Once More into the Preech: The Merry Wives' English Pedagogy

KRUSTY THE CLOWN	The young people today, they think comedy is dirty words. It's not. It's words that sound dirty, like mukluk.
FORD	Buck, buck, buck! ay, buck!
EVANS	What is the focative case, William?1

Bawdy—the inescapable Elizabethan habit of sexual innuendo—is everywhere in the text of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Lecherous interpretations hover around every turn of the text for those dirty-minded enough to see them (which is to say, everybody²): interpretations both of individual words, such as buck and focative (Evans's "frittering" blunder for vocative), and of the larger points of the plot. Just as fuck lurks behind buck, so, too, does a good old-fashioned adulterous fabliau shadow Falstaff's beleaguered courtship of Mistresses Page and Ford—in his mind, at least, not to mention that of Mrs. Ford's husband. That fabliau is only one of many amorous and amoral intertexts pressing on the characters' speech for inclusion in the play's action, intertexts that even when contemporary (such as Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd") depend on the polymorphous erotic possibilities of Latinity. Thus it is that the "entertainment" Falstaff claims to spy in Mrs. Ford's "familiar style" presents itself in his imagination as a Latin sentence he must "construe," and to enjoy her, he proposes to "translate . . . her will, out of honesty into English" (1.3.46, 49-50).

Yet the action never admits any of these hovering erotic possibilities, because the wives do not. Latin words may have seven genders and a plethora of possible endings, but English words and English boys have only one end, which is reliably available for a disciplinary thrashing: "if you forget your qui's, your [quae's], and your quod's [i.e., confuse the genders of the relative pronoun], you must be preeches [i.e., breeched]" (4.1.77-79), Evans warns the adolescent Will Page and, by extension, adolescent wills everywhere. As Patricia Parker and Elizabeth Pittenger have detailed, a whole theory of bawdy is present in the Latin lesson, with the pederastic implications of Evans's interrogation of the boy corrected, in Quickly's "ignorance," to heteroerotic ones (1.1.176-77).³ But, under Mrs. Page's supervision of the scene, all those deviant meanings—none of which she gives any sign of understanding, any more than she does the Latin itself—are corralled into her evaluation of whether her son has studied well enough to avoid a beating. In the domestic setting of this play it is the wives who are arbiters of the mother tongue, and they are determined to demonstrate that Latin's irreducible bawdiness can be contained in the surface of English as innocent merriment, without corrupting the behavior of those who speak it. As Mrs. Page says,

We'll leave a proof, by that which we do,
Wives may be merry, and yet honest too:
We do not act that often jest and laugh;
'Tis old, but true: still swine eats all the draff.

(4.2.104-7)

Here, indeed, it is the incompetent speakers who are given to lechery. Linguistic mastery is the proof of discipline in the play and gives the masters warrant to enact that discipline upon babblers and sexual deviants alike—because the two are alike. The driveling Slender has disturbingly little interest in Anne Page, while Ford's voyeuristic jealousy leads him to speak "lunatics" and to demand to enter discourse as a new proverb: "If I find not what I seek. . . . [l]et them say of me, 'As jealous as Ford, that search'd a hollow walnut for his wive's leman'" (4.2.124, 161-64). Falstaff, finally, quite literally misconstrues the wives; and they teach him how to read them properly upon his body, when he would have read his lecherous lesson upon theirs. There is plenty of focking and bucking in this play, but that doesn't mean there...