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Shakespeare & Beyond

The Merry Wives of Windsor: What sets this comedy apart from Shakespeare’s other plays?

The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor

Simple (Derrick Truby) and Mistress Quickly (Kate Eastwood Norris) in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Folger Theatre, 2019. Cameron Whitman Photography.

The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the end of the 16th century, and is what I would call – using the technical term – one of Shakespeare’s “puff-ball” plays. Like Comedy of Errors, the play is a farce: it’s about action, not about the deep questions that keep people up at night. These are characters who just seem to bump into each other and bounce off each other—human beings as billiard balls. Human beings in the dark.

The French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote a wonderful treatise on comedy in which he said these stories acquaint us with the mechanical side of our interactions. A lot of things we do without really thinking about it. And in that way, we’re a bit like wind-up toys. We just do certain things automatically. If you look at a play like The Comedy of Errors or Love’s Labor’s Lost, I think those satisfy this definition of being plays where part of the point is to let people bump into and off of each other so that by the end, hopefully they learn something. That’s part of what’s going on in this play.