Seven Ages

Comedy · c. 1597

Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor

Falstaff, transplanted from the histories into a small English town, decides to seduce two married women for their husbands’ money — sending both the identical love letter.

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By the Seven Ages editors2 min read

The wives compare notes immediately, and the play becomes a machine for humiliating him in escalating, laundry-basket-shaped ways.

It is Shakespeare’s only comedy of contemporary middle-class English life, all prose and bustle. Purists miss the tavern Falstaff’s dangerous wit; everyone else gets a genial, forgiving farce about a community absorbing a predator and turning him into entertainment.

Merry Wives of Windsor on screen

1The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982)

TV film · dir. David Jones

BBC Television Shakespeare

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