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Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations

Merry Wives of Windsor

by Joseph Rosenblum

Type of plot: Comedy

Time of plot: Sixteenth century

Locale: England

First performed: 1597; first published, 1602

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

Sir John Falstaff, a rogue

Fenton, a young gentleman

Slender, a foolish gentleman

Ford and

Page, two gentlemen living at Windsor

Doctor Caius, a French physician

Mistress Ford, Ford’s wife

Mistress Page, Page’s wife

Anne Page, the daughter of the Pages

Mistress Quickly, a servant of Doctor Caius

THE STORY

Sir John Falstaff was, without doubt, a rogue. True, he was fat, jolly, and in a way lovable, but he was still a rogue. His men robbed and plundered the citizens of Windsor, but he himself was seldom taken or convicted for his crimes. His fortunes being at low ebb, he hit upon a plan to remedy that situation. He had met Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, two good ladies who held the purse strings in their respective houses. Falstaff wrote identical letters to the two good ladies, letters protesting undying love for each of them.

The daughter of one of the ladies, Anne Page, was at the center of a love triangle. Her father wished her to marry Slender, a foolish gentleman who did not love her or anyone else, but who would marry any girl that was recommended to him by his cousin, the justice. Mistress Page, on the other hand, would have her daughter married to Doctor Caius, a French physician then in Windsor. Anne herself loved Fenton, a fine young gentleman who was deeply in love with her. All three lovers paid the doctor’s housekeeper, Mistress Quickly, to plead their cause with Anne, for Mistress Quickly had convinced each that she alone could persuade Anne to answer yes to a proposal. Mistress Quickly was, in fact, second only to Falstaff in her plotting and her trickery.

Unknown to poor Falstaff, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page compared the letters received from him, alike except for the lady’s name. They decided to cure him of his knavery once and for all. Mistress Ford arranged to have him come to her house that night when her husband would not be there. Mistress Page wrote that she would meet him as soon as she could cautiously arrange it. In the meantime, two former followers of Falstaff had told the two husbands of that knave’s designs on their wives. Page refused to believe his wife was unfaithful, but Ford became jealous and planned to spy on his wife. Disguising himself as Mr. Brook, he called on Falstaff. His story was that he loved Mistress Ford but could not win her love, and he came to pay Falstaff to court her for him. His stratagem was successful; he learned from Falstaff that the knight already had a rendezvous with the lady that very night.

At the appointed time, having previously arranged to have several servants assist in the plot, the two ladies were ready for Falstaff. While Falstaff was trying to make love to Mistress Ford, Mistress Page rushed in and said that Ford was on his way home. Quickly the ladies put Falstaff in a clothesbasket and had him carried out by the servants, to be dumped into the Thames. Ford did arrive, of course, for, unknown to his wife, he knew Falstaff was to be there. After looking high and low without finding the rogue, he apologized to his wife for his suspicions. Mistress Ford did not know which had been the most sport, having Falstaff dumped into the river or listening to her husband’s discomfited apologies.

The ladies had so much fun over their first joke played on Falstaff that they decided to try another. Mistress Ford then sent him another message, this one saying that her husband would be gone all of the following morning, and she asked Falstaff to call on her at that time so that she could make amends for the previous affair of the basket. Again Ford, disguised as Brook, called on Falstaff, and again he learned of the proposed assignation. He learned also of the method of Falstaff’s previous escape and vowed the old roisterer should not again slip through his fingers.

When Mistress Ford heard from Mistress Page that Ford was returning unexpectedly, the ladies dressed Falstaff in the clothes of a fat woman whom Ford hated. Ford, finding the supposed woman in his house, drubbed the disguised knight soundly and chased him from the house. Again Ford searched everywhere for Falstaff, and again he was forced to apologize to his wife in the presence of the friends he had brought with him to witness her disgrace. The two ladies thought his discomfiture the funniest part of their joke.

Once more the wives planned to plague poor Falstaff, but this time they took their husbands into their confidence. When Mistress Page and Mistress Ford told about the letters they had received from Falstaff and explained the details of the two previous adventures, Ford felt very contrite over his former suspicions of his wife. Eagerly, the husbands joined their wives in a final scheme intended to bring Falstaff to public shame. The ladies would persuade Falstaff to meet them in the park at midnight. Falstaff was to be disguised as Herne the Hunter, a horned legendary huntsman said to roam the wintry woods each midnight. There he would be surrounded by Anne Page and others dressed as fairies and elves. After he had been frightened half to death, the husbands would accost him and publicly display his knavery.

A quite different event had also been planned for that night. Page plotted to have Slender seize Anne in her disguise as the fairy queen and carry her away to marry her. At the same time, Mistress Page arranged to have Doctor Caius find Anne and take her away to be married. Anne, however, had other plans. She and Fenton agreed to meet in the park and under cover of the dark and confusion flee her parents and her two unwelcome suitors.

All plans were put into effect. Falstaff, after telling the supposed Brook that on this night he would for a certainty win Mistress Ford for him, donned the horns of a stag and met the two ladies at the appointed place. Quickly the fairies and witches surrounded him, and the women ran to join their husbands and watch the fun. Poor Falstaff tried to pretend that he was asleep or dead, but the merry revelers burned his fingers with tapers they carried, and pinched him unmercifully. When Falstaff threw off his disguise, Ford and Page and their wives laid hold of him and soundly scolded him for his silly gallantry and bombast. The wives ridiculed his ungainly body and swore that none would ever have such a fool for a lover. Such was Falstaff’s nature, however, that no one could hate him for long. After he had admitted his guilt and his stupidity, they all forgave him.

While all this merriment was going on, Anne and Fenton had stolen away to be married. They returned while the rest were busy with Falstaff. Page and his wife were in such good humor over all that had occurred that they forgave the young lovers and bestowed their blessing on them. Then the whole company, Falstaff included, retired to Page’s house to laugh again over the happenings of that night.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

Under public pressure to bring back Sir John Falstaff after Prince Hal’s arrogant dismissal of his boyhood friend in Henry IV, Part II (1597) and Henry V (1598–99), Shakespeare reintroduces the fat knight in a slapstick romp, The Merry Wives of Windsor. On the one hand, the farce can be viewed as a ridiculous satire of the London burghers, the Fords and the Pages, who successfully outwit the not-so-sly fox of an aristocrat, Falstaff, who is trying in his usual way to disrupt the pleasures and the comforts of the conventional.

Another way of approaching the play is by viewing it as a comic resolve of a story similar in some incidents to Shakespeare’s earlier play, Romeo and Juliet (1594–96). Unwittingly, Falstaff, in his buffoonery, performs the role of diverting the Pages from the elopement of their daughter, Anne, and Fenton, the comic Romeo. A potential tragedy thus averted, and love is allowed to flourish. Falstaff plays the same role that Shakespeare had assigned to him in the histories. As opposed to the deliberate Hal, who orders everything in his life, even his leisure with his cronies, Falstaff devotes his whole life to play, the gratification of the instincts, and the preservation of the self. His dalliance with the Mistresses Page and Ford may be a mockery of good burgher virtue, but he also pursues it with a good deal of pleasure, pleasure for its own sake. Everyone wins in the process. Anne is married to the man she loves, and the Pages, the Fords, and Sir John all have a thoroughly fine time in the romp. The only loser is respectability, which takes a back seat to the loud, vulgar guffaws of “Fat Jack” Falstaff.

—Joseph Rosenblum

FILM ADAPTATIONS

1980 Bard Production

This adaptation, directed by Jack Manning, featured Leon Charles as Falstaff; Valerie Seelie-Snyder as Mistress Ford; Gloria Grahame as Mistress Page; Dixie Tymitz as Mistress Quickly; and Joel Asher as Doctor Caius.

Jeanne Addison Roberts, reviewing this production in a 1982 issue of the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, called it “lively, colorful, frequently imaginative, and well worth seeing,” adding that “It will delight high school audiences and only occasionally offend scholars.” She admired “fine performances” by the key actors; said Falstaff here is a “forceful presence”; felt that “Gloria Grahame’s Mistress Page is also unusually effective,” especially thanks to her “resonant voice and beautiful articulation.” Roberts was impressed by the enhanced role of Fenton, reporting that the “alteration of text and the liberal use of close-ups work to single him out and add weight to his presence in a way that I found effective”; and she also considered the “roles of the eccentrics … suitably cast and capably performed.” She found the set sometimes “rigid and confining”; thought the “[c]ostume design, generally [in] conventional Renaissance style and quite acceptable,” did fail “in the last scene with Falstaff’s horns which are disappointingly unbestial”; but wrote that sometimes “the staging is particularly striking” (8). Faulting the occasional overuse of close-ups, she also noted many alterations to the text (some defensible, others not), and regretted the “omission of Ford’s soliloquy in III.ii,” saying it “diminishes our sense of the violence of his jealousy and flattens his character.” She concluded that the “treatment of the whole work, while certainly not reverential is, for the most part, responsible and intelligent” (11).

1982–83 BBC Shakespeare Production

This adaptation, directed by David Jones, starred Richard Griffiths as Sir John Falstaff; Judy Davis as Mistress Ford; Prunella Scales as Mistress Page; Ben Kingsley as Frank Ford; Alan Bennett as Justice Shallow; Tenniel Evans as Sir Hugh Evans; and Crispin Mair as William Page.

In his essay on “The Production” (17–28) in the booklet the BBC published to accompany the first broadcast of this version, Henry Fenwick wrote that director David Jones saw the play as a realistic depiction of Elizabethan village life and thought it would work well on television because of its middle-class focus, its emphasis on prose, its ensemble cast, and its substantial personalities (17). Producer Shaun Sutton emphasized the need for dynamic comic actors, while set designer Don Homfray stressed naturalism and realism in the settings, some of them inspired by Shakespeare-related buildings at Stratford. Part of the setting, such as the wooden beam in Falstaff’s room, inspired the actors’ movements, although achieving realistic exteriors was more problematic (19). Homfray explained how he tried to achieve vistas, while the director explained why some scenes could not use close-ups, as had originally been planned (20). Costume designer Christine Rawlins noted the characters’ distinctive hats, while Prunella Scales discussed the squarish Elizabethan costumes (21–23). Script editor David Snodin and director Jones explained why this production relied sometimes on the less censored quarto than on the more often (but not always) inhibited folio version. They also explained why some inconsistencies in the script were removed and why some lines were reassigned to different characters (21–23). Jones rejected the claim that Shakespeare wrote the play to give Queen Elizabeth more of Falstaff; defended this play’s Falstaff from charges that he seemed a diminished character, while Richard Griffiths, playing Falstaff; considered the character unscrupulous in a way that was probably common during the harsh Elizabethan era. He also saw Falstaff as a relic left over from the rapidly disappearing feudal era. He noted that Falstaff’s followers were especially gritty in this production; saw Falstaff as an arrogant if inventive speaker whom the women punish; saw the punishment as appropriately harsh; and thought Falstaff learned from it while pretending to be unaffected by it. He considered the play feminist, while Jones imagined the women as younger and sexier than they are often played (24–25). Prunella Scales remarked that she drew on her personal familiarity with rural life to play her part as Mistress Page, a character she did not completely admire, partly because the wives treat Falstaff so harshly. Scales praised the inventive acting of Judy Davis as Mistress Ford, who tried to make her character more rounded than the play presents her (26). Ben Kingsley, as Ford, considered the play quite realistic in presenting the rise of an Elizabethan middle class and the ways people lived and behaved in that era. He found Ford’s jealousy potentially tragic, intriguingly complex, and not merely absurd. Director Jones was not intent on making the play seem constantly comic; he thought that complex characters would be funny enough. He emphasized the final reconciliation of the Fords as a way to keep the conclusion from seeming too harsh (28).

J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen, in their 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, surveyed a number of reviews from 1983. A reviewer for Britain’s The Listener, for instance, could understand how this production’s Falstaff might appeal to women (290), while a commentator for the Boston Globe found the performances in general “imaginative,” “comic,” “very funny,” and full of “bright splashes of slapstick” while also calling Kingsley especially impressive. In the New York Times, a writer admired Griffiths’s creation of “a consistent character who rises as required to moments of high farce,” but a reviewer for an academic journal thought Griffiths looked “grim-faced and worried” and instead praised the performance of Elizabeth Spriggs as well as the depiction of “bustling street scenes.” A writer for the Los Angeles Times found the BBC production insufficiently amusing and too slowly paced, although Stanley Wells, a major scholar writing for the London Times Literary Supplement, first discussed the play in detail before commenting that this production’s emphasis was more personal than social; that the settings and costumes were effective; that the text was only slightly changed; that the “style is gently comic rather than uproariously farcical”; and that the production sought “comedy of character rather than of action, sometimes at a sacrifice of complexity” (291).

Jeanne Addison Roberts, reviewing the BBC version in the April 1983 issue of the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, admired “a few inspired moments, intelligent editing, and some creditable acting” but said “the production simply never cohered into an exciting whole.” She found the first scene hard to follow; called the Host “low-keyed and colorless”; regretted some badly performed speeches; and said that even the attractive set and costumes could not redeem such an “unpromising start.” She regretted the often-subdued delivery; wished the production had been more theatrical; did praise Elizabeth Spriggs; but was disappointed by Falstaff and Ford, remarking that Kingsley “clearly thought he was playing in a farce. His Ford was not only choleric but frequently hysterical.” She did, however, call the final scenes “extremely well done,” saying that the “final unmasking and reconciliation were accomplished with grace and dispatch,” and concluded that if the rest of the production had been as solid as the ending “it would have been a notable success instead of a mediocre near-failure” (5).

Peter Cochran, writing about this production for his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare, began by asserting that “David Jones’s production has a first-class cast, able to establish characters with minimal effort” and then cited some relevant examples. He also commended the sets and sounds and found especially intriguing Ben Kingsley’s Master Ford, a character he saw as a foreshadowing of Othello (290). Praising one of Kingsley’s speeches as among the best ever done for the whole BBC Shakespeare series, Cochran considered Kingsley’s Ford more interesting than Falstaff. He wished this version had been performed live (292).

2010 Shakespeare’s Globe Production

The adaptation, directed for the stage by Christopher Luscombe and for the screen by Robin Lough, starred Christopher Benjamin as Falstaff; Philip Bird as Dr. Caius; Ceri-Lyn Cissone as Anne Page; Barnaby Edwards as John Rugby; Serena Evans as Mistress Page; Peter Gale as Justice Shallow; Michael Garner as Master Page; and Andrew Havill as Master Ford.

Peter Cochran, assessing this production for his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (292–93), enjoyed the live performance, saying it brought out much of the play’s humor (22–93); found the cast “perfectly adequate, and without a weak link”; thought the stage too big to create intimacy but appreciated the laughs coming from a live audience; noted the comical accents; called this production’s Falstaff a bit understated; but appreciated the appropriate music (293).

Bibliography

1 

Bulman, J. C., and H. R. Coursen, editors. Shakespeare on Television: An Anthology of Essays and Reviews. UP of New England, 1988.

2 

Cochran, Peter. Small-Screen Shakespeare. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.

3 

Fenwick, Henry. “The Production.” The Shakespeare Play: The Merry Wives of Windsor. BBC, 1982, pp. 17–28.

4 

Roberts, Jeanne Addison. “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, vol. 6, no. 2, Mar. 1982, pp. 8, 11.

5 

_____. “The Shakespeare Plays on TV: The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Shakespeare on Film Newsletter, vol. 7, no. 2, Apr. 1983, p. 5.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Rosenblum, Joseph. "Merry Wives Of Windsor." Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations, edited by Robert C. Evans, Salem Press, 2025. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSSF_0028.
APA 7th
Rosenblum, J. (2025). Merry Wives of Windsor. In R. C. Evans (Ed.), Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Rosenblum, Joseph. "Merry Wives Of Windsor." Edited by Robert C. Evans. Critical Survey of Shakespeare: Film Adaptations. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2025. Accessed December 08, 2025. online.salempress.com.