1 00:00:01,290 --> 00:00:08,730 Morning, everyone. Thanks for coming back to the third lecture in this series that I'm going to talk about, the merry wives of Windsor play. 2 00:00:08,730 --> 00:00:17,430 That was a great favourite in the 18th century, probably kind of right at the top of the list of Shakespeare plays for the 18th century, 3 00:00:17,430 --> 00:00:24,780 but one which has struggled a bit to find a place in the critical repertoire and in the theatrical repertoire ever since. 4 00:00:24,780 --> 00:00:38,320 Try and talk to both those absences. So on the many wives of Windsor isn't the question that I want to try and focus my discussion on is why Windsor? 5 00:00:38,320 --> 00:00:44,710 Let's start, though, first by locating the play in Shakespeare's career. 6 00:00:44,710 --> 00:00:50,860 Firstly, obviously, it's got a really clear connexion to Shakespeare's history plays on the reign of Henry, 7 00:00:50,860 --> 00:01:01,440 the fourth and the fourth parts, one and two, because it transports their star character, Sir John Falstaff, into a different genre. 8 00:01:01,440 --> 00:01:08,260 So it shares its central character with a major character in those history plays. 9 00:01:08,260 --> 00:01:18,580 It's probably therefore connected to the lead day. So perhaps it comes from around 15 '97, 15 Ninety-eight, something like that. 10 00:01:18,580 --> 00:01:28,570 So it's in amongst the history plays and comedies that mark this part of Shakespeare's career at the end of the 16th century. 11 00:01:28,570 --> 00:01:34,780 One of the things I want to focus on about many wives of Windsor is that it's a kind of bourgeois comedy. 12 00:01:34,780 --> 00:01:38,720 It circles around faux staff's antics first. 13 00:01:38,720 --> 00:01:46,560 He's accused of poaching deer. Then the rest of it is in trying to get off with Windsor wives. 14 00:01:46,560 --> 00:01:51,870 He's completely unsuccessful, though, he's roundly tricked by two of the wives. 15 00:01:51,870 --> 00:02:03,570 Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. And in the course of that trickery, the women make the jealous husband, Master Ford. 16 00:02:03,570 --> 00:02:06,510 See how one reasonable his behaviour has been. 17 00:02:06,510 --> 00:02:18,990 So there's a kind of etiquette to process around Falstaff, but also around masterful at both of those men that seem to have behaved inappropriately. 18 00:02:18,990 --> 00:02:26,050 There's a romantic subplot in which a number of suitors jostle for the hand of the page. 19 00:02:26,050 --> 00:02:31,990 She pursues her own courtship of Fenton. Fenton is the person she wants to marry and eventually she does. 20 00:02:31,990 --> 00:02:37,630 There's quite a lot of comic scenes and japes that are mentioned as we go through the lecture. 21 00:02:37,630 --> 00:02:47,430 If you're someone who finds English with a foreign accent hilarious, you're going to love Merry Wives of Windsor. 22 00:02:47,430 --> 00:02:52,590 What I want to say, though, about this play is that basically is on quite a small scale. 23 00:02:52,590 --> 00:03:00,840 A lot of what the play is about, a mundane or ordinary activities, the nickols of married life running a household, 24 00:03:00,840 --> 00:03:11,310 the interactions of a small, slightly caricatured community, which in some ways looks a bit like a soap opera, a kind of contained soap opera. 25 00:03:11,310 --> 00:03:16,710 And that's the place from which I want to investigate the significance of Windsor. 26 00:03:16,710 --> 00:03:24,240 Firstly, though, I should acknowledge that most of the discussion about Merry Wives has not been about where the play takes place, 27 00:03:24,240 --> 00:03:35,130 but about when the priority of time over location has been all about that relation of this play to the history plays. 28 00:03:35,130 --> 00:03:44,930 And let's just talk a little bit more about that for a minute. So Falstaff had been the star of two history plays, Henry, the fourth part woman, too. 29 00:03:44,930 --> 00:03:53,040 And it's his popularity, really. That means that we get part two because he is a runaway stage success, 30 00:03:53,040 --> 00:03:59,100 much the most popular stage character, Shaikh's Parental Rights, and comes back in a sequel. 31 00:03:59,100 --> 00:04:09,820 We might think of Merry Wives as a as another sequel. The title page of the Corto edition of Merry Wives, which is published in 16 02, 32 00:04:09,820 --> 00:04:17,290 makes it clear that Falstaff himself is the main attraction so that the name by which we know this play has changed over time. 33 00:04:17,290 --> 00:04:24,130 And the title under which it was first printed in 60 NO2 is a most pleasant and 34 00:04:24,130 --> 00:04:33,080 excellent conceited comedy of Sir John Falstaff and The Merry Wives of Windsor. 35 00:04:33,080 --> 00:04:39,140 Now, it's a commonplace of historical serial narrative to put the two parts of Henry, the fourth together with Henry, 36 00:04:39,140 --> 00:04:46,880 the Fifth, perhaps with Richard, the second affront to produce a narrative of historical and character development. 37 00:04:46,880 --> 00:04:49,730 We might call the Henry out or something like that, 38 00:04:49,730 --> 00:04:56,600 a serial which is organised either like of a Jilian epic or like an 18th and 19th century buildings romance, 39 00:04:56,600 --> 00:05:05,600 the kind of maturation of the young hero around the kind of testing of a central character, Mary Wykes, that gives us an alternative. 40 00:05:05,600 --> 00:05:11,760 In some ways, a more interesting sequence than that slightly clichéd cluster, 41 00:05:11,760 --> 00:05:19,100 a sequence that is more like a full stuffy at a sequence organised around Falstaff as a central protagonist. 42 00:05:19,100 --> 00:05:22,370 That's what Verdi does in his opera. Falstaff is will. 43 00:05:22,370 --> 00:05:27,920 Also, Welles does, in his Falstaff focussed film on these plays, Chimes at Midnight In. 44 00:05:27,920 --> 00:05:34,070 Either of those might be interesting ways to think about how this play connects to the histories. 45 00:05:34,070 --> 00:05:38,810 When Prince Howe takes up the crown at the end of Henry, the fourth part two, 46 00:05:38,810 --> 00:05:43,220 you may remember that he wanted his first the first action of being a king. 47 00:05:43,220 --> 00:05:50,180 The way that he shows that he has repented from his prodigal youth is to banish Falstaff. 48 00:05:50,180 --> 00:06:00,650 Till then, I banish thee on pain of death, as I have done the rest of my misleaders not to come near our person by 10 mile. 49 00:06:00,650 --> 00:06:06,800 So Falstaff is literally kind of relocated at the end of the fourth part, too. 50 00:06:06,800 --> 00:06:14,690 Windsor is not exactly 10 miles from anywhere. Henry is likely to be unless he's hanging out at Heathrow or High Wickham. 51 00:06:14,690 --> 00:06:19,640 But perhaps we don't need to be quite so literal in banishing false stuff from the court. 52 00:06:19,640 --> 00:06:26,130 Perhaps King Henry propels him into this provincial comedy. 53 00:06:26,130 --> 00:06:34,110 But relatedly, if Falstaff is alive in the Henry the fourth place and seems the same kind of character here in Merry Wives, 54 00:06:34,110 --> 00:06:40,630 should we think that many wives of Windsor takes place in the early 15th century? 55 00:06:40,630 --> 00:06:46,600 So I don't think we should. I mean, Falstaff isn't really a historical figure in Henry the Fourth either. 56 00:06:46,600 --> 00:06:52,750 Part of what's powerful about him in those history plays is a kind of figure from outside history who doesn't believe in history, 57 00:06:52,750 --> 00:06:59,560 play heroics like fighting and honour. He's a kind of counter to that ideology. 58 00:06:59,560 --> 00:07:05,470 So he's a figure, miss, misplaced or displaced, even when he's in a history play. 59 00:07:05,470 --> 00:07:12,130 But the transposition of this character into comedy, I think is more generically interesting than its historical meaningful, 60 00:07:12,130 --> 00:07:20,290 because to all intents and purposes, Merry Wives of Windsor looks as if it takes place in the contemporary Elizabethan world. 61 00:07:20,290 --> 00:07:29,260 Now, of all Shakespeare's plays, only the induction to The Taming of the Shrew with its references to place names in Warwickshire, 62 00:07:29,260 --> 00:07:32,120 seems to take place in contemporary England. 63 00:07:32,120 --> 00:07:39,610 Shakespeare doesn't really do contemporary England, and maybe Mary Lives is the one place where he does so. 64 00:07:39,610 --> 00:07:45,220 Plans for me is more important than time in locating married wives. 65 00:07:45,220 --> 00:07:50,410 I think this is not primarily a historical play, but a topographical one. 66 00:07:50,410 --> 00:08:02,710 Windsor seems then to matter. Let's come at this via a slightly larger view of Shakespeare's sense of place. 67 00:08:02,710 --> 00:08:11,200 Most of Shakespeare's plays, as you known, as we've discussed before, follow some preordained shape from written sources quite closely. 68 00:08:11,200 --> 00:08:18,370 Most of these sources are originally Italian, but sometimes French romance fiction. 69 00:08:18,370 --> 00:08:28,480 Shakespeare sources are not mostly native. And that tells you something about English literature more generally at the time when he's writing. 70 00:08:28,480 --> 00:08:35,500 On many occasions, Shakespeare simply carries forward the location of his plays from the source. 71 00:08:35,500 --> 00:08:44,230 So the forest of Auden, sometimes our den in Astrid like it, comes from Thomas Lodge's prose story. 72 00:08:44,230 --> 00:08:55,110 Rosalind in the Robert Greene romance behind the Winter's Tale, the same places, Bohemia and Cecillia are the locations of the action. 73 00:08:55,110 --> 00:09:03,040 There's Shakespeare has flipped them, perhaps because he thinks hot tempered, jealous loyalty should be in a hot place like Sicily. 74 00:09:03,040 --> 00:09:09,850 This has, of course, brought in area about the seacoast of Bohemia. 75 00:09:09,850 --> 00:09:14,920 Sources for the Merchant of Venice give Shakespeare not only the plot of the juice usurer, 76 00:09:14,920 --> 00:09:20,980 but also the location and the arguments that Shakespeare must have had to go to Venice for research. 77 00:09:20,980 --> 00:09:27,220 A completely bonkers. The author of Merchant of Venice has never been to Venice, nor does he need to. 78 00:09:27,220 --> 00:09:33,190 Apart from the mention of the Rialto Bridge, which is hardly the hallmark of intimate knowledge of the city, 79 00:09:33,190 --> 00:09:37,180 there's no local experience here in the play at all, 80 00:09:37,180 --> 00:09:43,740 particularly given that everybody who went to Venice in this period was fascinated by the original ghetto. 81 00:09:43,740 --> 00:09:48,380 The gated suburb in which Jewish residents were shut up at night. 82 00:09:48,380 --> 00:09:53,200 It seems extraordinary that writing a play about how Jews are a darn part of Venice. 83 00:09:53,200 --> 00:09:56,150 If you knew about the ghetto, you wouldn't mention. 84 00:09:56,150 --> 00:10:07,800 That is to say, place is fictional in Shakespeare in the literal sense that it comes from fiction, not from experience. 85 00:10:07,800 --> 00:10:13,350 Now there are a handful of plays nominally organised around plays, 86 00:10:13,350 --> 00:10:20,160 two gentlemen of Verona that are going to be talking about in a couple of weeks, parallelise, Prince of Tyre. 87 00:10:20,160 --> 00:10:25,470 If you remember that played on their parities, spends no time really in Tyre at all. 88 00:10:25,470 --> 00:10:32,310 That's the point of the play. It's on the moon. Look, it's a kind of picaresque for wandering story. 89 00:10:32,310 --> 00:10:42,840 And Timon of Athens and Matt member time and moves from Athens into a kind of wild place in the second half of the play. 90 00:10:42,840 --> 00:10:48,000 The main waves of wings, I think, is different from these other examples in two ways. 91 00:10:48,000 --> 00:10:54,690 Firstly, we don't really have any attested major source for many wives of Windsor. 92 00:10:54,690 --> 00:11:00,210 So so far as we know, Shakespeare invented largely. 93 00:11:00,210 --> 00:11:09,480 And that makes Windsor a kind of invented place, an invented location, which is different from those inherited locations like Ardern or Venice. 94 00:11:09,480 --> 00:11:16,100 And secondly, what's important about this place is its English. 95 00:11:16,100 --> 00:11:21,740 So the place, though, doesn't work to fix the play into an exotic or classical location. 96 00:11:21,740 --> 00:11:29,030 But then how does it work? It's going to be the exact opposite of exoticism. 97 00:11:29,030 --> 00:11:33,290 Is it like saying Scunthorpe or Slough? 98 00:11:33,290 --> 00:11:45,830 This is the part of lecture. I am bound to offend someone. Is it like saying the only way is Winzer or is it something more like Martha's Vineyard 99 00:11:45,830 --> 00:11:51,650 or something which has a recognisable social topography or can social demographic, 100 00:11:51,650 --> 00:11:57,080 which is less a place and more a kind of demography? 101 00:11:57,080 --> 00:12:03,890 There are a couple of immediate contemporaneous associations of Windsor that I want to try and pick up for a minute. 102 00:12:03,890 --> 00:12:15,500 Firstly, the market town of Windsor, Apple, which is, as you probably know, on the River Thames, about 20 miles outside London, 103 00:12:15,500 --> 00:12:24,560 the market town of Windsor was probably in decline in the later 16th century, not follows the drying up of the Reformation. 104 00:12:24,560 --> 00:12:31,880 Pilgrim Trade of the pre reformation. Pilgrim trade after after the Reformation. 105 00:12:31,880 --> 00:12:41,840 Eton next door to Windsor, just across the river, had an important Marian shrine which attracted lots of pilgrims, probably since it's Oxford. 106 00:12:41,840 --> 00:12:48,410 There are lots of people who know that the full name of that school is actually the King's College of Our Lady at Eton, 107 00:12:48,410 --> 00:12:52,880 besides Windsor King's College of Our Lady of Eton. 108 00:12:52,880 --> 00:13:01,430 I didn't know that. But the Eton Shrine had brought lots of pilgrims tourism to the area around Windsor in the later Middle Ages. 109 00:13:01,430 --> 00:13:05,330 This is pretty much stopped by the period of the play. 110 00:13:05,330 --> 00:13:12,560 So the bit of this that I think I want to take away is that Windsor might have been a town that had seen better days, 111 00:13:12,560 --> 00:13:22,760 a bit washed up, a bit down on his luck. Now, you might think is a good place for Falstaff, who's also looking a little bit shop soiled. 112 00:13:22,760 --> 00:13:31,280 I don't know if there is any relevance of the religious associations, those residual religious associations that Windsor might have had. 113 00:13:31,280 --> 00:13:40,520 Of course, Catholic England had its own geography and topography of monasteries and their lands of pilgrims sites and pilgrim roots. 114 00:13:40,520 --> 00:13:46,550 And it's interesting to think how those erased geographies might persist in a kind of cultural memory. 115 00:13:46,550 --> 00:13:57,320 Maybe they have a topographical equivalent of the Hugh the Parson in the play whose opening remark is by our lady that invocation of the Virgin, 116 00:13:57,320 --> 00:14:08,410 which doesn't fit Protestant thought, but which is still a kind of verbal habit and natural verbal habit for many late 16th century Protestants. 117 00:14:08,410 --> 00:14:11,650 Secondly, the connotations of wounds are royal. 118 00:14:11,650 --> 00:14:17,650 There had been a royal palace on this strategically important site on the Thames since the mediaeval period. 119 00:14:17,650 --> 00:14:25,510 The parkland was notable for the royal sport of hunting. Was a good place for the court to retreat to in times of plague from London. 120 00:14:25,510 --> 00:14:33,880 In London, the chapel at Windsor Castle was the centre of the Order of the Knights of the Garter. 121 00:14:33,880 --> 00:14:40,690 The Order of the Garter is a it's hard to really know what it is, but it's a royal honour anyway. 122 00:14:40,690 --> 00:14:46,450 And there's long been an attempt to connect Mary Wines with some sort of garter installation ceremony. 123 00:14:46,450 --> 00:14:54,520 The taffin in the play is called The Garter. And at the end of many wives, Mr it quickly commands her fairies, 124 00:14:54,520 --> 00:15:03,220 who as will see our schoolboys in disguise to search Windsor Castle owls within and out. 125 00:15:03,220 --> 00:15:08,080 Now this association with royalty that attaches itself to Windsor is an interesting part 126 00:15:08,080 --> 00:15:14,050 of the play's ongoing reception that first quarto publication of Merry Wives in 60. 127 00:15:14,050 --> 00:15:23,380 NO2 has royal performance associations as it has been diverse times acted by the Right Honourable, 128 00:15:23,380 --> 00:15:30,270 My Lord Chamberlain's servants before, both before Her Majesty and elsewhere. 129 00:15:30,270 --> 00:15:36,810 This performance claim is dropped when the play is republished in 16 19. 130 00:15:36,810 --> 00:15:45,240 Now, it is not the first of Shakespeare's plays to make this claim in print or to make royal performance part of its marketing strategy. 131 00:15:45,240 --> 00:15:47,560 Love's Labour's Lost. Printed in 50, 132 00:15:47,560 --> 00:15:58,140 Ninety-eight also claims a royal performance and the quarto of King Lear in 60 No.8 records a Christmas performance before James the first. 133 00:15:58,140 --> 00:16:08,190 This information of title pages is all really easily available on the excellent Folger Library site, which is called a Shakespeare Documented dot org. 134 00:16:08,190 --> 00:16:13,200 Shakespeare documented dot org. It reproduces in digital facsimile. 135 00:16:13,200 --> 00:16:21,280 All the documentary records relating to Shakespeare's theatre, including a title page of every extant edition. 136 00:16:21,280 --> 00:16:27,750 Now my wife has a crew, lots of royal associations, most notably following the early 18th century. 137 00:16:27,750 --> 00:16:33,390 Ed and Shakespeare. Biographer Nicholas. Row Row asserted. 138 00:16:33,390 --> 00:16:41,010 We don't have any other evidence for this that the Queen was so well pleased with that admirable character of Falstaff 139 00:16:41,010 --> 00:16:52,680 in the two parts of Henry the forth that she commanded him to continue it for one play and more and to show up in love. 140 00:16:52,680 --> 00:17:00,750 Falstaff is not going to go to see. Falstaff is not really in love in many ways of Windsor. 141 00:17:00,750 --> 00:17:05,790 But this is the sort of unlikely it's unlikely to be true in a literal sense. 142 00:17:05,790 --> 00:17:12,570 But of course, it's true in a sense of the kind of myths and stories we have wanted to tell ourselves about Shakespeare. 143 00:17:12,570 --> 00:17:18,990 I think Rose anecdote about Mary wives being written on Queen Elizabeth's commission 144 00:17:18,990 --> 00:17:25,140 speaks to a long fascination with potential encounters between Elizabeth and Shakespeare, 145 00:17:25,140 --> 00:17:31,720 which have animated a long kind of creative fiction which interweaves the two in the 18th century. 146 00:17:31,720 --> 00:17:40,200 The forger, William Henry Ireland, forged a letter purportedly from Elizabeth thanking Shakespeare for his pretty verses. 147 00:17:40,200 --> 00:17:47,160 And we can see that the charge that the desire for it to be true, that Shakespearean is both intimate in some way, 148 00:17:47,160 --> 00:17:54,560 right through to the encounter between them in the form of Shakespeare in Love. 149 00:17:54,560 --> 00:17:57,680 So Windsor then has a really prominent association with royalty. 150 00:17:57,680 --> 00:18:05,780 But what I want to talk about, about the place, the way it pulls significantly in the opposite demographic direction. 151 00:18:05,780 --> 00:18:14,360 What seems most important about the play now is less that it might have been written at the command of the queen or for the garter ceremony. 152 00:18:14,360 --> 00:18:20,480 And interestingly, these narratives look in retrospect like attempts to pimp the play towards a more socially 153 00:18:20,480 --> 00:18:28,090 elevated status as a kind of overcompensation for the fact that so resolutely middle class. 154 00:18:28,090 --> 00:18:34,790 So it's not really royal at all. So this is feeding this big effort to kind of make it more so. 155 00:18:34,790 --> 00:18:39,330 What's most obvious, that's to say about Merry Wives is it's really only shakes chicks. 156 00:18:39,330 --> 00:18:52,370 It's only comedy of the middling sort. William Harrison, the Elizabethan writer writing his description of England, 157 00:18:52,370 --> 00:18:59,870 wrote very helpfully about a kind of premodern class or status distinction in England. 158 00:18:59,870 --> 00:19:14,060 We in England, Harrison wrote, divide our people commonly into four sorts as gentlemen citizens or Burgess's yeomen and artifices 159 00:19:14,060 --> 00:19:21,920 or labourer's gentlemen citizens or Burgess's yeomen and artifices or Labour labourers. 160 00:19:21,920 --> 00:19:27,170 And the middling sort is the term historians tend to use about those people in the middle. 161 00:19:27,170 --> 00:19:33,170 Citizens Burgess's yeomen's. So neither gentleman or aristocrats. 162 00:19:33,170 --> 00:19:42,060 On the one hand, nor artifices. And labourers at the lower end of the spectrum, but the people in the middle. 163 00:19:42,060 --> 00:19:52,820 Windsor is middling, sort central, even though Sir Mark's Falstaff as an ungentlemanly sort of gentleman. 164 00:19:52,820 --> 00:19:57,350 Let's look again at the title page. That includes that information about royal performance. 165 00:19:57,350 --> 00:20:06,290 I'm still with the quarter 60 note to a most pleasant and excellent conceited comedy of Sir John Falstaff and the merry wives of Windsor, 166 00:20:06,290 --> 00:20:14,120 as we've already heard. But then it goes on intermixed with some very valuable and pleasing humours of Sir Hugh. 167 00:20:14,120 --> 00:20:22,800 The Welsh Welsh Knight Justice Shallow and his wise cousin, M. Slender, with the swaggering vein of H. 168 00:20:22,800 --> 00:20:26,870 A pistol and Corporal Negm. 169 00:20:26,870 --> 00:20:36,110 So this is a bustling, interconnected world with six named characters, plus the merry wives themselves as part of the title page. 170 00:20:36,110 --> 00:20:44,790 More, I think that we get on any other play by Shakespeare. This is a kind of social world, an interconnected world. 171 00:20:44,790 --> 00:20:50,140 And it's a world resolutely bourgeois or middling sort the fairy queen at the end 172 00:20:50,140 --> 00:20:55,630 of the May Wykes of Windsor is really not Spencer's poetic allegory of Elizabeth, 173 00:20:55,630 --> 00:21:05,170 but the doctor's housekeeper mistress quickly wearing an elaborate costume and supervising a cast of malevolent juvenile fairies. 174 00:21:05,170 --> 00:21:12,340 The Merry Wives of Windsor is the play of Shakespeare's that most consistently ignores blank verse in favour of prose. 175 00:21:12,340 --> 00:21:17,200 The ordinary unhide and language of the everyday here. 176 00:21:17,200 --> 00:21:21,910 There are no counts or dukes as in other comedies here. 177 00:21:21,910 --> 00:21:30,490 Middle class professionals, vicars, doctors, hotelier's, go to taverns, get their washing done, gossip, 178 00:21:30,490 --> 00:21:38,550 know each other's business swap books and reading recommendations, send their children to school and so on. 179 00:21:38,550 --> 00:21:46,410 Perhaps this small town bourgeois world is the equivalent of the market time politics of Stratford-Upon-Avon in which Shakespeare grew up. 180 00:21:46,410 --> 00:21:54,210 It's striking that the classroom scene features a school boy called William Shakespeare, 181 00:21:54,210 --> 00:22:00,960 as I've already said, never sets a play in the contemporary London where he made his career. 182 00:22:00,960 --> 00:22:06,840 Modern productions have really amplified this sense of provincial and domestic life in Windsor, 183 00:22:06,840 --> 00:22:11,560 with lots of different stage business choirboys playing conkers. 184 00:22:11,560 --> 00:22:24,540 Mock Tudor suburbia for wives plotting under hair salon Dryas in Bel Alexander's Royal Shakespeare Company production of 1985 with a cast of children, 185 00:22:24,540 --> 00:22:31,110 young people and older adults and a range of occupations and domestic locations. 186 00:22:31,110 --> 00:22:37,590 This play does seem to have a kind of provincial realism as the backdrop to its absurd plot. 187 00:22:37,590 --> 00:22:46,710 So Windsor, although it had been associated with the Royal Castle since early mediaeval times and although royal rituals are part of this place, 188 00:22:46,710 --> 00:22:49,860 De Neumar seems in fact for Shakespeare, 189 00:22:49,860 --> 00:22:57,990 a community of ordinary ish people rather than the widely socially stratified world of Illyria or of messenger. 190 00:22:57,990 --> 00:23:03,630 In Much Ado or the fairy monarchy, we get A Midsummer Night's Dream. 191 00:23:03,630 --> 00:23:10,290 So far then, we've addressed the wide Windsor question by acknowledging that it is a real English location and that crucially, 192 00:23:10,290 --> 00:23:17,410 it's provincial and middling sort rather than metropolitan. 193 00:23:17,410 --> 00:23:27,610 One of the things about Windsor residents is that they buy things, economic relationships are probably the most significant ones in this play. 194 00:23:27,610 --> 00:23:32,440 Property and propriety are closely linked. 195 00:23:32,440 --> 00:23:41,950 The play opens with just a shallow complaining about how Falstaff disdains these values of ownership and respect for ownership, 196 00:23:41,950 --> 00:23:45,550 which he thinks offers definitive of Windsor. 197 00:23:45,550 --> 00:23:57,280 He threatens to go to the star chamber with the complaint that Falstaff has beaten my men, killed my dear, and broke open my lodge. 198 00:23:57,280 --> 00:24:05,380 We can see that this act of disrespect for to Justice cello's property anticipates Falstaff claim, 199 00:24:05,380 --> 00:24:11,210 on those merry wives of the town and his cat canted attempt to seduce them. 200 00:24:11,210 --> 00:24:16,720 And it also anticipates the cuckold's forms with which he will be crowned in the weirdly 201 00:24:16,720 --> 00:24:23,320 phantasmagoric mock garter ceremony in Windsor Great Park with which the play ends. 202 00:24:23,320 --> 00:24:32,110 Establishing the plot on the basis of property and theft, that is to say, establishes one of its most important themes. 203 00:24:32,110 --> 00:24:37,520 Many wives pre-date the popular comic genre of the early 17th century. 204 00:24:37,520 --> 00:24:43,660 That's all about city life and the economic self-interest to which human relationships 205 00:24:43,660 --> 00:24:49,850 have been cheerfully subordinated in the companion series to this lectures. 206 00:24:49,850 --> 00:24:56,020 These lectures are called Not Shakespeare. There are lectures on Middleton's chase made in Cheapside and Dekkers, 207 00:24:56,020 --> 00:25:02,650 the shoemaker's holiday, which might be relevant to this contemporary near contemporary genre. 208 00:25:02,650 --> 00:25:06,220 So Many Wives isn't a city comedy because, as we've been saying, 209 00:25:06,220 --> 00:25:14,170 it's not set in the city and it predates those popular plays of the early 17th century, which are. 210 00:25:14,170 --> 00:25:23,830 But it does show with city comedy an interest in the material in stuff that has been of particular interest to contemporary critics. 211 00:25:23,830 --> 00:25:30,700 I want to try and think about that interest in relation to one particular episode in the play. 212 00:25:30,700 --> 00:25:36,160 The humiliation of Falstaff in the laundry basket. 213 00:25:36,160 --> 00:25:46,810 This scene gives us some of the components we now associate with fast physical use of props for farcical purposes in the plot of Merry White. 214 00:25:46,810 --> 00:25:51,820 So far, Falstaff, in a kind of romantic version of spread betting, 215 00:25:51,820 --> 00:26:00,550 has sent identical and unsolicited love letters to two wives of the town, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page. 216 00:26:00,550 --> 00:26:09,160 As the wives recognise letter for letter. But the name of Page and Ford differs. 217 00:26:09,160 --> 00:26:17,620 There's some suggestion Archie Falstaff has got some printed love letters made with spaces for the name of the woman. 218 00:26:17,620 --> 00:26:21,340 These letters include the winning phrases. You are not young. 219 00:26:21,340 --> 00:26:25,660 No more am I. Go to them. There is sympathy. You are, Mary. 220 00:26:25,660 --> 00:26:30,010 And so am I. You love Sack and so do I. 221 00:26:30,010 --> 00:26:33,120 If the love of a soldier can suffice, 222 00:26:33,120 --> 00:26:40,270 it struck me reading this letter that it's got a relation both to the lungs wooing scene of Henry the Fifth at the end of that play, 223 00:26:40,270 --> 00:26:45,880 and perhaps to Hamlet's curiously flat lover actor to Ophelia. 224 00:26:45,880 --> 00:26:53,650 That's right out in his. So Falstaff is short of money and his main interest in these women is economic rather than romantic. 225 00:26:53,650 --> 00:27:06,030 And so the plot turns like those later city comedies on money or on sex as a commodity with a particular economic exchange value. 226 00:27:06,030 --> 00:27:12,820 Mr. Mrs. Ford and Paige, of course, confide in each other and they discover this double insult. 227 00:27:12,820 --> 00:27:19,440 Not only has he made advances to respectable married women, but he's done it to both of them at the same time. 228 00:27:19,440 --> 00:27:27,470 And they said Falstaff up for punishment. One of the long discussed definitions of Shakespearean comedy connects it to festival 229 00:27:27,470 --> 00:27:33,250 traditions often related to the Russian critic Mikhail Back Tienes influential idea. 230 00:27:33,250 --> 00:27:40,190 The Carnival World for Bakhtin Carnival was a form of cultural subversion, which he argued, 231 00:27:40,190 --> 00:27:47,300 revelled in the suspension of norms and the indulgence of bodily and carnal impulses. 232 00:27:47,300 --> 00:27:54,710 But it's important that our idea of a festival doesn't over sentimentalise it over sentimentalising. 233 00:27:54,710 --> 00:27:59,510 Carnival is particularly dangerous when coupled with the idea of Shakespeare, 234 00:27:59,510 --> 00:28:08,270 a combination that's long served the ideologic conservative myth of Mary England and nostalgic vision of a small town England, 235 00:28:08,270 --> 00:28:11,840 of thatched cottages and roast beef and good fellowship. 236 00:28:11,840 --> 00:28:16,040 That, of course, never existed and we can see the shared term. 237 00:28:16,040 --> 00:28:24,140 Mary in Mary, England. And here in Merry Wives connect this idealised national construct with Shakespeare's play. 238 00:28:24,140 --> 00:28:31,310 And indeed the popularity of Merry Wives of Windsor in the 18th century probably coincided with the consolidation of this nostalgic 239 00:28:31,310 --> 00:28:41,360 idea to part of why Mary Wives as popular was it would seem to be super English in a way that people wanted to have presented. 240 00:28:41,360 --> 00:28:51,740 But in fact, if we look at festival and ritual traditions here in Merry Wives, they're actually rather bracing and also normative in their impulses. 241 00:28:51,740 --> 00:29:06,200 Rituals like scapegoating or social expressions like the charity fari for kind of carting or procession that shames people in social communities. 242 00:29:06,200 --> 00:29:14,570 The charity VARI, these are designed to bring social behaviour towards the norm, that conservative, that is to say, rather than transgressive. 243 00:29:14,570 --> 00:29:24,500 They pick out behaviour that they don't think appropriate and they ridicule and humiliated in order to change it. 244 00:29:24,500 --> 00:29:28,970 Now we tend to emphasise transgression and subversion in Shakespeare's comedies, 245 00:29:28,970 --> 00:29:35,210 not least because we want our artists to challenge rather than reinforce social norms. 246 00:29:35,210 --> 00:29:42,290 It's good to remember that there's actually quite a lot of authoritarian and conservative discipline in Shakespeare's comedies, 247 00:29:42,290 --> 00:29:50,780 from the violence repeatedly meted out to the certain queens in comedy of errors to the thoroughgoing humiliation of the upwardly mobile Malvolio 248 00:29:50,780 --> 00:30:02,180 in Twelfth Night comedy here is less in the service of social subversion and more provides the shock troops of conservatism and moral order. 249 00:30:02,180 --> 00:30:04,610 I think the same is true in Merry Wives. 250 00:30:04,610 --> 00:30:15,770 We see a kind of ritual humiliation devised by the wives and corroborated by the Windsor community against their would be seducer. 251 00:30:15,770 --> 00:30:23,360 Windsor itself in the final scene, which includes all its characters in the park in Windsor Great Park Thunder, 252 00:30:23,360 --> 00:30:26,190 one of the great symbols of Mary England Hurn, 253 00:30:26,190 --> 00:30:37,250 the Hunter's oak tree takes a comic but unmistakeable moral revenge against Falstaff schoolboys dressed as fairies singing a puritanical rhyme, 254 00:30:37,250 --> 00:30:41,950 fie on sinful fantasy, fie on lust and luxury. 255 00:30:41,950 --> 00:30:49,790 Lust is but a bloody fire kindled with unchaste desire fagging heart whose flames as fire is thought to blow them higher and higher. 256 00:30:49,790 --> 00:30:55,640 Pinch him. Fairies mutually. Pinch him for his villainy. 257 00:30:55,640 --> 00:31:03,020 The fairies use the rhythm of the other world. That Shakespeare uses to designate man that's witches or the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream. 258 00:31:03,020 --> 00:31:11,150 But here they are knowingly performing the supernatural within a deeply mundane material world and enforcing bourgeois, 259 00:31:11,150 --> 00:31:18,970 ultimately bourgeois behaviour. Fie on the sinful fantasy cry on lust luxury. 260 00:31:18,970 --> 00:31:26,280 Now discouraging a full stop begins earlier, though, here in the scene with a laundry basket. 261 00:31:26,280 --> 00:31:31,080 What happens to fall stuff in this scene is kind of a. fertility ritual. 262 00:31:31,080 --> 00:31:35,610 He arrives at the house of Mr. Sport thinking he's going to have sex with her. 263 00:31:35,610 --> 00:31:43,500 And instead, quite it's quite different and quite a different scene unfolds. 264 00:31:43,500 --> 00:31:48,630 The lover arrives full of compliments. Have I caught my heavenly jewel? 265 00:31:48,630 --> 00:31:53,640 Why now? Let me die for I have lived long enough. 266 00:31:53,640 --> 00:32:03,390 Mistress Page arrives to this compromising assignation, Falstaff, as the stage direction has it, stands behind the iris. 267 00:32:03,390 --> 00:32:06,160 You can see that this is the in that fast, isn't it? 268 00:32:06,160 --> 00:32:15,830 That the B lover caught and having to hide in some piece of the wardrobe or in some piece of domestic furniture. 269 00:32:15,830 --> 00:32:25,930 Mr. Page informs them that M. Ford has heard that his wife is entertaining a man alone at home and he's coming back in a fury. 270 00:32:25,930 --> 00:32:28,380 There's a general panic. Although this has, of course, 271 00:32:28,380 --> 00:32:35,480 all been set up by the women and it's agreed that Falstaff should be very quickly hidden in the laundry or [INAUDIBLE] basket. 272 00:32:35,480 --> 00:32:40,590 But we have seen brought on stage for this very moment, a few minutes before his arrival, 273 00:32:40,590 --> 00:32:45,900 and he agrees to servants have the unenviable job of heaving this enormous 274 00:32:45,900 --> 00:32:51,030 burden off the stage as the furious master thought comes in at the same door. 275 00:32:51,030 --> 00:32:54,930 So far, it is all about things, people going in and out of doors, 276 00:32:54,930 --> 00:33:04,900 sort of at the same time or in that kind of split second time in the laundry basket full of dirty linen is both a great stage prop and a moral symbol. 277 00:33:04,900 --> 00:33:09,690 False starts behaviour earns him not the carnal pleasure of Mr. Sports body, 278 00:33:09,690 --> 00:33:19,740 but rather a kind of intimacy with the dirty clothing that has been next to it in amongst the filth and grease of the family's washing, 279 00:33:19,740 --> 00:33:26,160 his moral character is clearly displayed as he himself later recounts. 280 00:33:26,160 --> 00:33:36,030 This is a distinctly humiliating form of carnival. It's not exactly Bakhtin ideas of revelling in the physical and in the bodily. 281 00:33:36,030 --> 00:33:40,860 It's actually a kind of ritual of disgust or shaming. 282 00:33:40,860 --> 00:33:51,780 This is him describing his his ordeal to become just like a good Bilbo in the circumference of a pack, 283 00:33:51,780 --> 00:34:00,780 Hillard's to point hill to head and then to be stopped in like a strong distillation with stinking clothes that threated in their own grease. 284 00:34:00,780 --> 00:34:10,200 Think of that. A man of my kidney. Think of that. The term is subject to heat as butter, a man of continual dissolution and thaw. 285 00:34:10,200 --> 00:34:14,460 It was a miracle to escape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, 286 00:34:14,460 --> 00:34:25,680 when I was more than half stewed in grease like a Dutch dish to be thrown into the Thames and cooled glowing cot in that surge like a horseshoe. 287 00:34:25,680 --> 00:34:33,270 The humour of this account is amplified by the fact that he's telling the man he would have cuckolded the masochistically jealous master, 288 00:34:33,270 --> 00:34:43,230 Ford has disguised himself and befriended Falstaffian in order to hear even more about how Falstaff wants to get a wife. 289 00:34:43,230 --> 00:34:50,460 This is a comic version of those tormented relationships between husband and and lover. 290 00:34:50,460 --> 00:34:58,830 Which has also weirdly triangulated in Shakespeare's insistent recurse to this story of the jealous husband. 291 00:34:58,830 --> 00:35:01,830 So the relationship between Othello and DRDO, for instance, 292 00:35:01,830 --> 00:35:07,680 or between Posthumus and the Arkema in symbolism that we talked about a couple of weeks ago. 293 00:35:07,680 --> 00:35:09,000 But back to that Shamy. 294 00:35:09,000 --> 00:35:19,110 First off undergoes a shaming ritual in which is presented to public view in the theatre as well as in Windsor in a humiliating and exposing manner. 295 00:35:19,110 --> 00:35:25,680 But it does not stop there. This is a scene choreographed by the women to re-educate the men. 296 00:35:25,680 --> 00:35:30,280 I do not know which pleases me better, says Mr Sport, after they've all gone. 297 00:35:30,280 --> 00:35:37,050 But my husband is deceived. Also, John, my husband is deceived or Sir John. 298 00:35:37,050 --> 00:35:43,270 But what happens slightly later complicates the gender politics of this narrative. 299 00:35:43,270 --> 00:35:47,880 Falstaff arranges another hour Diggnation with Mr. Sward, 300 00:35:47,880 --> 00:35:56,490 and of course he brags of it to the disguised master forwarder who turns up again to try to catch his wife in Ferrante. 301 00:35:56,490 --> 00:36:07,020 This time, Falstaff has to escape, disguised as what Mr. Ford calls My Maids and the fat woman of Brentford. 302 00:36:07,020 --> 00:36:15,690 So my maids aren't the fat woman of breath. Bradford House, for some reason, left a very large gown in which Falstaff can be disguised. 303 00:36:15,690 --> 00:36:23,250 Falstaff exits to prepare this ridiculous costume, and Mr Sport explains her method. 304 00:36:23,250 --> 00:36:29,430 I would my husband would meet him in this shape. He cannot abide the old woman of Brentford. 305 00:36:29,430 --> 00:36:35,880 He swears she's a witch for bait. My house and have threatened to beat her. 306 00:36:35,880 --> 00:36:44,730 Sure enough, Master Ford encounters the fat old woman and beats her roundly in frustration at having turned the laundry basket upside down, 307 00:36:44,730 --> 00:36:50,490 this time to try to find the seducer. Two things interests me here. 308 00:36:50,490 --> 00:36:52,980 One is material and one is social. 309 00:36:52,980 --> 00:37:02,500 Firstly, the material we can see that false starts humiliations in these two aborted wooing scenes, a closely collocated with women's clothing. 310 00:37:02,500 --> 00:37:08,760 We know a lot about how women characters in Shakespeare approach men's clothing in the play. 311 00:37:08,760 --> 00:37:14,190 We often talk about kind of cross dressing or gender blurring of gender fluidity in that direction. 312 00:37:14,190 --> 00:37:22,610 We don't often talk about it this way around. So these humiliations are close to collocated with women's clothing, 313 00:37:22,610 --> 00:37:34,010 either the dirty linen in the laundry basket or the borrowed outfit of the old woman of Brentford in their fabulous book on Renaissance clothing. 314 00:37:34,010 --> 00:37:43,250 Peter Stalley Breast and Rosalyn Jones show how closely clothing was associated with personhood in this period. 315 00:37:43,250 --> 00:37:49,250 In fact, the book actually argues that attitudes to clothing are one of the signal signs of a difference between 316 00:37:49,250 --> 00:37:55,220 how we see ourselves now and how people in the Renaissance saw themselves for the early models. 317 00:37:55,220 --> 00:38:00,380 They suggest clothes were material mnemonics. 318 00:38:00,380 --> 00:38:04,460 They were they were at the site of personhood material mnemonics. 319 00:38:04,460 --> 00:38:11,950 Whereas for us, they say these are essentially detachable and disposable goods. 320 00:38:11,950 --> 00:38:15,730 According to this account, the specific form of false attacks, humiliation, 321 00:38:15,730 --> 00:38:21,490 mocks his attempts at masculine virility by recategorize in him in the female sphere. 322 00:38:21,490 --> 00:38:32,890 He's less a ladies man as he would want to be and more if feminised, feminised by proximity to this clothing is a really good way to look at any play. 323 00:38:32,890 --> 00:38:39,190 This play particularly, but at any play to work out what objects or props or stuff it would need to be performed. 324 00:38:39,190 --> 00:38:46,120 That can often point you to something quite specific and significant about it. 325 00:38:46,120 --> 00:38:47,170 So that's the material. 326 00:38:47,170 --> 00:38:54,700 The second point about is about the social function of Falstaff humiliation and how this relates to our central question about Windsor. 327 00:38:54,700 --> 00:38:58,600 Falstaff is completely outclassed in Windsor. 328 00:38:58,600 --> 00:39:06,700 The challenge to his strictly values that made him such a hit in the Henry the fourth place seems to be completely neutralised here. 329 00:39:06,700 --> 00:39:14,320 Its intrusion into the boys to our world of Windsor creates barely a ripple as that laundry basket sinks into the river. 330 00:39:14,320 --> 00:39:19,300 Windsor values are utterly dominant in the play for staff's own. 331 00:39:19,300 --> 00:39:34,030 Self-interest is never a threat. Perhaps that's actually because Windsor and Falstaff are ideological, if not literal bedfellows, after all, 332 00:39:34,030 --> 00:39:44,890 Falstaff tries to seduce Mistress Paige because she has all the rule of her husband's purse and he have a legion of angels. 333 00:39:44,890 --> 00:39:53,140 So Mr. Paige is attracted to him because she controls M. Page's money. 334 00:39:53,140 --> 00:39:58,300 But I'm anticipating, again, the ideological contours of city comedy romantic, 335 00:39:58,300 --> 00:40:04,820 another relationships are so commodified in this play that full staff's attraction, 336 00:40:04,820 --> 00:40:11,470 the attraction mistress page for Falstaff, is really the attraction of all the figures in the play to each other. 337 00:40:11,470 --> 00:40:16,690 So that's to say Falstaff is not an outsider to the values of Windsor. 338 00:40:16,690 --> 00:40:27,250 But in some ways, the focus for the focus for the Falstaff echoes rather than challenges the values of the society in which he 339 00:40:27,250 --> 00:40:34,900 finds himself considered is perhaps most clearly in the subplot between Young and Paige and her chosen suitor. 340 00:40:34,900 --> 00:40:41,020 Fenton and herself is really a pretty uninteresting and underdeveloped character. 341 00:40:41,020 --> 00:40:48,220 So she's a structural figure. The young woman who's going to get married rather than anything more interesting. 342 00:40:48,220 --> 00:40:56,890 And in fact, one of the one of the striking points about Mary wives is that it organises itself not around young virgins who are about to be married, 343 00:40:56,890 --> 00:41:02,560 but the state of marriage itself, something which we don't so often see in Shakespeare's plays, 344 00:41:02,560 --> 00:41:11,080 which tend to be invested in the period right up to marriage or in an unexplained widowhood sometime later. 345 00:41:11,080 --> 00:41:18,100 But Anne Page is characterised in distinctly economic terms from the start. 346 00:41:18,100 --> 00:41:28,030 What is attractive about her is her dowry. She has 700 pounds of moneys and gold and silver. 347 00:41:28,030 --> 00:41:34,510 Even the romance plot in this play. That's to say it's characterised by economic and proprietary interest. 348 00:41:34,510 --> 00:41:40,600 This the story of the young characters and their wooing is not separate from this. 349 00:41:40,600 --> 00:41:44,640 The more washed up narrative with Falstaff and the wives. 350 00:41:44,640 --> 00:41:50,980 Fact it's just the same thing. Full staffs financial motives for wooing others. 351 00:41:50,980 --> 00:42:00,400 The winds of rule, not the exception, is a lucrative marriage commodity fought over by a trio of suitors, 352 00:42:00,400 --> 00:42:05,980 including Master Slender and the comic French Doctor Keyes. 353 00:42:05,980 --> 00:42:15,370 Of course, in true new comedy fashion, new comedy of those comedies where Young Love outwits the blocking figures does parental 354 00:42:15,370 --> 00:42:21,830 opposing figures in true new comedy fashion and has already chosen Fenton as her preference. 355 00:42:21,830 --> 00:42:26,690 And that's what's going to come come around in the end as a great source. 356 00:42:26,690 --> 00:42:37,780 There's a great twist at the end where the other two suitors are somehow made to marry or at least pair off with boys dressed as women. 357 00:42:37,780 --> 00:42:45,470 Quite an interesting element of those questions in Shakespeare, which is not discussed as often as some of the more obvious cases. 358 00:42:45,470 --> 00:42:51,500 But Anne's mother, Mistress Page, is driven by the same economic motives as the rest of Windsor planning, 359 00:42:51,500 --> 00:42:55,340 actually, that the doctor should be her son in law. 360 00:42:55,340 --> 00:43:00,130 He is well moneyed and his friends potent at court. 361 00:43:00,130 --> 00:43:08,960 So Mistress Paige is herself interested in money and in power and in the kind of economics of marriage. 362 00:43:08,960 --> 00:43:22,280 Not a romantic love. Fenton, too, is associated with money, paying out bribes and hoping for the success of his suit a quote, recompense. 363 00:43:22,280 --> 00:43:29,510 So Fenton and Falstaff look like moral opposites in the play, but they actually turn out to be rather similar. 364 00:43:29,510 --> 00:43:36,800 Windsor is a byword for a comfortable bourgeois world in which money is the dominant value. 365 00:43:36,800 --> 00:43:41,480 And it's interesting that Shakespeare locates that in a provincial town rather than 366 00:43:41,480 --> 00:43:45,920 the London that's just coming into view as a location for contemporary dramas. 367 00:43:45,920 --> 00:43:48,530 By far by his fellow playwrights. 368 00:43:48,530 --> 00:43:58,970 So I suppose what I'm arguing for here is that Windsor helps us to see married wives as a kind of proto citizen comedy set outside London. 369 00:43:58,970 --> 00:44:09,200 It could be fruitfully compared with work by Middleton or Dekker or Johnson or Marston, or it could interestingly sit alongside Merchant of Venice. 370 00:44:09,200 --> 00:44:11,870 Measure for measure or comedy of errors. 371 00:44:11,870 --> 00:44:22,870 Also, Shakespeare plays particularly concerned with economic communities and the relationship between desire, exchange and commodity. 372 00:44:22,870 --> 00:44:28,090 One last element of the pair I want to suggest to you is texture. 373 00:44:28,090 --> 00:44:33,910 I've talked quite a bit about that Busi title page of the 60 NO2 Quarto text of the play. 374 00:44:33,910 --> 00:44:38,150 And there's a second edition in 16. 19 in 16. 375 00:44:38,150 --> 00:44:44,170 Twenty three. The play appears in print again as part of the First Folio. 376 00:44:44,170 --> 00:44:53,200 Like many plays with a similar printing history, Merry Wives is quite different in its quarter incarnation than in the Folio. 377 00:44:53,200 --> 00:45:01,360 The quarter is only about two thirds of the length of the folio, and it doesn't have some notable scenes that I've already mentioned, 378 00:45:01,360 --> 00:45:09,990 including the discussion of the Guard ceremony and the comic schoolroom scene in which young William struggles with Latin. 379 00:45:09,990 --> 00:45:18,370 Now you'll know the current thinking about Var. early Texas has moved a long way from the old bad quarter designation, 380 00:45:18,370 --> 00:45:23,300 were more likely to think about Shakespeare or if you remember or as well, last week, 381 00:45:23,300 --> 00:45:34,400 another playwright revising his work and to countenance the idea that the longer text is an adaptation of the shorter rather than the shorter, 382 00:45:34,400 --> 00:45:41,450 is always a cut or inadequate version of the longer, as I've suggested in his lectures before. 383 00:45:41,450 --> 00:45:48,110 The interesting question now about textual values is not why, but so what? 384 00:45:48,110 --> 00:45:49,760 We're less interested in injera, 385 00:45:49,760 --> 00:46:00,100 ingenious theories about how the texts come to be and more in the theatrical specificity or formal revision that might be displayed there. 386 00:46:00,100 --> 00:46:09,900 Recognising that a play text as a script for a potential performance never really exists in a permanent or ideal form on the page. 387 00:46:09,900 --> 00:46:17,120 So what I think turns out to be interesting here, there's not been a huge amount of work on courtroom term Foleo Merry Wives, 388 00:46:17,120 --> 00:46:24,410 but my sense is that Foleo Merry Wives is more winsley, more interested in Windsor, 389 00:46:24,410 --> 00:46:31,190 more economically motivated, more specifically located than the term. 390 00:46:31,190 --> 00:46:33,440 Many of the things I've been talking about, about this play, 391 00:46:33,440 --> 00:46:40,880 therefore have the great critical advantage of being easy to spot because there's a comparative text where they don't exist. 392 00:46:40,880 --> 00:46:44,570 The comparison is a really easy, 393 00:46:44,570 --> 00:46:52,400 critical method to work out what's significant because you can see what the what the text looks like without those elements in it. 394 00:46:52,400 --> 00:46:59,930 The two taxand marry wives then offer a really interesting case study and a less explored example of textual variance than are now familiar, 395 00:46:59,930 --> 00:47:05,750 tragic examples of Lear or Hamlet. And it may be that editing, like the rest of Shakespeare criticism, 396 00:47:05,750 --> 00:47:14,660 has been more interested in the sort of intrinsic seriousness of everything about tragedy, that it has been able to be about comedy. 397 00:47:14,660 --> 00:47:17,570 To bring us back to our central question, why Windsor? 398 00:47:17,570 --> 00:47:26,900 I think the answer to that might be different, whether you're reading the 60 NO2 or the 16 twenty three text of marry wives, or to be more accurate, 399 00:47:26,900 --> 00:47:31,940 whether you're reading the play called a Most Pleasant and Xman conceited comedy at Sir John 400 00:47:31,940 --> 00:47:37,340 Falstaff and the married white of Windsor in 69 two or the one in sixteen twenty three, 401 00:47:37,340 --> 00:47:41,120 which we call the Merry Wives of Windsor. 402 00:47:41,120 --> 00:47:48,350 So I've been suggesting that Windsor has a particular role to play in Shakespeare's only contemporaneous English play, 403 00:47:48,350 --> 00:47:53,720 that it points to particular communal and social values that link this comedy with the 404 00:47:53,720 --> 00:47:58,910 economic and moral themes of slightly later citizen plays generally located in London. 405 00:47:58,910 --> 00:48:06,890 Settings have suggested, finally, that looking at the two distinct plays published as the Quarter and Folio, 406 00:48:06,890 --> 00:48:11,510 my wives can help sharpen some of those factors through a comparison. 407 00:48:11,510 --> 00:48:15,020 Next week I will talk about the second part of Henry the Six. 408 00:48:15,020 --> 00:48:22,250 But don't worry, I'll be talking about why the first part appetitive the sixth is not quite as necessary to that plane as you might have imagined. 409 00:48:22,250 --> 00:48:29,304 In fact, I think my question for the lecture next week is going to be why up to maybe I'll see you then.