Queen Elizabeth and the "Merry Wives" [pp. 348-358]

350 QUEEN ELIZABET AND "THE MIERRY WIVES." [June,
social institutions could only have meant license, anarchy, and
ruin. And so it happens that Shakspere is the poet of humanity
rather than of nature, Milton to the contrary notwithstanding.
There are no "native wood-notes wild" in the Shaksperean
opera. The music is that of camp and court, of tourney and
assemblage, and of crowded city streets. Only kings, queens,
dukes, lords, and titled ladies mnove in the action of his dramas.
The people, the masses, are only his accessories and supernu meraries. It is only when a patrician is to be represented in
exile or retirement that we have the pastoral or the rural-Per dita among the oafs and shepherdesses, the forest of Arden, Pros pero's magic island, or eulogy of any life that is "exempt from
public haunt." I desire in this paper to point out what seems
to me a most singularly suggestive exception to the rule, as an
instance (and, so far as I can find, the only one) in which Shakspere used a titled personage for a butt, and brought a nobleman
to grief in his pages. And if my explanation of Shakspere's pos.
sible motive and reasons for so doing is esteemed too finical or
far-fetched, at least I am only sharing with my fellow-students
the ordinary penalty of Shaksperean study-viz., an over-tendency to surmise and conjecture-and no great harm is done
where all are warned. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Shakspere's rule of -adulation for and adjuration of rank is, for the
first and only time, suspended. For the first time his personages
are common people-tradesmen and villagers, a schoolmaster, a
publican, and a French doctor; and, most marvellous of all, a
knight for their butt!-ordinary human beings poking fun at a
knight! Certainly so abrupt and radical a change seems to warrant tradition in asserting that William Shakspere wrote that
comedy, not of his own motion, but under direction of a higher
will and edict than his own.
Two statements, referred back to this tradition, appear to
have been generally conceded without much examination: first,
that Queen Elizabeth ordered William Shakspere to write a play
in fourteen days for the purpose of showing Falstaff (with whom
her majesty had already become acquainted in Henry IV.) "in
love," and that The Merry Wives of Windsor, as printed in i623,
was the result of that order; and, second, that the I602 quarto
version of The Merry Wives is a shorthand transcript of the i623
version surreptitiously captured from the actors' mouths. But
why should Queen Elizabeth-who was the most scrupulous of
monarchs to keep her people from thinking, least of all from
prating, about a change in the chartered order of things-why