The Merry Wives of Windsor

Summary

The Merry Wives of Windsor is Shakespeare's only comedy set in the England of his own day, among the householders, innkeepers, servants and parsons of a market town beside the royal castle. Sir John Falstaff, short of money and lodged at the Garter Inn, decides to court two well-to-do wives, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, in the hope of getting at their husbands' purses. He sends them the same love letter with only the name changed. The wives compare the letters, laugh, and resolve to punish him, while proving to everyone that wives may be merry and still be honest. Their three tricks give the play its shape. Falstaff is smuggled out of Ford's house in a basket of dirty laundry and tipped into a ditch beside the Thames; he escapes a second time disguised as the old woman of Brentford, whom Ford hates, and is beaten out of the house; and at last he is lured at midnight to Herne's Oak in Windsor Park wearing a buck's horns, where children dressed as fairies pinch and burn him with tapers until he admits he has been made an ass. Running alongside the wives' plot is Ford's own: tormented by jealousy, he disguises himself as Master Brook and pays Falstaff to seduce his wife, so that he hears from the would-be seducer's mouth each appointment he hopes to catch. A second plot follows Anne Page, whose father wants her to marry the foolish country heir Slender while her mother prefers the irascible French physician Doctor Caius. Anne loves Fenton, a gentleman whose past is wild and who admits he first sought her for her father's wealth. During the fairy masque each parent sends a suitor to steal Anne away in a coloured gown; Slender and Caius each elope with a boy, and Fenton marries Anne. The play ends not with punishment but with an invitation: Page asks everyone, Falstaff included, home to laugh over a posset by the fire. The comedy is built from prose more than any other Shakespeare play, and much of its pleasure is in its voices: the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans, the Frenchman Caius, the Host's bluster, Mistress Quickly's malapropisms, and Slender's helpless courtship. Beneath the farce it treats real goods. The wives defend their marriages with wit rather than complaint, Ford is cured of a suspicion that nearly wrecks his home, Fenton's confession shows love outgrowing a mercenary start, and Falstaff's humiliation is meant to correct rather than destroy. The library attaches the full Project Gutenberg text (#1517), so the tricks, speeches and scene locations named here can be checked directly.

Top Lessons

• Merry and yet honest

  Mistress Page's couplet in Act IV, Scene II states the wives' purpose: to show that cheerfulness and laughter do not mean loose virtue. The wives never consider Falstaff's offer; they use comedy to defend their marriages and their reputations. Students can see chastity presented not as gloom but as a confident, even playful, strength.

• Jealousy as self-made torment

  Ford is never wronged, yet he pays a stranger to tempt his wife, ransacks his own house twice, and beats an old woman he believes is a witch. His soliloquy in Act II, Scene II shows a man thanking God for his jealousy while it destroys his peace. The play sets him against Page, who trusts too easily, and asks what trust in marriage requires.

• The fairies' sentence

  The masque at Herne's Oak is a mock trial: fairies sing against lust, pinch the knight and test him with fire. Falstaff confesses that his own guilty mind made him believe the fairies were real. The punishment is shame, not ruin, and it ends at Page's table. The scene invites reflection on correction that aims at amendment and on the place of laughter in moral reproof.

• Anne Page and the choice of a husband

  Anne's parents bargain over her like the provinces in a treaty: Page values Slender's land, Mistress Page the doctor's connections. Fenton's confession in Act III, Scene IV that money was his first motive, and his defence of the secret marriage in Act V, Scene V, raise the old question of how far parental authority extends in marriage. The play takes Anne's side, but students should weigh both duty and freedom.

• Many tongues in one town

  Windsor is full of accents and errors: Evans's Welsh, Caius's French, Quickly's malapropisms, Pistol's bombast, the Host's catchphrases. Falstaff's final humiliation includes being mocked by a man who makes fritters of English. The comedy delights in language while gently teaching that pride in one's own speech can be another kind of folly.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Of limited but real interest for the history of medicine. Doctor Caius is a comic French physician whose authority the Host and Evans mock by invoking Aesculapius, Galen and Hippocrates and by joking about urinals, the flasks used in uroscopy. Falstaff's account of the buck-basket is full of humoral and dietary language about heat, grease, dissolution and cooling the reins. Ford's jealousy is repeatedly called a 'distemper' and his 'old lunes', terms that treat an obsessive passion as something close to illness; reading it as monomania is an interpretation, not the play's own category.

• Act II, Scene III; Act III, Scene I

  The Host hails Caius as his Aesculapius and Galen and calls him a urinal; Evans claims the doctor knows nothing of Hippocrates and Galen and threatens to knock his urinal about his head.

• Act III, Scene I

  The Host reconciles the 'soul-curer and body-curer', saying his doctor gives him 'potions and the motions' and his parson the proverbs.

• Act III, Scene V

  Falstaff describes being stewed in greasy linen and then quenched in the Thames, calling himself subject to heat as butter and drinking sack to warm a belly cold as if he had swallowed snowballs for pills to cool the reins.

• Act III, Scene III; Act IV, Scene II

  Ford's jealousy is called a distemper and his 'old lunes' as he searches his house and beats the supposed witch of Brentford.