#MyPlayToday ... The Merry Wives of Windsor
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| It's as Sir John would have wanted, butter on the stove and fudge in hand |
First impressions of the draw: Did anybody see that absolutely mental performance from Verdi's Falstaff as part of Shakespeare Live? Yeah, that.
Had I read the play before? No
Had I seen the play before? Yes
'What tempest, I trow, threw this whale, with so many tuns of oil in his belly, ashore at Windsor?'
MWoW, 2.1
MWoW, 2.1
I have a confession to make - when I drew Merry Wives from Jarthur (the official name for my plays jar: because he's cute, small, and is always perched precariously on a ledge in my room), I felt quite the drop in my stomach. Firstly, because I am so disorganised that I had drawn this play thinking that to read it right at this moment would be inopportune, not realising until about five minutes ago that Merry Wives IS in fact on my to-read-list for the coming week. Secondly, because coming back to the blog after almost two months of scholastic distraction is scary. Add to that a play that isn't regarded as the richest literary goldmine and you're left with a particularly anxious fledgling student of Shakespeare.
But the sense of trepidation and of heightened expectations that I felt drawing Merry Wives this morning is inseparable from the reputation of this play. I had always heard that Merry Wives is to Shakespeare what The Hound of the Baskervilles is to Conan Doyle; a way to 'resurrect' a popular character and keep the party swinging for at least another two hours traffic. Certainly, the characters and language lifted straight from the Henry IV plays into this domesticated comedy have the flavour of a fan fiction. To me, it's a laboured squeeze to reset Falstaff outside of the relationships that are so indelibly bound within his character: the subversive soldier, the pseudo-father, the huge heap of flesh that really would need a crane to lift him out of that Cheapside tavern and into rural Windsor.
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| No food on the tables? I had probably already eaten it all |
What is interesting is this sense of squeezing something that doesn't quite fit kept throwing itself at my face as I read the play today. Simple is shut in a closet, Falstaff is famously smuggled out of Ford's house in a basket of filthy linen. Even his beard struggles to be confined under women's clothes and in this way, the play ties its comic tendency toward the anxiety of cuckoldry with a visual and theatrical counterpart of claustrophobic, domestic spaces. Just as Ford, like Leontes, cannot contemplate being sealed inside the label of 'cuckold', the play gives us vignettes of domesticity that always warp into someone being confined. It's a Don Juanesque comic trope, the unfaithful wife's secret lover being bundled into a closet as her husband returns home, and this particular mise-en-scene of domestic entrapment just won't stay concealed in Merry Wives.
Perhaps this also has something to do with Falstaff. I'm indebted, as ever, to Emma Smith's Approaching Shakespeare lecture on 1 Henry IV which may as well have taken Falstaff as its titular focus. Smith, I think crucially, reminds us that it's near impossible to read that particular play and to forget that Falstaff is fat. The same lexicon of largesse that makes Falstaff an impossible character to ignore in the Henry IV plays makes him seem something too large for every role Merry Wives presents to him. For example, when Mistresses Ford and Page receive identical love letters from Falstaff the 'lover', they imagine an excess of letters which casts Falstaff as a printer (in the early modern, rather than the Hewlett Packard, sense):
'I warrant he hath a thousand of these letters,... sure, more, - and these are of the second edition: he will print them, out of doubt'
MWoW, 2.1
Similarly, Falstaff is just too big to successfully play the role of 'cuckolder' to the anxious Ford:
'he cannot creep into a halfpenny purse, nor into a pepper-box ... I will search impossible places.'
MWoW, 3.5
For all the play's gluttony and domesticity, coming home from uni to my absolute-dream-but-definite-feeder of a mother made Merry Wives a terrifying mirror to nature. Is there anything more Falstaffian than arriving through the door and making cakes in the first ten minutes? Particularly the most beautiful autumnal cake from my insanely-talented-but-also-a-feeder best friend. All that was missing was sack (does gin count?) and a laundry basket which, bucking the cliche, I actually didn't bring home with me.
Today was, as it turns out, as good a day as any to be pleasantly surprised by this play. I feel that sounds like a laboured, false smile conclusion. But I was pleasantly surprised, as I expect to continue to be. For now, I'm going to jump back into the fragrant laundry basket of MA life and hopefully I'll be able to pop my head out periodically here as I rummage. And whilst we are heading that way with the metaphor, if I stay any longer at home, I'm going to need cranes to lift me out of Cheapside.
More of a 'note-to-self': It would be super interesting to look at Leontes' and Ford's visual lexicon of cuckoldry. Particularly Ford's 'hole in my coat' metaphor. Early modern men be crazy.
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