Merry Wives of Windsor - Act IV

[Scheherazade]

Please post your comments in this thread.

Scene I

Scene II

Scene III

Scene IV

Scene V

Scene VI

[Virgil]

I guess no one has even posted on Act IV. Let's see a couple of things are noteworthy in Act IV. One thing is the repeat of flogging of Falstaff. He's already had to bear punishment and now they will do it again, and this time literally beating while he's ignominiously dressed in a dress. And by the end of the fourth Act the Pages and Fords are planning a third humiliation. So the repetition is important. It's like a joke with three parallel events, each one raising the stakes. The audience has an expectation built in and each time the screw must twist tighter for the laugh, but the Humor gets funnier with each turn.

Also the two women are playing a double game in that they are not only tricking Falstaff, but are tricking their husbands. And so we get a great laugh in seeing Mr. Ford think his wife is really unfaithful and tries to find Falstaff in the clothes basket.

Interesting how the plot of the third Falstaff humiliation is planned in the context of a folkloric sport. From Scene IV:

MISTRESS PAGE
There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter,
Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;
And there he blasts the tree and takes the cattle
And makes milch-kine yield blood and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner:
You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know
The superstitious idle-headed eld
Received and did deliver to our age
This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth.

PAGE
Why, yet there want not many that do fear
In deep of night to walk by this Herne's oak:
But what of this?

MISTRESS FORD
Marry, this is our device;
That Falstaff at that oak shall meet with us.

PAGE
Well, let it not be doubted but he'll come:
And in this shape when you have brought him thither,
What shall be done with him? what is your plot?

MISTRESS PAGE
That likewise have we thought upon, and thus:
Nan Page my daughter and my little son
And three or four more of their growth we'll dress
Like urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white,
With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,
And rattles in their hands: upon a sudden,
As Falstaff, she and I, are newly met,
Let them from forth a sawpit rush at once
With some diffused song: upon their sight,
We two in great amazedness will fly:
Then let them all encircle him about
And, fairy-like, to-pinch the unclean knight,
And ask him why, that hour of fairy revel,
In their so sacred paths he dares to tread
In shape profane.

MISTRESS FORD
And till he tell the truth,
Let the supposed fairies pinch him sound
And burn him with their tapers.

MISTRESS PAGE
The truth being known,
We'll all present ourselves, dis-horn the spirit,
And mock him home to Windsor.

The beating of Falstaff, the "dis-horning" of the "spirit" is a sort of beating of a devil or evil spirit. This is not uncommon in Shakespearean comedies, though I think it's typically better developed than it is in this play. This part of Mistress Page's dialogue is particularly reelevant:

We two in great amazedness will fly:
Then let them all encircle him about
And, fairy-like, to-pinch the unclean knight,
And ask him why, that hour of fairy revel,
In their so sacred paths he dares to tread
In shape profane.

The circle is a ritual with religious (pagan and Christian) connotations and the paths are made sacred by the beating of the profane.

Another interesting aspect of Act IV is the first scene. It has no narrative purpose and as far as I can tell it has no thematic purpose ither. It's just an excuse to make some bawdy jokes. This is certainly a play that would have appealed to the lower brow people and Shakespeare does not fail them. In fact I've always felt that Shakespeare disliked the intelligentia types and I wonder what he would have thought about his plays so studied in colleges today. What is going on in the scene is Hugh is quizing the Page boy on his latin and Mistress Quickly is finding double entendres for the latin responces.

SIR HUGH EVANS
What is your genitive case plural, William?

WILLIAM PAGE
Genitive case!

SIR HUGH EVANS
Ay.

WILLIAM PAGE
Genitive,--horum, harum, horum.

MISTRESS QUICKLY
Vengeance of Jenny's case! fie on her! never name
her, child, if she be a whore.

SIR HUGH EVANS
For shame, 'oman.

MISTRESS QUICKLY
You do ill to teach the child such words: he
teaches him to hick and to hack, which they'll do
fast enough of themselves, and to call 'horum:' fie upon you!

Hahaha, very unsophisticated, sort of the thing we used to do as boys in Brooklyn. She thinks he's teaching the boy "to hick and to hack." Also it's very curious that Shakespeare gives the boy the name of William, his first name. I bet Shakespeare's recalling some sort of boyhood memory.