set up by the women and it's agreed that Falstaff should be very quickly hidden in the laundry or [INAUDIBLE] basket. But we have seen brought on stage for this very moment, a few minutes before his arrival, and he agrees to servants have the unenviable job of heaving this enormous burden off the stage as the furious master thought comes in at the same door.
So far, it is all about things, people going in and out of doors, sort of at the same time or in that kind of split second time in the laundry basket full of dirty linen is both a great stage prop and a moral symbol. False starts behaviour earns him not the carnal pleasure of Mr. Sports body, but rather a kind of intimacy with the dirty clothing that has been next to it in amongst the filth and grease of the family's washing, his moral character is clearly displayed as he himself later recounts.
This is a distinctly humiliating form of carnival. It's not exactly Bakhtin ideas of revelling in the physical and in the bodily. It's actually a kind of ritual of disgust or shaming. This is him describing his his ordeal to become just like a good Bilbo in the circumference of a pack, Hillard's to point hill to head and then to be stopped in like a strong distillation with stinking clothes that threated in their own grease.
Think of that. A man of my kidney. Think of that. The term is subject to heat as butter, a man of continual dissolution and thaw. It was a miracle to escape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease like a Dutch dish to be thrown into the Thames and cooled glowing cot in that surge like a horseshoe.
The humour of this account is amplified by the fact that he's telling the man he would have cuckolded the masochistically jealous master, Ford has disguised himself and befriended Falstaffian in order to hear even more about how Falstaff wants to get a wife. This is a comic version of those tormented relationships between husband and and lover. Which has also weirdly triangulated in Shakespeare's insistent recurse to this story of the jealous husband.
So the relationship between Othello and DRDO, for instance, or between Posthumus and the Arkema in symbolism that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. But back to that Shamy. First off undergoes a shaming ritual in which is presented to public view in the theatre as well as in Windsor in a humiliating and exposing manner. But it does not stop there. This is a scene choreographed by the women to re-educate the men. I do not know which pleases me better, says Mr Sport, after they've all gone.
But my husband is deceived. Also, John, my husband is deceived or Sir John. But what happens slightly later complicates the gender politics of this narrative. Falstaff arranges another hour Diggnation with Mr. Sward, and of course he brags of it to the disguised master forwarder who turns up again to try to catch his wife in Ferrante. This time, Falstaff has to escape, disguised as what Mr. Ford calls My Maids and the fat woman of Brentford.
So my maids aren't the fat woman of breath. Bradford House, for some reason, left a very large gown in which Falstaff can be disguised. Falstaff exits to prepare this ridiculous costume, and Mr Sport explains her method. I would my husband would meet him in this shape. He cannot abide the old woman of Brentford. He swears she's a witch for bait. My house and have threatened to beat her.
Sure enough, Master Ford encounters the fat old woman and beats her roundly in frustration at having turned the laundry basket upside down, this time to try to find the seducer. Two things interests me here. One is material and one is social. Firstly, the material we can see that false starts humiliations in these two aborted wooing scenes, a closely collocated with women's clothing. We know a lot about how women characters in Shakespeare approach men's clothing in the play.
We often talk about kind of cross dressing or gender blurring of gender fluidity in that direction. We don't often talk about it this way around. So these humiliations are close to collocated with women's clothing, either the dirty linen in the laundry basket or the borrowed outfit of the old woman of Brentford in their fabulous book on Renaissance clothing. Peter Stalley Breast and Rosalyn Jones show how closely clothing was associated with personhood in this period.
In fact, the book actually argues that attitudes to clothing are one of the signal signs of a difference between how we see ourselves now and how people in the Renaissance saw themselves for the early models. They suggest clothes were material mnemonics. They were they were at the site of personhood material mnemonics. Whereas for us, they say these are essentially detachable and disposable goods.
According to this account, the specific form of false attacks, humiliation, mocks his attempts at masculine virility by recategorize in him in the female sphere. He's less a ladies man as he would want to be and more if feminised, feminised by proximity to this clothing is a really good way to look at any play. This play particularly, but at any play to work out what objects or props or stuff it would need to be performed.
That can often point you to something quite specific and significant about it. So that's the material. The second point about is about the social function of Falstaff humiliation and how this relates to our central question about Windsor. Falstaff is completely outclassed in Windsor. The challenge to his strictly values that made him such a hit in the Henry the fourth place seems to be completely neutralised here.
Its intrusion into the boys to our world of Windsor creates barely a ripple as that laundry basket sinks into the river. Windsor values are utterly dominant in the play for staff's own. Self-interest is never a threat. Perhaps that's actually because Windsor and Falstaff are ideological, if not literal bedfellows, after all, Falstaff tries to seduce Mistress Paige because she has all the rule of her husband's purse and he have a legion of angels.
So Mr. Paige is attracted to him because she controls M. Page's money. But I'm anticipating, again, the ideological contours of city comedy romantic, another relationships are so commodified in this play that full staff's attraction, the attraction mistress page for Falstaff, is really the attraction of all the figures in the play to each other. So that's to say Falstaff is not an outsider to the values of Windsor.
But in some ways, the focus for the focus for the Falstaff echoes rather than challenges the values of the society in which he finds himself considered is perhaps most clearly in the subplot between Young and Paige and her chosen suitor. Fenton and herself is really a pretty uninteresting and underdeveloped character. So she's a structural figure. The young woman who's going to get married rather than anything more interesting.
And in fact, one of the one of the striking points about Mary wives is that it organises itself not around young virgins who are about to be married, but the state of marriage itself, something which we don't so often see in Shakespeare's plays, which tend to be invested in the period right up to marriage or in an unexplained widowhood sometime later. But Anne Page is characterised in distinctly economic terms from the start.
What is attractive about her is her dowry. She has 700 pounds of moneys and gold and silver. Even the romance plot in this play. That's to say it's characterised by economic and proprietary interest. This the story of the young characters and their wooing is not separate from this. The more washed up narrative with Falstaff and the wives. Fact it's just the same thing. Full staffs financial motives for wooing others.
The winds of rule, not the exception, is a lucrative marriage commodity fought over by a trio of suitors, including Master Slender and the comic French Doctor Keyes. Of course, in true new comedy fashion, new comedy of those comedies where Young Love outwits the blocking figures does parental opposing figures in true new comedy fashion and has already chosen Fenton as her preference. And that's what's going to come come around in the end as a great source.
There's a great twist at the end where the other two suitors are somehow made to marry or at least pair off with boys dressed as women. Quite an interesting element of those questions in Shakespeare, which is not discussed as often as some of the more obvious cases. But Anne's mother, Mistress Page, is driven by the same economic motives as the rest of Windsor planning, actually, that the doctor should be her son in law. He is well moneyed and his friends potent at court.
So Mistress Paige is herself interested in money and in power and in the kind of economics of marriage. Not a romantic love. Fenton, too, is associated with money, paying out bribes and hoping for the success of his suit a quote, recompense. So Fenton and Falstaff look like moral opposites in the play, but they actually turn out to be rather similar. Windsor is a byword for a comfortable bourgeois world in which money is the dominant value.
And it's interesting that Shakespeare locates that in a provincial town rather than the London that's just coming into view as a location for contemporary dramas. By far by his fellow playwrights. So I suppose what I'm arguing for here is that Windsor helps us to see married wives as a kind of proto citizen comedy set outside London. It could be fruitfully compared with work by Middleton or Dekker or Johnson or Marston, or it could interestingly sit alongside Merchant of Venice.
Measure for measure or comedy of errors. Also, Shakespeare plays particularly concerned with economic communities and the relationship between desire, exchange and commodity. One last element of the pair I want to suggest to you is texture. I've talked quite a bit about that Busi title page of the 60 NO2 Quarto text of the play. And there's a second edition in 16. 19 in 16. Twenty three. The play appears in print again as part of the First Folio.
Like many plays with a similar printing history, Merry Wives is quite different in its quarter incarnation than in the Folio. The quarter is only about two thirds of the length of the folio, and it doesn't have some notable scenes that I've already mentioned, including the discussion of the Guard ceremony and the comic schoolroom scene in which young William struggles with Latin.
Now you'll know the current thinking about Var. early Texas has moved a long way from the old bad quarter designation, were more likely to think about Shakespeare or if you remember or as well, last week, another playwright revising his work and to countenance the idea that the longer text is an adaptation of the shorter rather than the shorter, is always a cut or inadequate version of the longer, as I've suggested in his lectures before.
The interesting question now about textual values is not why, but so what? We're less interested in injera, ingenious theories about how the texts come to be and more in the theatrical specificity or formal revision that might be displayed there. Recognising that a play text as a script for a potential performance never really exists in a permanent or ideal form on the page.
So what I think turns out to be interesting here, there's not been a huge amount of work on courtroom term Foleo Merry Wives, but my sense is that Foleo Merry Wives is more winsley, more interested in Windsor, more economically motivated, more specifically located than the term. Many of the things I've been talking about, about this play, therefore have the great critical advantage of being easy to spot because there's a comparative text where they don't exist.
The comparison is a really easy, critical method to work out what's significant because you can see what the what the text looks like without those elements in it. The two taxand marry wives then offer a really interesting case study and a less explored example of textual variance than are now familiar,
tragic examples of Lear or Hamlet. And it may be that editing, like the rest of Shakespeare criticism, has been more interested in the sort of intrinsic seriousness of everything about tragedy, that it has been able to be about comedy. To bring us back to our central question, why Windsor?
I think the answer to that might be different, whether you're reading the 60 NO2 or the 16 twenty three text of marry wives, or to be more accurate, whether you're reading the play called a Most Pleasant and Xman conceited comedy at Sir John Falstaff and the married white of Windsor in 69 two or the one in sixteen twenty three, which we call the Merry Wives of Windsor.
So I've been suggesting that Windsor has a particular role to play in Shakespeare's only contemporaneous English play, that it points to particular communal and social values that link this comedy with the economic and moral themes of slightly later citizen plays generally located in London. Settings have suggested, finally, that looking at the two distinct plays published as the Quarter and Folio, my wives can help sharpen some of those factors through a comparison.
Next week I will talk about the second part of Henry the Six. But don't worry, I'll be talking about why the first part appetitive the sixth is not quite as necessary to that plane as you might have imagined. In fact, I think my question for the lecture next week is going to be why up to maybe I'll see you then.