The merry wives of windsor - Stratford Festival

More documents

Recommendations

Info

who rose to become a Stratford alderman and bailiff. John Shakespeare eventually applied for a coat of arms to advance his status and the status of his descendants. In the opening of Merry Wives, Shallow also highlights his status by describing his coat of arms. In his book Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt describes Elizabethan society as “intensely, pervasively, visibly hierarchical. . . . Woe betide anyone who violated the rules, forgetting to cede place to someone above him or attempting to pass through a door before his betters or thoughtlessly sitting somewhere at church or at a dinner table where he did not belong.” Greenblatt goes on to describe a man who was sent to jail without bail by a squire who felt he was not given due deference. The hierarchy of Windsor society is carefully observed by the characters in Shakespeare’s play. Justice Shallow asserts himself as “Esquire,” putting himself at the top of the food chain of the local characters. His nephew Slender emphasizes that status by pointing out that he is Chief Justice of the Peace and “a gentleman born.” Page talks about his wealth when he dismisses one of his daughter’s suitors as too poor, and he and Shallow greet each other with the elaborate deference due their wealthy stations when they first meet. Ford is the other wealthy burgher we meet in the play. Beneath these four grandees are two members of the emerging professional classes: the French doctor Caius and the Welsh parson Evans, who teaches their children. Learning Latin was a bragging point for parents in an England that was becoming more cosmopolitan, as shown by the presence of a French doctor. As members of the working class, the Host of the Garter Inn and Mistress Quickly must flatter and defer to all of these, but the Host is not beyond playing a practical joke on the least powerful of them, Caius and Evans, sending them to different places for their duel, and Quickly is quick to mock anyone as soon as they are out of earshot. She may be the confidante of the wealthy Page’s daughter, Anne, but she is willing to take money from all three of Anne’s competing suitors, helping each advance his case. Into this society, Shakespeare brings two outsiders to challenge the citizens of Windsor. Shakespeare plucked Falstaff from his two-part play Henry IV, one of the summits of his writing, and tradition has it that Queen Elizabeth ordered 3
Shakespeare to write another play that showed that popular character in love. What he shows is Falstaff in debt. Shakespeare transports Falstaff to a Windsor that seems more like England in the 1590s than the period of his history plays. As a knight, Sir John Falstaff is the social superior of the townspeople, but that function was becoming outmoded by the time Shakespeare was writing Merry Wives. Falstaff is out of work, broke, and finds an excuse to dismiss his retinue. He is kin to another impoverished knight you can see this season – Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night – and like Sir Toby, he lives off others. His attempted simultaneous conquest of both Ford and Page’s wives is only the most outrageous example of the pursuit of money in the play, and it reveals cracks in the society of Windsor. The most obvious is the strain between Ford and his wife, but Mistress Page also differs with her husband on matters minor – the value of learning Latin – and major: who should marry their daughter. Anne is the chief commodity in the play and the characters who are not her suitors are promoting one of them. “She has good gifts,” Shallow tells his nephew. “Seven hundred pounds, and possibilities, is good gifts,” the parson replies. The other outsider is one of Anne’s suitors – Fenton. He is a gentleman without an income, perhaps the younger son of a wealthy family, and for this reason he is not deemed a good match by her father. Fenton confesses to Anne that her father’s wealth was his motive in first wooing her before he came to know and love her, and his honesty wins her over. If the wives take the lead in bringing the play to its conclusion, it is the lovers who trump everyone else at the end. Shaw does not spare the Irish in John Bull’s Other Island. Shakespeare too exposes the vanities of his characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor, but unlike Shaw he ends his comedy with a typical Shakespearean embrace. The citizens of Windsor take out their anger against Falstaff with perhaps too much zest, but we leave the theatre with the feeling of equilibrium restored – and an invitation from Page to dinner. Robert Blacker is Dramaturge for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and dramaturge for this production. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, by Stephen Greenblatt, is one of the many books available in the Festival’s Theatre Store. 4
Page 1 and 2: Festival Theatre May 10 TO OcTOber
Page 3: Shakespeare’s World Unfiltered by
Page 7 and 8: Ideas and Insights ArcelorMittal Do
Page 9 and 10: costume Design For Mistress Ford by
Page 11 and 12: DAVID MIRVISH PRESENTS TORONTO’S
Page 13 and 14: The Company Wendy Allnutt Second se
Page 15 and 16: Robert King 18th season: Robert in
Page 17 and 18: Steve Ross Eighth season: John Rugb

The merry wives of windsor - Stratford Festival

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?