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 stage

Merry Wives of Windsor on screen

Typeset plate for the screen adaptation The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982), directed by David Jones. A designed placeholder, not a picture of the poster.1982The MerryWives ofWindsorDAVID JONES

1The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982)

TV film · dir. David Jones

BBC Television Shakespeare

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