Behind The Curtain: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Part Three
Folkore of the Play and Folklore in the Play
By Liz Larson
Greetings all and welcome back to our virtual Forest of Windsor! For this post, I thought we’d delve into the mythology in the play and the mythology of the play. If this happens to pique your interest, don’t forget that Points North will be performing The Merry Wives of Windsor at Rob Fleming Park on September 26th and the Kevin Brady Community Center on October 3rd.
As discussed in my previous post, the play culminates in the people of Windsor dressing as a fairy court and tormenting the incorrigible Falstaff who is disguised as the mythological ‘Herne the Hunter.’ But before I talk about Herne and his folklore, we need to talk about the folklore surrounding the writing of the play.
Merry Wives is not believed to be cursed like Macbeth. The folklore surrounding its creation is more whimsical than creepy. The old tale is that Queen Elizabeth I so loved the character of Falstaff that she commanded Shakespeare to write a play where Falstaff falls in love. Shakespeare then rushed to write the play in under two weeks. If you want to continue to believe this story, I’m not going to yuck your yum. There’s very little about Shakespeare’s life and career that we can say for certain, so decide who you think Shakespeare is and cherish him. For my money, I think this is a Disneyfied version of the real story.
Several scholars have argued that the play was actually written for the the yearly feast held for the Order of the Garter on April 23, 1597. At that point, Shakespeare was writer and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, and the historical record suggests that the new patron of that acting company was being elected a Knight of the Garter at that feast. The Order of the Garter was the most senior order of knighthood, so being elected into its membership was a great honor. It is possible that the company’s patron asked them to write and perform a new play for that event. The title page for the publication of the play in quarto form in 1602 does claim that it was performed ‘before her Majestie’, but people were known to take creative liberties with title pages. They were used for marketing a publication, and, in the world of pre-internet and pre-Consumer Protection Bureau, lying was common. See previous comment about lack of certainty…
That said, the play would be appropriate for such an event. The Cambridge edition notes a few moments of the play geared toward an upper-class audience, including jokes about learning Latin. It would also be apt for Shakespeare to write a play around his most famous (infamous?) knight character to celebrate the honoring of the company’s knighted patron.
If the play did premiere on April 23, 1597, that would also have been Shakespeare’s thirty-third birthday! Or close to his birthday. We don’t actually know the precise date of Shakespeare’s birth… There’s that certainty thing again…
As for evidence that the play was written in a rush, there are a few foibles in the text that have led scholars to make that conclusion. One major error is the issue of the three Mistresses Anne Page at the end of the play. In Act V, Scene 2, Master Page tells Slender that Anne Page is wearing white, so he should steal away the woman in white and marry her. In Act V, Scene 3, Mistress Page tells the Doctor that Anne will be in green, so he should steal away the woman in green and marry her. Fenton then steals away the actual Mistress Anne and they marry for love. However, when Slender and the Doctor arrive at the end of Act V, Scene 5, the first publication of the play (the quarto) has Master Page tell Slender that Anne would be in green and the second edition (the Folio) says she is in white, while Mistress Page tells the Doctor that she told him Anne would be in green (quarto edition) or white (Folio edition). This could be an intentionally comedic moment where the Fords themselves mix up which color they put their daughter Anne in, but the stage directions in the quarto confuse the matter further by actually putting Anne in a white dress. The stage direction doesn’t appear in the Folio (which was quite common).
So, yeah … something hinky has definitely occurred. The upside is, it’s given historians and scholars enough fodder to sustain several centuries of debate. Was it an editor issue or a memorial mistake or Shakespeare’s shaky hand? The answer is – say it with me now – uncertain.
But, speaking of the stealing of the Anne Pages, let’s talk about the folklore evoked by Act V. In Act IV, Scene 4, the wives come clean to their husbands about the pranks they’ve been playing on Falstaff, and the town decides to band together to torment the old fool. Their plan? Herne the Hunter.
Mistress Page tells her fellow citizens and us the audience the lore of Herne the Hunter, which she calls, ‘an old tale.’ Herne used to be a groundskeeper of the Windsor Forest, but now he:
Doth all the winter-time, at still midnight,
Walk round about an oak, with great ragg’d horns;
And there he blasts [blights] the trees, and takes the cattle,
And makes milch-kine [dairy cows] yield blood, and shakes a chain
In a most hideous and dreadful manner.
(4.4.25-35)
Basically, the ghost of the guy that used to care for Windsor Forest shows up at midnight around an old oak tree. He has big horns, and he gives trees diseases, steals the cattle and makes the dairy cows lactate blood. Oh, and he’s shaking a chain.
I recently attended a talk at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust by Andrew Anderson who has just written a book called ‘Herne the Hunter: The Lord of the Forest’. He (and wikipedia) explained that there’s no written record of ‘Herne the Hunter’ before Shakespeare. This could be because Shakespeare made him up, or it could be that Shakespeare was playing on a local legend. There are a lot of nods to local landmarks of Windsor in the play, so the latter idea has some merit. There also was a famous oak tree in that forest that became known as ‘Falstaff’s Oak.’
Anderson presented evidence that Herne the Hunter was based on a local ghost story. He suggested that ‘Herne’ was actually Richard ‘Horne’ who was caught poaching deer in the Forest during the reign of Henry VIII. The Quarto does call him ‘Horne the Hunter’, which lends credence to the theory. He argued (convincingly) that it would be too coincidental for this ghost to wear horns when Shakespeare needed horns to make a cuckoldry joke.
Shakespeare’s plays (and other early modern plays) are rife with jokes about cuckolds. A cuckold was a man whose wife slept with another man (meaning Falstaff wanted to make Page and Ford cuckolds by sleeping with their wives), and the Cambridge edition explains that the horns on a cuckold’s head were to ‘symbolize his overmastering by the virility of another’ while the horns of a stage symbolize its virility. So, Falstaff losing his horns symbolizes his inability to turn Ford and Page into cuckolds. Ford even makes a joke to this effect at the end of the play.
Personally, because of the arrival of kids dressed as fairies, I always assumed that Herne was a fairy-type figure (like the Celtic Oak King), but the description in the play is clearly of a ghost. That said, apparently I’m not alone because after the play was written, people began envisioning Herne leading the Wild Hunt. That’s right! Shakespeare may’ve used a local legend but then created local legend like an O.G. Slenderman (#IYKYK). It is possible that Herne and the Wild Hunt came from the same germ of ancient folklore, but it’s also possible that Shakespeare Mandela-effected us into believing Herne had been there all along.
So it seems our dear (or deer?) Will mashed together the midnight stroll of Old Hamlet, deer-based cuckoldry jokes of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the fairy antics of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the local ghost story of Horne the Poacher, and a prop-based cuckoldry pun to create his set piece finale moment.
There you have it. Shakespeare not only wrote a cheeky tale of clever women pranking a lecherous knight, but also incepted people into believing his Herne the Hunter had existed in folklore for centuries and that he and Queen Liz gossiped about how fab Falstaff was as a character. The play does involve other mythology, like the wise woman of Brentford, but we’ve run out of space for that discussion. It may come up in my next post where I plan to talk about original staging and casting of the play, so, since I don’t have a horn to blow, sign up for the newsletter if you want to be notified for our next chat!
If you want to hear more from me about Shakespeare generally, I have a Substack called Shakespeare Said it Better that you can find at https://lizlarson.substack.com/. I’m an actor, attorney, and budding Shakespearean scholar finishing up my master’s in Shakespeare and Creativity at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.
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