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peaking Cornuto, and wittolly, Shakespeare twice alludes to Actaeon, the unfortunate Greek hunterturned into a stag (with horns) and torn to pieces by his dogs after he stumbled upon Diana bathing.Ford characterizes himself as horn-mad, a term also used by Mistress Quickly of Dr. Caius in anothercontext.In the end, of course, Falstaff wears the horns, not as buck or cuckold, but as a chump—or, as hesays, “I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass” (5.5.119). Master Ford promises never again toimagine horns (mistrust his wife), and Master Page pronounces universal forgiveness: “What cannot beeschew’d must be embrac’d” (5.5.237). Above all, honorable love triumphs.28The Merry Wives of Windsor:The Same Sir John StillBy Ace G. PilkingtonFrom Midsummer Magazine, 1992Sometime between the fall of 1596 and the spring of 1597, John Falstaff first stepped onto theboards of the Globe Theatre. His coming was an extraordinary event, like the sighting of a new andhuge planet in the sky. In his case the planet must have been a gas giant, accompanied by a number ofsmaller satellites and so luminous that it all but eclipsed even the royal son it accompanied. In largemeasure because of Falstaff, Henry IV, Part I was an instant, and has been a continuing, success. If quartoeditions are anything to go by, the play was the most popular of all Shakespeare’s works during hislife and soon after his death, with seven editions before the First Folio and two following it. Falstaff ’sfame (and unmistakable form) were carried on into Henry IV, Part II, and his dying words give a reverberatingpathos (even in the Hostess’s mouth) to the early scenes of Henry V.The roguish old knight and highwayman, whose cowardice was exceeded only by his cunning,established himself as the best known of all Shakespeare’s creations in the seventeenth century. TheShakspere Allusion-Book cannot deal with him as a mere character in a play but indicates, “For thepurposes of this Index, Falstaff is treated as a work.” He has, as the Allusion-Book says, “131 referenceswhile Othello (the next highest) . . . scores only 55” (“Introduction,” Shakespeare: Henry IV, Parts I andII, A Casebook, ed. G. K. Hunter [London: Macmillan, 1983], 16).According to legend, Falstaff ’s popularity was not confined to the groundlings and middle classbut extended to Queen Elizabeth herself: “The Restoration theatre tradition recorded by John Dennisin 1702 and Rowe in 1709 was that the Queen had demanded a play about Falstaff in love, andShakespeare wrote it in a fortnight” (Peter Levi, The Life and Times of William Shakespeare [NewYork: Henry Holt and Company, 1988], 209). That play was, of course, The Merry Wives of Windsor.WITS’ COMBAT AND CRITICS’ CONFLICT. But, as Falstaff knew, honor will not live withthe living (or even with literary immortals) because detraction will not suffer it, and the fat knight’svery popularity engenders arguments, just as his many incarnations inspire partisans. He says in HenryIV, Part II that “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men” (The CompleteSignet Classic Shakespeare, ed.Sylvan Barnet [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972], 1.2.9-10). He is in additionthe cause of wits’ combat and critics’ conflict; there are those who believe that even for someone of SirJohn’s appetites, his appearances in the second tetralogy constitute a surfeit of sequels, and The MerryWives of Windsor is one course too many. Further, they believe that Falstaff in moving from history tocomedy has lost much of his savor and most of his weight and is not, so to speak, a “twentieth part theUtah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880
tithe of [his] precedent” lard (Hamlet, 3.4.98-99).A. C. Bradley, who calls this comic Sir John “the imposter,” wrote in 1909, “To picture the realFalstaff befooled like the Falstaff of the Merry Wives is like imagining Iago the gull of Roderigo. . . .The separation of these two has long ago been effected by criticism, and is insisted on in almost allcompetent estimates of the character of Falstaff ” (“The Reject ion of Falstaff,” Shakespeare: KingHenry IV Parts I and II, A Casebook, ed. G. K. Hunter [London: Macmillan, 1983], 57).However, I am about to insist that Sir John is “constant as the Northern Star,” jumping genreswith the same nimbleness that he avoids debts and finding himself much the same man whether he ismatched with the wild prince or the merry wives. Part of the problem with Bradley’s position is that,having rightly idealized Sir John as a wonder of wit, he insists, against all the evidence, that the fatknight is also a master tactician. Nothing could be more wrong. Falstaff is a superb talker, an incomparableperformer, a veritable “star of England,” but he could never be considered for the criminalmastermind Oscar. As W. H. Auden observes in “The Prince’s Dog,” Falstaff and his cohorts are “byany worldly standards, including those of the criminal classes, all of them failures” (emphasis his; TheDyer’s Hand and Other Essays [London: Faber and Faber, 1962], 183).In Henry IV, Part I, Falstaff has his horse stolen and his pocket picked and is outmaneuvered byPoins with Prince Hal’s help so that the fat knight finds his ill-gotten loot stolen from him in turn bytwo mysterious figures in buckram. Further, even the first part of this robbery goes awry; he is recognizedas a result of his size and pursued to his tavern lair. Only the intervention of the Prince of Walesand the paying back of the twice-stolen money saves Falstaff from prison.In Henry IV, Part II, the Lord Chief Justice accuses Sir John of crimes in general, the Hostess joinsin with the specific accusations of evasion of debt and breach of promise, Hal and Poins fool him bydisguising themselves once again, Prince John threatens him with a hanging for coming late to thebattle, and, finally, when Jack Falstaff interrupts Hal’s coronation procession, the young king rejectsand banishes him. At the last, the Chief Justice gives orders to “Go, carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet”(5.5.93). The Fleet was a prison for distinguished prisoners, but it was a prison just the same.CONSTANTLY BEING CAUGHT. Where is there anything in Falstaff ’s history to justifyBradley’s confidence that the fat knight cannot be fooled? It is true he cannot be outfaced or outtalked,but he is constantly being caught by a plot or caught out in one of his schemes. Indeed, Poins earlyidentifies the central comic satisfaction which attaches to Sir John, “The virtue of this jest will be theincomprehensible [unlimited] lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper” (HenryIV, Part I, 1.2.183-5). It is vital that Falstaff be caught so that he may save himself with his wit, befooled so that he may whip his persecutors with words, and be abused so that he may strike back withhis most unsavory similes. In short, Falstaff is funniest when he fails and most enjoyable when he isleast at ease, giving us his best when he is suffering the worst. It is a measure of his comic power that nodefeat can vanquish him and a feature of his character that no disappointment (until Hal’s rejection)can put out the light of his optimism.In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff suffers the pangs of three several deaths and gives birth tomuch humor. Here, he is among the bourgeoisie and not the aristocracy, and (as Sir John to all Europe)he tends to underestimate his opposition, but he is the same Falstaff still with the same glorious foiblesand follies. As Ruth Nevo writes, “the character of Falstaff has not changed. The craft, the shrewdness,the brass, the zest are all there. The very accents and rhythms, the vivid similes, the puns, thepreposterous hyperboles, the loving ingenuity with which he enlarges on his monstrous girth” (ComicTransformations in Shakespeare [London: Methuen, 1980], 155). It is a prose that in Peter Levi’swords “sparkles and crackles along . . . crammed with short, sensuous phrases” (The Life and Times ofWilliam Shakespeare, 210).Utah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-788029
Page 1 and 2: InsightsA Study Guide to the Utah S
Page 3 and 4: The Merry Wivesof WindsorContentsIn
Page 5 and 6: 9), Shakespeare evidently felt exub
Page 7 and 8: husband: Curtsy to your father, but
Page 9 and 10: All these ideas find expression in
Page 11 and 12: Mr. Shakespeare, I Presumeby Diana
Page 15 and 16: But however he got into the theatre
Page 17 and 18: almost no novels, and only a few ch
Page 19 and 20: In London itself, the new Globe, th
Page 21 and 22: (Walter Bromberg, “Witchcraft and
Page 23 and 24: Synopsis: The Merry Wives of Windso
Page 25 and 26: The Merry Wives of Windsor:Herne th
Page 27: The Merry Wives of Windsor:Double,
Page 31 and 32: The Merry Wives of Windsor:For Love
Page 33 and 34: Let the Sky Rain PotatoesBy Diana M
Page 35 and 36: A Collection of All Things Familiar
Page 37 and 38: The Merry Hunters of WindsorBy Jess

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