The Merry Wives of Windsor

Generally, the modernization of Shakespeare’s plays hasn’t worked for me; because more is lost than gained by the updating. 

UTAH SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL’S transposing of THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR to the 1920’s, with twenties music added, is a happy exception, brighting Shakespeare’s lightest comic farce and probably a good intro, into Shakespeare, on stage, for reluctant theatre goers, who regarded their enforced reading of Shakespeare in high school as a punishment. 

It is delightful holiday fun, despite Harold Bloom’s lament that in this play Shakespeare has turned Bloom’s favorite character, Sir John Falstaff into a clown, Falstaff seems to agree when he says:

“Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in ’t.

(Bardolph exits.)

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow

of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?

Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my

brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a

dog for a New Year’s gift. (’Sblood,) the rogues

slighted me into the river with as little remorse as

they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies,

fifteen i’ th’ litter! And you may know by my size

that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bot-

tom were as deep as hell, I should down. I had

been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and

“shallow—a death that I abhor, for the water swells

a man, and what a thing should I have been when

I had been swelled! (By the Lord,) I should have

been a mountain of mummy.”

A. C. Bradley concurs:

[Falstaff is] “baffled, duped, treated like dirty linen, beaten, burnt, pricked, mocked, insulted, and, worst of all, repentant and didactic. It is horrible.”

Is it horrible? a conventual, comic, farcical, screwball, love plot with sophisticated and witty dialogue. It is horrible that the Sir John Falstaff of Henry IV can be reduced to this clown as we all have been by: hormones, infatuation, unrequited love, jealousy, lust, heartbreak, desire—and love. 

When the belly laughs are over, it’s not deep thinking we are left with, but reflections on our own past clowning, and the tragic reverse face of Comedy. Are we wiser?

As Sir John says:

 “Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it,

that it wants matter to prevent so gross o’erreach-

ing as this?”

From my tub to yours

Carpe Diem,

Carl