The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (review)

"Merry Wives of Windsor is no doubt a very amusing play . . . but we should have liked it much better, if any one else had been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff." Thus begins Hazlitt's laconic response to one of Shakespeare's least performed dramas. Merry Wives has occasioned relatively little theatrical attention, and critics often turn to the play to compare Falstaff with the Falstaff in Henry IV. Although originally titled A Most pleasaunt and excellent conceited Comedie, of Sir John Falstaffe, and the merrie Wives of Windsor, Diana Van Fossen's staging emphasized the wives in the folio title known today. While not unique in her attempt to place the wives at center stage, Van Fossen nevertheless innovatively engaged puppetry to unearth socially progressive aspects of a play that is too often dismissed as Elizabethan farce. In doing so, she illuminated a tension between the play's bourgeois accoutrement and its subversion, challenging Hazlitt's assumption of Falstaff as the play's hero and offering instead a feminized interpretation in which the women of Windsor, acting as puppeteers, manipulate and exercise power over men.

Shakespeare's comedy concerns small-town Windsor and its middle-class denizens. Van Fossen set her production in the autumn of about 1910, with several of the men returning from the Boer wars in South Africa. One of the most impressive aspects of the production was Peter Hicks's luminescent set in an abstracted Tiffany style. Hicks converted the proscenium arch into a large mosaic stretched over the stage, with a large painting of Windsor Castle that served as a backdrop and reminder of the nobility nearby. Also in autumnal colors were large wooden doors, marked "Ford," "Page," and "The Garter" and reminiscent of classical Roman staging, that moved to indicate scene changes.

Wilbur Edwin Henry (Sir John Falstaff) in The Merry Wives of Windsor. (Photo: Stephen Poff.)

The major aesthetic and social contributions of Van Fossen's production were the puppet plays that bookended the performance. Serving as a prologue, a Punch and Judy show performed by Mistress Quickly established the major theme of the production: the rule and power of women over men. The play began when children rushed downstage to sit in front of the iconic red-and-white-striped puppet booth. In the puppet play, Punch, believing his wife Judy has cuckolded him, spies on her. Aware of her husband's suspicion, Judy concocts a situation that ends with Punch hidden beneath a handkerchief and beaten harshly for his mistrust. In this way, the puppet show anticipated not only the knockabout plot traditionally played for laughs in Shakespeare's play, but also the control of a wife over her husband. Later, in a sequence added to the final scene of the first act, Quickly removed the same Punch and Judy puppets from beneath her dress and sang of a cuckolded farmer. When confronted by one of Anne's suitors, Quickly held the cuckolded farmer puppet up to the man to suggest that he, like all the men in this production, was as imprudent as this cuckolded puppet.

These early puppet additions advanced the directorial and acting choices for the wives and their control and manipulation of Ford and Falstaff. Vanessa Morosco (Mistress Ford) and Cheri Vanden Heuvel (Mistress Page) depicted strong, capable, and clever wives. The production presented them as devoted friends who frequently mirrored each other's gestures. For instance, after realizing that they had received identical love letters from Falstaff, the two wives, back-to-back, folded their individual notes, stuffed them into their corsets, and identically adjusted themselves. As they plotted their revenge, they held hands, walked in each other's steps, and sat in each other's laps. Inseparable, they devised plans to humiliate the men for underestimating their abilities.

Even when puppets were not included in particular scenes, the production's staging depicted feminine power derived from masculine...