The merry wives of windsor - Stratford Festival

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let us take you on an adventure! Great stories transcend time and place. Whatever country or century gave them their birth, they speak to us here and now, their power to move or delight us recharged with each telling, their insights as pertinent to the world we live in as the latest work of a dramatist today. our 2011 playbill opens doors to vistas both familiar and exotic, from shakespeare’s illyria to the American dust Bowl, from contemporary canada to the legendary realm of camelot. each of the dramatic worlds created on our stages embodies universal aspects of the human heart and the human soul; each invites you into an extraordinary adventure we hope you will never forget. Artistic director GeNerAL director The 2011 season is dedicated to the memory of Michael Langham, Artistic Director from 1956 to 1967. scan with your smartphone for a free ring tone from our new 2011 season song: Show Time! 1
Shakespeare’s World Unfiltered by Robert Blacker Below | Director Frank Galati in Rehearsal. Facing page, left to right from top| Tom Rooney (Master Francis FORD) and Lucy Peacock (Mistress Alice Ford); Geraint Wyn Davies (Falstaff); Trent Pardy (Fenton) and Andrea Runge (Anne PAGE). Following page | Geraint Wyn Davies and Lucy Peacock; Tom McCamus (Master George Page); Laura Condlln (Mistress Margaret PAGE); Members of the company. Photography By Erin Samuell. One of the delights of seeing John Bull’s Other Island at the Shaw Festival last season was in watching George Bernard Shaw turn his acerbic wit on his own people, the Irish. That play is on my mind as I write about The Merry Wives of Windsor, for here we have the rare opportunity to see Shakespeare set his scrutiny on his roots, the middle class of a small English town that was not very different from the Stratford in which he grew up. Of course Shakespeare is writing about his contemporary English society even when he sets his plays, as he usually does, in other lands and times. In Merry Wives, he removes those filters. Perhaps that is why this remarkable play, so often underrated by scholars but not by audiences, has an immediacy that still captures us today. The characters are so familiar to us because they were familiar to Shakespeare. At the time Shakespeare was writing, Renaissance England was in the midst of great change, moving from a medieval society where wealth was based on land to a modern mercantile society based on the sale of goods. Capulet in Romeo and Juliet may be an early sketch of such upwardly mobile new money. When he speaks, he does not share the classical imagery of the Montagues and their son. Capulet has the smarts of a self-made man, and parties are a necessary part of his social agenda, as is marrying his daughter to a kinsman to the Prince. In Merry Wives, Shakespeare presents us with another wealthy man, Master Page, who throws dinner parties, and Page too has plans to have his daughter marry up in society. Shakespeare understood the ambitions of this class. His father, the son of a tenant farmer, transformed himself into a successful merchant 2
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Page 7 and 8: Ideas and Insights ArcelorMittal Do
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Page 11 and 12: DAVID MIRVISH PRESENTS TORONTO’S
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The merry wives of windsor - Stratford Festival

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