The Merry Wives of Windsor (21 page)

The play remained popular throughout the seventeenth century, with two court revivals under James I, and it was one of the first plays revived after the Interregnum. Unusually for the Restoration, Shakespeare’s text was left largely intact, though it was not to everyone’s taste. Samuel Pepys reluctantly saw it three times and, despite being initially impressed by the presentation of Caius and “the country gentleman” (perhaps Ford or Slender), found the play consistently “ill done,” and a 1667 performance “did not please me at all—in no part.”
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In 1702 John Dennis’s adaptation
The Comical Gallant
premiered at Drury Lane. Dennis drew on French neoclassic notions of bourgeois comedy, restructured it into five scenes, and used it to assert conservative patriarchal values, notably in Page’s closing lines:

The adaptation was deservedly unsuccessful. In the 1704–05 season, however, Shakespeare’s text was performed at court with Thomas Betterton as Falstaff and Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle as the wives. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1720, the twenty-seven-year-old James Quin first played Falstaff, and he dominated the play across London for the next thirty years. However, “this comedy was so perfectly played in all its parts, that the critics in acting universally celebrated the merit of the performers.”
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Already, and unusually, critics valued
Merry Wives
for its ensemble opportunities rather than as a star showcase. Delane and Stephens were among the other eighteenth-century actors to play Falstaff, although Quin’s jovial knight cast a long shadow.

The play’s American fortunes began at Philadelphia’s Southwark Theater in 1770. Interestingly, one of the earliest American performances featured one of the few women to play Falstaff, Mrs. Webb (1786), though William Winter remarked: “Mrs. Webb’s obesity appears to have been her sole qualification for the part.”
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Mrs. Glover was a more successful Falstaff at London’s Haymarket in 1833, “one of the best stage ‘old women’ ever seen.”
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The play reached New York in 1789.

Many of the great nineteenth-century actors appeared in
Merry Wives
(although J. P. Kemble [1840] and Charles Kean [1851] preferred Ford for themselves), and even Charles Dickens mounted an amateur performance in 1848 as a benefit for Shakespeare’s Birthplace. George Bartley’s 1815 performance was praised for its lack of buffoonery, and his “bursting exultation of gratified vanity”
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upon reading Mistress Ford’s final letter was singled out as exemplary of his neatly characterized performance, while the 1824 Drury Lane production starring William Dowton betrayed an operatic influence, with spectacular scenery depicting Windsor and the forest, musical interludes, and a Fenton who “happily had nothing to do but sing.”
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The greatest Falstaff of the century, though, was Samuel Phelps, and one account of an 1857 Sadler’s Wells performance suggests why:

In an 1872 New York adaptation by William Winter, Augustin Daly reclaimed the play as a refined modern comedy, and he played Falstaff until the end of the century.

Where later American productions struggled to capture the peculiar “Englishness” of the play, Daly’s success stemmed from being bold enough to make it a play about the
American
middle classes: its decorum was praised, with characters “in satins and silks and velvets of graceful shape and agreeably harmonized tints … The text is shorn of all its vulgarity.”
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The play debuted at Stratford-upon-Avon under Frank Benson, whose productions were revived regularly between 1887 and 1919. Benson played Caius, though neither role nor production was among his most celebrated: “The Duelling scene was an unmitigated travesty. Shakespeare shows his wit in playing on words and not in stupid horseplay.”
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Benson’s succession of Falstaffs included George Weir, Oscar Asche, and William Calvert. Benson established another popular feature: “Nothing could have been prettier than the little army of fairies and sprites, who disported themselves before Herne’s Oak.”
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Benson’s run at Stratford was interrupted briefly by Patrick Kirwan’s 1914 version, praised for an absence of pantomime business but not for its lead. One critic drily noted: “Kirwan had two qualifications for Sir John Falstaff: the ability to look the part and a passing knowledge of the lines.”
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During this period, Herbert Beerbohm Tree played Falstaff in London and New York. He was criticized for a heavily made-up performance “more remarkable as an exhibition of the resources of theatrical disguise than as an original or inspired interpretation of the fat knight. [Falstaff’s character is] not only concealed, it is annihilated.”
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Beerbohm Tree closed his 1916 New York celebrations of Shakespeare’s tercentenary with the play, whose Keystone Kops–style knockabout comedy was disliked, though G. W. Anson’s Bardolph surprisingly stood out. Unfortunately for Beerbohm Tree, James K. Hackett’s production at New York’s Criterion earlier in 1916 had been surprisingly successful. At ten days’ notice, the comedian Tom Wise learned Falstaff’s lines and bowled over critics: “he rolled from scene to scene quivering like a mountain of jelly, as he boozed and guzzled and boasted, and entangled himself in the snares set by those zestful wives.”
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Wise’s fresh performance reenergized a play that too often merely reprised former glories.

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Augustin Daly’s 1886 New York production “reclaimed the play as a refined modern comedy.” His “success stemmed from being bold enough to make it a play about the American middle classes.”

Oscar Asche presented a winter-set version at London’s Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1911, significantly breaking from the usual midsummer atmosphere. In 1919, following Benson’s retirement, William Bridges-Adams took over at Stratford with William Calvert
as Falstaff. This Falstaff “was a nimble-witted and light-hearted old rogue, who has the good humour to laugh at his own misfortunes,”
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but again it was the ensemble playing that impressed. Character moments succeeded better than farce, particularly the meetings of Falstaff and “Brook.” Bridges-Adams successfully revived the play for several London and Stratford seasons, with Falstaffs including Baliol Holloway and Roy Byford.

Theodore Komisarjevsky deliberately defied tradition at Stratford in 1935, turning the play into a musical farce with a bustling stage. Ford was an Edwardian melodrama villain, while Neil Porter’s “vitriolic French doctor livens up the whole production, though in doing so he utters some vulgarities which would not be allowed in any other modern show.”
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The deliberately artificial setting of colored houses and layered entrances divided critics: some found it self-consciously arty, others enjoyed a “brilliant, colourful, musical piece of theatricality.”
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The Strand Theatre offered a more straightforward version in 1942, with Donald Wolfit playing an attractively comic Falstaff.

The text itself was once more the subject of criticism at Stratford in 1940. Despite prejudices, however, Ben Iden Payne’s strong company prevailed: “Thea Holme and Clare Harris, as the Wives, see to it that for once ‘merry’ is the operative word,”
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while Baliol Holloway’s bitter Ford was a standout. Holloway triumphantly returned to Stratford as Falstaff in 1943, directing himself in a production noted for the details amid the chaos: “After the undignified dive into the basket, … the small suspicious eye that Falstaff turns on the second invitation to dalliance” rendered audiences helpless, while Abraham Sofaer’s Ford “set the jealous husband on the rampage early on … at times, the character grew to proportions of authentic tragedy.”
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Critics of
Merry Wives
by now needed no innovation from productions, just solid traditional performances. This was not satisfied by Robert Atkins, directing and playing Falstaff two years later at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Atkins was a noted Falstaff in
Henry IV
, but here

Memories of past Falstaffs thus served as standards against which modern actors were judged. Glen Byam Shaw directed Anthony Quayle in the last pre-RSC production at Stratford in 1955. In a wintry landscape (paying tribute to Asche), Quayle “waddled and straddled and lurched, and blew, and gurgled, and wheezed and roared his way through Falstaff’s indignities,”
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but critics felt it was still “a performance by a serious actor who integrally lacks a naturally comic personality as he lacks Falstaff’s stomach.”
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Mel Shapiro’s 1965 San Diego production projected Hogarthian prints and turned Falstaff’s cronies into eighteenth-century highwaymen, while Josephine Wilson’s 1975 production at London’s Mermaid theater “seems to be set not in Windsor but in some Breughelian limbo where everyone is afflicted either by missing teeth, curlicued noses or mirthful convulsions.”
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Attempts to make this gentle comedy more ugly or complex were still resisted on both sides of the proscenium arch. By contrast, Donald Moffat’s 1963 Ohio production was “beautifully articulated and surprisingly chaste.”
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Glen Byam Shaw’s 1955 production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with Anthony Quayle, who “waddled and straddled and lurched, and blew, and gurgled, and wheezed and roared his way through Falstaff’s indignities,” with Joyce Redman as Mistress Ford.

Several American and Canadian productions, rather than following Daly’s lead in breaking away from the play’s Englishness, tried to capture it with mixed results. Michael Kahn’s 1971 Connecticut Shakespeare Festival version evoked the bustle of Elizabethan life, but missed the play’s domestic interest in the process. The 1978 Restoration-set production at Stratford, Ontario, was more successful:

As the century progressed, attempts were made to link
Merry Wives
to the history plays. Jon Jory’s 1976 American Conservatory Theater production opened and closed with “a ‘sadly fallen’ Falstaff (Ray Reinhardt) sitting on a darkened stage listening to himself in
Henry IV, Part I
pleading with Prince Hal not to banish him.”
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Jory imagined the play as a comic interlude in a broken life, Falstaff’s comic humiliation a pathetic reflection of his earlier disfavor. The BBC’s links were lighter, foreshadowing Quickly and Pistol’s affair as the camera caught a secret tryst behind a shed.