Weighing Falstaff

Merry Wives of Windsor is an almost-bedroom comedy with song and dance and a little bit of darkness

I have heard Merry Wives of Windsor described as a play about Falstaff in love. Now that is an irresistible marketing line. But I like to read chronologically, so I felt I ought to first re-read Henry IV parts one and two, in which a thoughtless young prince rioting with the stout John Falstaff grows fit to lead an army into battle.

As Prince Hal becomes the King of England, his friendship with Falstaff fades in importance. Falstaff is surely everyone’s favourite rogue and the only character we can all keep straight in a history overstocked with Henrys. We’d all like to know what happens to him in old age.

The trouble with reading this story chronologically is that the plot of

Richard II precedes that of

Henry IV , and while I was looking backward to the beginning of the thread I could see all the way to King John. I’d have to read four plays before I got to Falstaff in love.

Of all Shakespeare’s work, I find the historical plays most forbidding, and I didn’t feel ready to tackle a row of them. It was clearly time to break some rules, so I put off those plays for another day and picked up

Merry Wives .

Our hero is not really Falstaff in love, or even Falstaff in heat, but rather Falstaff in debt. The knight is broke, so he decides to downsize his hangers-on and his horses. He also hits on the idea of wooing two wealthy wives of the town, Mistress Page and Mistress Ford. He fancies they’ve been flirting with him and he hopes to live off their gifts. Falstaff plays with colonial metaphors: he calls Mistress Page “a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty” and declares, “They shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both.”

Meanwhile, Mistress Page’s young daughter Anne is eyed by no less than three men: a Welsh parson favoured by her father, a French doctor promoted by her mother, and a young man she herself loves. Will she be forced to listen to a bizarre accent all her life or can she achieve a marriage of true love? Anne’s future and Falstaff’s comeuppance converge in a song and dance routine in the woods, so we are probably not meant to take away profound lessons from the play. Still, for what it’s worth, young love wins the day, some same-sex weddings are solemnised, and Falstaff fails to jump into these women’s beds. He never gets further than the laundry basket, and his humiliation is crowned when he gets beaten, pinched and burned as punishment for his lust.

The dark quality to this play is that Falstaff has not one ally. His go-between carries his letters but does not keep his secrets, his own men are angry at his economising and betray him to the husbands, and the wives themselves gang up to humiliate him. Maybe because he has failed so spectacularly, Falstaff is in the end forgiven by these merry wives and even by their husbands and treated to a hearty dinner.

Did he deserve for everyone to gang up on him? Was he ever guilty of more than lust, gluttony and sloth? To weigh this hefty character, I’ll have to go back to the historical plays, and I believe I’m ready now.

(Writer/editor Latha has set herself the task of reading all of the Bard’s plays, poems and sonnets this year and will share her thoughts on them.)

Read Latha’s work at >lathaanantharaman.blogspot.com . Write to her at >anantharaman.bookwise@gmail.com