Sir John Falstaff & the Merry Wives of Windsor (review)

If brevity is indeed the "soul of wit," the 1602 Quarto text of Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsorexemplifies both, combining dramaturgical economy with cleverness in action. At roughly half the length of the 1623 Folio version, the Quarto's quick-witted Wives thus made short work of Sir John Falstaff in Florida State University's production, which was "part of the New Oxford Shakespeareproject to test and recover Shakespeare's 'Alternative Versions.'" In this context of testing and recovery, Terri Bourus and Michael M. Wagoner's production featured a cast making merry with comedic revenge and wielding wit as their principal instrument, a weapon as sure as a sword and in some ways more destructive.

Aligning themselves with the play's merry wives, Bourus and Wagoner highlighted a key aspect of the wives' characterization: their capacity to make use of what's at hand in the furtherance of a witty stratagem. To take their revenge in a patriarchal world arrayed against them, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page relied on the immediacy of women's wit unfolding in real time. When confronted with Falstaff's plan to seduce and defraud them, they immediately devised a series of punishing ripostes, each conceived in light of the limitations they face as women and adapted to emerging circumstances, amplifying the scope of their revenge.

Like the Wives, Bourus and Wagoner made use of what was on offer in the Quarto text, their playing space, and their youthful cast in a series of witty dramatic devices. Take for example the production's opening, which featured a clever twist on the dramaturgical practice of in media res. The actors took to the stage to announce a "few numbers" before the play began, featuring the song, "Has Anyone Seen My Cock?" sung by the cast and accompanied on ukulele by Andii Sajid's Mistress Page. The suggestive lyrics, by the Canadian group "The Merry Wives of Windsor," were delivered with punchy aplomb, setting the stage with its female voices' sense of ownership over the "sweet Westchester Red," the wayward rooster of the title.

As the singing continued, the audience relaxed, seeming to lose sight of the play as Shakespeare per se, a directorial device revealed as such when Justice Shallow suddenly tripped in a crush of bodies, and the play's first lines were spoken. The effect was rather like walking through an open door; one found oneself within the world of the play almost unawares in the passage from the Merry Wives' bawdy song to the more familiar terrain of Shakespeare's text. The set design reinforced this liminal sense: an unraised playing space dispensed with the boundary between players and audience in a manner not unlike the onstage seating at reconstructed playhouses such as the Blackfriars in Staunton. Entrances and exits from multiple locations added to the sense of immersion, creating unexpected configurations of bodies in space. Having the actors with their backs to at least some of the audience for part or all of a scene could have been a source of frustration, but here, too, Bourus and Wagoner made witty use of what they had in an otherwise uncongenial playing space. Members of the audience simply leaned in to get a better view, almost as if they were passers-by in Windsor watching the action unfold in the public square.

Another virtue borne of necessity, the age of the cast relative to that of the characters as traditionally defined, had a defamiliarizing effect. In thwarting...