(8) The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a singular play in Shakespeare’s dramatic canon. Unlike most (all?) of his other plays, this one is set in Elizabethan England, not in Venice, Athens, Vienna, etc., but in The Bard’s own backyard. He also decides to make this a middle class affair, with the characters and action (with one notable exception…more on this later), circling around the loves, lives, and losses of the English middle class, circa 1600. This is clearly meant to be a play for The People. Indeed, I read somewhere that Friedrich Engels (co-writer of the Communist Manifesto) was a big fan, mainly because of the strong proletariat tone of the play. Shakespeare goes to great lengths to construct this façade of the everyday familiar, including the settings. Locales such as the English town of Windsor, the Garter Inn, Datchet Mead, etc. create a clear sense of the common. The Merry Wives is a definite effort to connect directly with his contemporaries through time, place, and action.

The question, then, is why? Or even more intriguingly, why only here, with this one play? It would seem (at least to me) that a real easy way to gather an audience is to reflect them like a mirror (however modestly they act, people like looking at themselves, right?), to show them by proxy, on stage and in public, to highlight. This creates a link of identification and recognition, a link that allows the artist to then gather his crowd and make his mark. But, again, Shakespeare generally avoids this. He more often goes far away, to lands with strange and foreign names, and even stranger and more foreign characters (and creatures…think A Midsummer Night’s Dream).

He writes what he does not know (at least in this respect), which I think is fascinating. It is a simple entertainment to show something new and foreign (it is inherently interesting to at once find yourself on the Acropolis in Athens or dockside in Venice). However, in most cases Shakespeare seems to veer away from this, eschewing the familiar in favor of the exotic. What is interesting here is that the plays, taken in their entirety, do not change in tenor based on the locale. His characters, with their flowery Greek or Italian names, living in their flowery Greek or Italian towns, are of course only Elizabethans in disguise. They were his contemporaries set aside, making one wonder about the implications of such contrasts, the implications of the familiar within the estranged. By forcing his audience to view themselves through another lens, is Shakespeare saying something here, something about the transience of it all perhaps? It seems to me that this is a cornerstone of his technique, this idea of separation, contrast, and difference.