SUPPORT FOR THE 2019 SEASON OF THE FESTIVAL THEATRE IS GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY DANIEL BERNSTEIN AND CLAIRE FOERSTER PRODUCTION SUPPORT IS GENEROUSLY PROVIDED BY JANE PETERSEN BURFIELD & FAMILY, BY DR. DESTA LEAVINE IN MEMORY OF PAULINE LEAVINE AND BY DR. M. LEE MYERS 2 DIRECTOR’S NOTES A COMMUNITY TRANSFORMED BY THEATRE BY ANTONI CIMOLINO The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only play Shakespeare set in his own contemporary time and place. Yet it somehow has the feeling of a memory play. Ben Jonson accused Shakespeare, his friend and rival, of having “small Latin and less Greek,” and this play features a Latin lesson taken by a struggling young student named Will. Might the rural, small-town community in Merry Wives be modelled on the Stratford of the playwright’s youth? We can’t know that for sure, but we can certainly see that the hero of this play is the community, and that community is led – by example, at least – by two remarkable women. Alice Ford and Meg Page, the BRIGIT WILSON (LEFT), SOPHIA WALKER, GERAINT WYN DAVIES (INSET) “merry wives” of the title, take whatever ill fortune offers them and, through wit, differences. Shakespeare has a deep love wisdom, and brio, ensure a happy outcome for the underdog and the marginalized. for themselves and those they love. Here, the oddballs, eccentrics, and This brilliant comedy about harassment, foreigners do not merely find inclusion jealousy, and revenge tames through but also drive positive change in the laughter the green-eyed monster that community by virtue of their diverse views. looms so large in Othello. And so much of The French Doctor Caius – portrayed by the healing comes by way of characters the same actor who this season also plays using theatre to subvert and delight. that most sinister promoter of jealousy, Iago – chastens the madly suspicious Ford: These two middle-class wives become, “By gar, ’tis no the fashion of France; it is in essence, playwrights and actresses in not jealous in France.” order to bring their “audience” to a new understanding: a happier, healthier one. By taking matters into their vastly capable And they’re not alone in this, as other hands, the merry wives change their lives members of the town also create scenarios and the life of their community. Everyone to divert and instruct. The comedy ends ends up among friends. And Anne Page, with the whole town, children and all, the young woman who was to be married putting on a show in which spirits and off for her family’s financial and social gain, goblins punish lust and lechery. creates a brighter future by deceiving the deceivers and standing firm in her Yet the play is not puritanical. This is a independence and agency. community working at its own kind of multiculturalism – townspeople trying This, then, is a production set in a small to forge joyful relationships across town, in the not too distant past, where 9 eccentric characters and remarkable in positions of leadership during the war, women make the world a bit better were expected to return to the home and a through play-acting and theatre. secondary role. In their spirit and courage, The early 1950s was a time before easy the actions of Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page international plane travel and the ubiquity send a message that gets only stronger of television: a time when a small town with time. From their first being spoken in was a place unto itself. It was a time 1600 to 1950 to today, Mrs. Page’s words within living memory that nonetheless ring loud and true: “We’ll leave a proof, predates feminism: a time when so many by that which we will do, / Wives may be women, who had worked in factories and merry, and yet honest too.” THE HEALING POWER OF LAUGHTER BY JESSICA RIDDELL In his 1709 Life of Shakespeare, Nicholas Although many of the claims in Rowe’s Rowe reported that Queen Elizabeth biography of Shakespeare have since been “was so well pleased with that admirable discredited (he recounts how Shakespeare character of Falstaff in the two parts of fled to London after being convicted of Henry IV that she commanded him to “Deer-stealing” in Warwickshire), some of continue it for one play more, and to his observations continue to capture the show him in love.” And so, the story goes, imagination of scholars and actors alike Shakespeare wrote The Merry Wives (he famously suggests that Shakespeare of Windsor at her royal behest around performed on stage as “the Ghost in his 1600 as a spin-off from the wildly popular own Hamlet”). While there is no evidence Henriad series. to corroborate the apocryphal story of Elizabeth’s intervention, this tantalizing Falstaff – hailed as one of Shakespeare’s tidbit does help contextualize one of greatest comedic characters – partied his Shakespeare’s most unusual comedies. way through Cheapside with Prince Hal and a naughty band of ne’er-do-wells for The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only the better part of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part play Shakespeare set in his contemporary 2. In the latter play, Prince Hal discards Elizabethan world. The world of Windsor his old friend when he becomes king; in is populated by merchants and wives, Henry V, written and performed around servants and tapsters, hostesses and the same time as The Merry Wives of housekeepers. But it is also a world where Windsor, we learn that this act of betrayal members of the nobility mix with members was too much for the old knight to bear: of a rural middle class, and where a Falstaff – according to Mistress Quickly Welsh parson, a French physician, and – dies of a broken heart. There is some an English judge can frequent the same speculation that Shakespeare, bending drinking establishment. This middle- to royal pressure or capitalizing on public class community – with its contemporary, appetite, gave this beloved character one domestic, and non-aristocratic feel – final hurrah in Windsor. operates in the shadows of Windsor Castle, 10 a crucial royal residence that Elizabeth overtures are fuelled by his conviction that spent much of her reign renovating and these married women (the title “Mistress” restoring. Although these conditions being the unabbreviated form of today’s make Windsor a place like no other, the “Mrs.”) should welcome his advances, setting also has a quality of small towns imagining female “leer[s] of invitation” everywhere, filled with big personalities and their “greedy intention” to use him and real problems, of competing rural for sexual purposes. The implausibility concerns and cosmopolitan influences, and of Falstaff’s plan generates laughter animated by the pride and resilience of because of the incongruity between his provincial townships. self-aggrandizement and his status as an overweight, self-indulgent, bawdy old man. And yet, there is a sense that the world However, his sense of entitlement and of Windsor is not quite contemporary. In unsolicited advances also have a menacing this play, Shakespeare gestures towards a edge, especially when viewed through not-so-distant past with oblique references the lens of the #MeToo and #TimesUp to Falstaff as a fifteenth-century knight movements. named Oldcastle, relies on a more than forty-year-old source text, Il Pecorone Perhaps more dangerous, however, is (written in 1558), and deploys medieval Ford’s behaviour: he is seized with the farce and fabliau genres to drive the action. unshakeable conviction he is about to be The fabliau was a popular genre in late cuckolded. Ford’s plans to catch his wife medieval England, mastered by Chaucer in flagrante delicto exemplify a recurring in his comically subversive “The Miller’s trope in Shakespeare’s plays – Othello, Tale.” Fabliau stories are set in the present Posthumus in Cymbeline, Leontes in The in familiar, contemporary places with Winter’s Tale, Claudio in Much Ado About characters of the “middling sort.” The plots Nothing are all obsessed with female are driven by realistically motivated tricks inconstancy – and this almost always and ruses executed masterfully by those ends in tragedy. Underneath the surface who are usually marginalized or scorned of the hilarity and banter lie real danger by society: penniless students triumph and risk. Mistress Page and Mistress Ford over prosperous merchants, beautiful must navigate tricky terrain to defend young wives trick jealous old husbands, their honour and teach men in Windsor a and members of the nobility and the clergy valuable lesson about respecting women. are almost always targets of mocking, Comeuppance comes in various forms. subversive laughter. Shakespeare imports Falstaff is first dumped into the river in the logic of fabliau justice into his near- a pile of soiled laundry, a sly reversal contemporary world in order to expose of the punishment usually reserved for male predators and rehabilitate jealous nags, scolds, or shrews (names used for husbands through the healing power of women who asserted their views too communal laughter. vigorously). Unruly women were viewed The Merry Wives of Windsor is a play about as a threat to public order, so they were men behaving badly and extraordinary publicly humiliated, often drawn through women working within tight parameters the streets in a cart before being dumped to exercise a form of fabliau justice that is, in the river with a “cucking stool.” In The ultimately, restorative. The largest butt of Merry Wives of Windsor, the tables turn jokes in this play is Falstaff. As a member when the shrews gain control of the of the nobility, Falstaff shows none of cucking stool and wield it to shame unruly the gentility or refinement of his social men.