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Falstaff and the Renewal of Windsor

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

J. A. Bryant Jr.
J. A. Bryant Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky, Lexington
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Abstract

The neglect of The Merry Wives of Windsor among scholars and critics results from a failure to appreciate the special nature of the play. Although superficially structured like Roman comedy, the play is really built upon the succession of Falstaff episodes, which give meaning to the Fenton-Anne plot and provide a resolution for it. In this play Falstaff is no lecher but a discredited old adventurer, down on his luck, who becomes the scapegoat for a community afflicted generally by the lust and greed that some of its members seek to make him solely responsible for. The humiliations that they impose upon him are similar to those traditionally inflicted upon the scapegoat figures of European folk custom, and at the end of the play he has become the horned scapegoat indeed, the visible bearer of punishment, and the means whereby innocent love may triumph in Windsor in spite of parental vanity and economic interests. Thus, with the punishment of Falstaff, death is once more temporarily defeated, and the renewal, appropriately celebrated in comedy, is presented for the approval of sympathetic audiences.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 89 , Issue 2 , March 1974 , pp. 296 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1974

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References

Note 1 in page 300 See, e.g., Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (1939; rpt. New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 118; and H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (1938; rpt. New York: Barnes and Noble, n.d.), pp. 192–93.

Note 2 in page 300 See Oscar J. Campbell, “The Italianate Background of The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Univ. of Michigan Publications in Language and Literature, No. 8 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1932), pp. 81–117.

Note 3 in page 301 Quotations from Shakespeare are taken from Shakespeare: Complete Plays and Poems, ed. William Allan Neilson and Charles Jarvis Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton, 1942).

Note 4 in page 301 “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1949), p. 69.

Note 5 in page 301 Frazer, The Golden Bough, 11 vols. (1911–15; rpt.

London: Macmillan, 1955); Cornford, The Origin of Attic Comedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1914); Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 3rd. ed. (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1922).

Note 6 in page 301 Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; rpt. Cleveland: World, 1963), pp. 206–09.

Note 7 in page 301 Feeling and Form (New York: Scribners, 1953), pp. 348–49.