From The Library of Literary Criticism of English and American Authors, ed. Charles Wells Moulton, 8 vols. (London: Moulton Publishing, 1901), 1: 491-94.
MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR
1598-99
A | Most pleasaunt and | excellent conceited Co- | medic, of Syr John Falstaffe, and the | merrie Wiues of Windsor. | Entermixed with sundrie | variable and pleasing humors of Syr Hugh | the Welch Knight, Iustice Shallow, and his | wise Cousin M. Slender. | With the swaggering vaine of Auncient | Pistoll, and Corporall Nym. | By William Shakespeare. | As it hath bene diners times Acted by the right Honorable | my Lord Chamberlaines servants Both before her | Maiestie, and elsewhere. | LONDON | Printed by T. C. for Arthur Johnson; and are to be sold at | his shop in Powles Church-yard, at the signe of the | Flower de Leuse and the Crowne. | 1602. -- TITLE PAGE OF FIRST EDITION, 1602.
But Shakespear's play in fourteen days was writ
And in that space to make all just and fit,
Was an attempt surpassing human wit.
Yet our great Shakespear's matchless muse was such
None ever in so small time perform'd so much.
-- DENNIS, JOHN, 1702, The Comical Gallant.
The conduct of this drama is deficient; the action begins and ends often before the conclusion, and the different parts might change places without inconvenience; but its general power, that power by which all works of genius shall finally be tried, is such, that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator, who did not think it too soon at end. -- JOHNSON, SAMUEL, 1768, Observations on Shakspeare's Plays.
The "Merry Wives of Windsor" is no doubt a very amusing play, with a great deal of humour character, and nature in it: but we should have liked it much better if any one else had been the hero of it, instead of Falstaff. We could have been contented if Shakespear had not been "commanded to show the knight in love." Wits and philosophers, for the most part, do not shine in that character, and Sir John himself by no means comes off with flying colours. -- HAZLITT, WILLIAM, 1817 69, Characters of Shakespear's Plays, p. 229.
In the system of intrigued comedy, the "Merry Wives of Windsor" may be said to be almost perfect in its composition; it presents a true picture of manners, the denouement is as piquant as it is well-prepared; and it is assuredly one of the merriest works in the whole comic repertory. -- GUIZOT, FRANCOIS PIERRE GUILLAUME, l821-52, Shakspeare and His Times, p 85.
"The Merry Wives of Windsor" is the work of Shakspeare in which he has best displayed English manners for though there is something of this in the historical plays, yet we rarely see in them such a picture of actual life as comedy ought to represent. . . . In this play the English Gentleman in age and youth is brought upon the stage, slightly caricatured in Shallow, and far more so in Slender. The latter, indeed, is a perfect satire, and I think was so intended, on the brilliant youth of the provinces, such as we may believe it to have been before the introduction of newspapers and turnpikes-roads; awkward and boobyish among civil people, but at home in rude sports, and proud of exploits at which the town would laugh, yet perhaps with more courage and good-nature than the laughers. No doubt can be raised that the family of Lucy is ridiculed in Shallow; but those who have recourse to the old fable of the deer-stealing, forget that Shakspeare never lost sight of his native county, and went, perhaps, every summer, to Stratford. It is not impossible that some arrogance of the provincial squires toward a player, whom, though a gentleman by birth and the recent grant of arms, they might not reckon such, excited his malicious wit to those admirable delineations. -- HALLAM, HENRY, 1837-39, Introduction to the Literature of Europe, pt. iii, ch. vi, par. 38.
There is a prodigal and glorious throng of incident and character in this very admirable comedy: for variety, and broad unceasing effect, it stands perhaps unrivalled. Each individual member of the breathing group -- the Wives, the Husbands, the Doctor, Parson, mine Host of the Garter, Shallow, Slender, every character, in short, from Falstaff and his satellites to Simple and Rugby -- stands out in the clearest light, and assists in reflecting the sunshine of the author's intellect for the delight and instruction of the reader or spectator. It has been said, and truly, that Falstaff, in this play, is not so unctuous and irresistible as in the two parts of "Henry IV.;" but if the Falstaff of Windsor must succumb to him of Gadshill and Shrewsbury, it should in fairness be added
''Nought by himself can be his conqueror."
Even the gullibility of the unfortunate old boy (as drawn forth of him by the witcheries of the wicked wives) places him in an amiable point of view, and raises a new sensation in his favour. -- VERPLANCK, GULIAN CROMELIN, 1844-47, The Illustrated Shakespeare, vol. II.
That Queen Bess should have desired to see Falstaff making love proves her to have been, as she was, a gross-minded old baggage. Shakespeare has evaded the difficulty with great skill. He knew that Falstaff could not be in love; and has mixed but a little, a very little, pruritus with his fortune-hunting courtship. But the Falstaff of "The Merry Wives" is not the Falstaff of "Henry IV." It is a big-bellied impostor, assuming his name and style, or, at best, it is Falstaff in dotage. The Mrs. Quickly of Windsor is not mine hostess of the Boar's Head, but she is a very pleasant, busy, good-natured, unprincipled old woman, whom it is impossible to be angry with. Shallow should not have left his seat in Gloucestershire and his magisterial duties. Ford's jealousy is of too serious a complexion for the rest of the play. The merry wives are a delightful pair. Methinks I see them, with their comely, middle-aged visages, their dainty white ruffs and toys, their half-witch-like conic hats, their full farthingales, their neat though not over-slim waists, their housewifely keys, their girdles, their sly laughing looks, their apple-red cheeks, their brows the lines whereon look more like the work of mirth than years. And sweet Anne Page -- she is a pretty little creature whom one would like to take on one's knee.-- COLERIDGE, HARTLEY, 1849-51, Essays and Marginalia, vol. II, pp. 133, 134.
Is one of those delightfully happy plays of Shakespeare, beaming with sunshine and good humour, that makes one feel the better, the lighter, and the happier, for having seen or read it. -- CLARKE CHARLES COWDEN, 1863, Shakespeare-Characters, p. 141.
"The Merry Wives of Windsor" is a play written expressly for the barbarian aristocrats with their hatred of ideas, their insensibility to beauty, their hard efficient manners, and their demand for impropriety. The good folk of London liked to see a prince or a duke, and they liked to see him made gracious and generous. These royal and noble persons at Windsor wished to see the interior life of country gentlemen of the middle class, and to see the women of the middle class with their excellent bourgeois morals, and rough, jocose ways. The comedy of hearing a French physician and a Welsh parson speak broken English was appreciated by these spectators, who uttered their mother-tongue with exemplary accent. Shakspere did not make a grievance of his task. He threw himself into it with spirit, and despatched his work quickly -- in fourteen days, if we accept the tradition. But Falstaff he was not prepared to recall from heaven or from hell. He dressed up a fat rogue, brought forward for the occasion from the back premises of the poet's imagination, in Falstaff 's clothes; he allowed persons and places and times to jumble themselves up as they pleased; he made it impossible for the most laborious nineteenth-century critic to patch on "The Merry Wives" to "Henry IV." But the Queen and her court laughed as the buck-basket was emptied into the ditch, no more suspecting that its gross lading was not the incomparable jester of Eastcheap than Ford suspected the woman with a great beard to be other than the veritable Dame Pratt. -- DOWDEN, EDWARD, 1875-80, Shakspere, A Critical Study of His Mind and Art, p. 329.
The task of presenting him so shorn of his beams, so much less than archangel (of comedy) ruined, and the excess of (humorous) glory obscured, would hardly, we cannot but think and feel, have spontaneously suggested itself to Shakespeare as a natural or eligible aim for the fresh exercise of his comic genius. To exhibit Falstaff as throughout the whole course of five acts a credulous and baffled dupe, one "easier to be played on than a pipe," was not really to reproduce him at all. The genuine Falstaff could no more have played such a part than the genuine Petruchio could have filled such an one as was assigned him by Fletcher in the luckless hour when that misguided poet undertook to continue the subject and to correct the moral of the next comedy in our catalogue of Shakespeare's. "The Tamer Tamed" is hardly less consistent or acceptable as a sequel to the "Taming of the Shrew" than the "Merry Wives of Windsor" as a supplement to "King Henry IV." and no conceivable comparison could more forcibly convey how broad and deep is the gulf of incongruity which divides them. -- SWINBURNE, ALGERNON CHARLES, 1880, A Study of Shakespeare, p. 116.
This play supplements the two parts of "King Henry IV." by showing what Falstaff stands for; the temptation of the flesh the world, the flesh and the devil -- backed to the uttermost with good wit and good humour, that have force to mislead our youth; here brought into relation with a simple, healthy womanhood. Mrs. Page and Mrs. Ford are not heroines with unexampled powers, but ordinary women, cheerful and right-minded, to whose minds Falstaff is as nothing. Quick parts, bent upon ill, fail in a wrestle with the mother-wit of plain folk who live loyally. -- MORLEY, HENRY, 1893, English Writers, vol. X, p. 300.
It has failed to find favour with some owing to a not ignoble dislike at seeing the degradation or discomfiture of Falstaff, but it must be remembered that Shakespeare, though never cruel with the morbid cruelty of the modern pessimist, is always perfectly awake to the facts of life. And, as a matter of fact, bowls that Falstaff played involve the rubbers that are here depicted. It has also been a common saying that the play is little better than a farce. If so, it can only be said that Shakespeare very happily took or made the opportunity of showing how a farce also can pass under the species of eternity. How infinitely do the most farcical of the characters, such as Sir Hugh and Dr. Caius, excel the mere "Vices" of earlier playwrights! Who but Shakespeare had --we may almost say who but Shakespeare has -- made an immortal thing of a mere ass, a mere puff-ball of foolish froth like Slender? If Chaucer had had the dramatic as he had the narrative faculty and atmosphere, he might have done Mrs. Quickly, who is a very near relative, in somewhat lower life, of the Wife of Bath, and rapidly ripening for her future experiences in Eastcheap. But Shallow is above even Chaucer, as are also the subtle differentiation between sirs. Page and Mrs. Ford, and the half-dozen strokes which her creator judged sufficient for sweet Anne Page. As for Falstaff, it is mistaken affection which thinks him degraded, or " translated" Bottom-fashion. He is even as elsewhere though under an unluckier star. -- SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1898, A Short History of English Literature, p. 323.
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