The merry wives of windsor - Stratford Festival

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
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