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While countless stagings of The Merry Wives of Windsor have been set in a bucolic "merrye olde England," Bill Alexander's 1985 RSC rendition took Shakespeare's representation of a 1590s English bourgeoisie, numerically anagrammatized its temporal setting, and placed it in the 1950s Macmillan years of postwar prosperity in Britain. Alexander depicted a suburban middle class enjoying the power of newfound affluence in an era whose watchword was "you never had it so good." Mistresses Ford and Page plotted their revenge on Falstaff while sitting under hair dryers and sipped gin and tonics in a comfortable living room while Ford ransacked the infamous buckbasket. One of the underlying concerns of this much-lauded production was the materialism of the time; theater programs even carried real period advertisements for consumer goods such as televisions, complete with prices. Alexander's vision was entirely apropos, as the idea that wealth had become both the measure of personal worth and a societal linchpin lies at the heart of Merry Wives, a play in which economic imperatives are never far from the surface. Falstaff dissolves his retinue and pursues the titular wives because he is penniless; Ford throws money at Falstaff to test his wife's fidelity; and Anne Page's matrimonial fate is governed by the wealth she represents and the capital she attracts. In the only work wherein Shakespeare ostensibly depicts his own contemporary society, it seems evident that cash values, rather than human ones, are firmly in control.
While often neglected in discussions of Shakespeare's comedic oeuvre, Merry Wives is both an intriguing and important play that warrants inclusion in any discussion of the dramatist's underlying attitudes toward the role played by money in society. The inclination of some to place it in the genre of Citizen Comedy seems apt, given that genre's preoccupation with economic motivations and the cozenage required to accumulate wealth. In both the main and subplot of Merry Wives, subterfuge driven by greed appears to be a societal norm. Yet the cynicism of Comedy is belied to a degree by the somewhat predictable resolution of the play's main plot, in which lessons are learned and the forces of avarice are turned back. In fact, the defeat of Falstaff seems so effortless that one might ask whether he ever did represent a threat to Windsor's values. Perhaps of greater interest is the much more opaque Anne Page subplot, which, in the end, offers none of the comfort engendered by the comeuppance of a humbled fortune hunter. This seemingly standard New Comedy tale of a young woman defying her parents to wed the man she loves is, upon closer examination, a consistently cynical exploration of the pervasiveness of economic imperatives in interpersonal relationships. Of particular interest here are the very different ways that the Anne-Fenton love story unfolds in the Merry Wives Quarto and Folio texts. Comparing the two versions reveals that the Folio foregrounds economic themes largely absent in the 1602 Quarto. While the differences between the Q and F versions have long been widely considered the result of the former being either a memorial reconstruction or an abridgement, the argument advanced here is that the Folio text is more likely a revision of the Quarto and that Shakespeare's motivation was to strengthen the indictment of cash and exchange values that lies at the heart of Merry Wives.
As noted above, Merry Wives is the only play that Shakespeare set in a recognizable, contemporary England, and its singularity in this respect suggests it contains his reactions to the economic world in which he lived. The Pages, the Fords, Shallow, Slender, Evans, and Doctor Caius collectively represent an English bourgeoisie (the latter two in spite of their Welsh and French pedigrees, respectively (1)) that grew in strength and numbers over the sixteenth century, and, in Shakespeare's only "English" comedy, their value system is shown to be sorely wanting.
Over the years, a good deal of Merry Wives criticism has focused on how Falstaff's presence poses a threat to Windsor from the outside. For example, Anne Barton argues that the Windsorites view Falstaff as "the intruder from another social and moral sphere ... a threat to the established order of a community." (2) Yet it is arguable that the "threat" of Falstaff exists more in the minds of critics than it does within Merry Wives. Under the direction of Page, its middle-class avatar, this society is fundamentally secure and self-assured. In the play's opening contretemps and in Sir John's campaign to bed Ford's wife and acquire his wealth, the threat of Falstaff seems all smoke with precious little fire. One might expect that the anachronistic thrusting of him into this bourgeois society would result in a puncturing of its pretensions and values similar to the way that notions of honor and duty come under attack in the Henry plays. Instead, it is Falstaff's pretensions that are deflated by economic reality, and he embarks upon his ultimately humiliating seduction of Mistress Ford simply because he is poverty-stricken.
Needless to say, money is front and center in Merry Wives' central plot. Falstaff means to romance Mistress Page because "she has all the rule of her husband's purse [and] he hath a legion of angels." (3) Thus, the main plot's stage is set, with the expectation that Falstaff will play the court card successfully as he does with the rural inhabitants in Henry IV Part 2. But in Merry Wives, expectations are thwarted, and Falstaff's deception is grounded without ever having taken flight. Mistresses Ford and Page are not taken in for a moment, and the plot reverses upon itself, as their schemes henceforth predominate. Those who wish to read Falstaff as a threat to the economic well-being of Windsor's citizenry must disregard how immediately that threat is neutralized. In no other Shakespearean play is a plot centered on deception so immediately seen through, and the resulting impression is that, far from being under attack from without, Windsor and its inhabitants are anything but vulnerable. What this comedy does seem to say is that the turn-of-the-century gentry were immune to the moral and economic rot represented by Falstaff--in short, his values are as anachronistic as his presence in the play. But perhaps the Falstaff plot in Merry Wives is nothing more than a highly entertaining red herring designed to reinforce a contemporary audience's complacency vis-a-vis their own moral and economic conduct. The main plot may indicate that mirth, wit, common sense, and an amiable sociability trump man's mercenary tendencies, but everything beyond it in Merry Wives suggests the opposite. Windsorites may be easily able to ward off the threat of Falstaff, but, in their egocentricity, they seem unaware of the extent to which they emulate his values. For example, Ford's dedication to the economic matrix is evident in his first encounter with Sir John; he is well aware that the prospect of cash is enough to enlist Falstaff's help, but he goes further and provides a supremely jaded philosophic slant on the way of the world, stating baldly that "if money go before, all ways do lie open" (2.2.160). While Sir John's reply, "Money is a good soldier, sir, and will on" (161), bestows a spurious dignity upon cash values with its invocation of military valor, this trade-off of mercenary aphorisms effectively renders the two men equal. Even near the play's end, instead of partaking in the happy resolution and joying at the confirmation of his wife's virtue, Ford insists on bringing economics to the fore with his demand that Falstaff repay him the funds he has advanced (5.5.165-67). For his part, Page, whose cool-headedness contrasts with Ford's choler throughout the play, contributes to the impression that it is Falstaff's financial status that marks him as an outsider. Following the Herne's Wood mix-ups, when the collected Windsorites take turns heaping abuse on Sir John, Page alone maligns him on an economic basis, calling Falstaff "as poor as Job" (154). It would appear that penury, as well as moral transgressions, runs contrary to Windsor's communal values. In the end, Falstaff's agenda of acquisition is decisively thwarted, and Ford's campaign to maintain his wife and fortune ends in triumph. As happy endings go, this one would certainly suggest that all is right in this bourgeois world. Yet Ford's behavior throughout the play plants seeds of doubt about Windsor's priorities. In the subplot of Merry Wives, those seeds come to fruition.
At first glance, the Anne Page-Fenton intrigue appears to be merely a conventional New Comedy plot. It certainly contains the essential elements as outlined by...
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