The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival

Seeing Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival over the last few years, we’ve gotten so used to pleasant surprises that we’ve come to expect them. We’re talking here about plays that didn’t seem like much when we read them, but that came wonderfully rich and alive on stage – like Troilus and Cressida (2003), The Taming of the Shrew (2008), and A Winter’s Tale (2010).

We counted on the same from this year’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, which we’d never seen performed before. True, on the printed page – and we re-read the play just last spring — its situations seemed contrived, its jokes puerile (if we got them at all), and its characters one-dimensional.  But we still somehow expected that the magic would come out on stage.

Sir John Falstaff (Geraint Wyn Davies), flanked by Mrs. Page (Laura Condlin) and Mrs. Ford (Lucy Peacock)

Unfortunately, it just didn’t. We don’t fault either the cast or the director. You couldn’t ask for more, for instance, from the two merry wives themselves, Mrs. Page (played by Laura Condlin) and Mrs. Ford (Lucy Peacock), a pair of past-their-prime housewives who find that they’ve both gotten indecent propositions from Sir John Falstaff (Geraint Wyn Davies). On stage Ms. Condlin and Ms. Peacock giggle and carry on energetically at their own schemes for teaching the lecherous knight a lesson. Unfortunately, the audience – at least at the performance we attended – mostly didn’t laugh along. The material just isn’t that funny.

Tom Rooney as Master Ford

In fact, our audience didn’t really stir until Tom Rooney, playing Master Ford, came on stage. Here, at least, was a bit of magic. Failing to realize that his wife is merely making sport of the fat knight, Master Ford believes he is being cuckolded. The character seems dull and lifeless on the printed page, but Rooney’s Ford is vital and compelling. Rooney makes far more out of the part that we imagined possible.

Nor does the seriously talented Geraint Wyn Davies fail to get all there is out of the role of the fat knight, Sir John Falstaff, although it wasn’t really until the second half of the play that our audience began responding to Falstaff with any regularity or enthusiasm. We got a charge out of Falstaff’s padded fat costume — in fact, we liked all the period costumes and the set for the interior of the Garter Inn. (We were grateful that director Frank Galati didn’t transpose the play to, say, Brooklyn in the 1950s.)

Geraint Wyn Davies as the fat knight

Considering the individual performances and the brisk direction, we didn’t feel we wasted our money on The Merry Wives of Windsor. But we left thinking that this play would languish in obscurity, unperformed, if it were attributed to a Elizabethan playwright other than Shakespeare. It just isn’t that good; even this excellent Stratford Festival cast couldn’t make us think it was. There aren’t any clever turns of phrases that you’d want to tuck away for future use, there aren’t any speeches that make you sit back, smile, and appreciate the poetry, and there aren’t any genuinely memorable characters. No other Shakespeare play is so deficient. We left feeling that we would have “had to be there” — in 1599 — to find the play funny.

In the program notes, Robert Blacker writes that The Merry Wives of Windsor is “underrated by scholars but not by audiences.” We grant his first point, but doubt his second.

We rank our ten favorite Shakespeare plays

Macbeth may not be one of our favorite Shakespeare plays, but this portrait of Ellen Terry playing Lady Macbeth is probably our favorite picture by John Singer Sargent

Since starting the Emsworth blog, we’ve been amazed to see how many first-rate websites and blogs are devoted more or less exclusively to Shakespeare. The one we like best and visit the most is the indispensable Shakespeare Geek, whose learned readers happily debate such enduring questions as whether Hamlet’s mother was in on the murder of his father. The Geek has guest appearances from Shakespeare experts, passes along news from the world of Shakespeare scholarship, and cheers the ongoing impact of Shakespeare on culture.

The Geek recently invited readers to rank their favorite ten Shakespeare plays so he can poll the results. This is our list:

10. Measure for Measure. A bracingly earthy play in which a hypocritical judge sentences fornicators to death, but demands sex from a woman who seeks mercy for her brother. Angelo is one of our favorite villains. And there’s the glorious cameo role of Barnardine, the reprobate who successfully insists that he’s too drunk to be executed.

We were delighted to learn recently that, back in the early 1800s when Thomas Bowdler prepared his editions of Shakespeare with the smutty parts taken out or rewritten to make them suitable for family reading, he threw up his hands and gave up Measure for Measure as an incurable case.

Al Pacino as Shylock

9. The Merchant of Venice. The first Shakespeare we ever read and still a top favorite, even though we have yet to see a good production. Who can resist either the trial scene or the “In such a night” duet of Lorenzo and Jessica?

We’d like a moratorium on the whining about the ethnic stereotypes in this play. Sure, Shylock’s character shows evidence of the ingrained prejudices of the day, but the playwright’s affirmation of our common humanity was a breakthrough. And as Portia says, “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”

8. Troilus and Cressida. All good literature and drama is “relevant” (how we despise that tiresome word!) in today’s world. But what Shakespeare play presents a more apt metaphor for our own times than this tale of Greeks, lost in sensuality and relativism, who have lost the sense of what they’re fighting for, or why it makes any difference which side they’re on? The play’s attractions include two of Shakespeare’s most repulsive characters, Thersites and Pandarus.

Orson Wells as Falstaff

7. Henry IV, Part 1. The play that gives the best sense of England in the Bard’s own day. Prince Hal’s slumming with Falstaff is great fun.  But the picture of Falstaff’s manning his regiment with unarmed peasants for cannon fodder is sobering. Those were cruel times.

If the Shakespeare Geek were inviting his readers to rank their favorite practical joke scenes in Shakespeare, our favorite would be the prank Falstaff’s fellow villains played him on the highway near Gadshill. (Our second favorite is the hilarious scene in All’s Well in which the blindfolded Paroles, believing himself a prisoner of the enemy, doesn’t hesitate to betray his comrades.)

John Gielgud as Prospero

6. Othello. So many Shakespeare plays revolve around characters like Iago who control and manipulate people around them that we’ve often thought the playwright must have had recurring fantasies of having godlike control over his fellow humans. But none of the Bard’s other puppet masters is so thoroughly sociopathic as Iago. The visceral impact of the final scene is unparalleled.

5. The Tempest.  Gonzalo will forever be a hero to Emsworth and all bibliophiles because he made sure the castaway Prospero was supplied not only with food and clothes, but also with books:

Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

Even the wretched Caliban knew the value of Prospero’s books:

Remember
First to possess his books; for without them
He’s but a sot

4. Hamlet. For all the usual reasons, we never tire of Hamlet. And the comic relief — the garrulous Polonius, the traveling players, the gravediggers — always comes just when the play needs it the most.

Mervyn Peake's drawing of his own character, Fuchsia

3. Twelfth Night. Here we confess that since boyhood we have been prone to hopeless crushes on fictional female characters: Mona in Elizabeth Enright’s The Four-Story Mistake, Perry Mason’s secretary Della Street, Titus Groan’s sister Fuchsia in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, Bobbie Wickham in P. G. Wodehouse’s Wooster/Jeeves stories, Jane Austen’s Emma — and the quick-witted, slender-figured Viola, heroine of Twelfth Night.

Feste’s our favorite Shakespeare fool. There’s just no other Shakespeare comedy that we like nearly so well.

2. Julius Caesar. A gripping story, the best plot of any Shakespeare play. So many delicious scenes: Cassius’s courtship of Brutus, the assassination of the tyrant Caesar, the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech, the exquisite quarrel between Brutus and Cassius — and especially the cameo appearance of the unfortunate Cinna the poet. “Tear him for his bad verses!”

Brian Bedford as Lear at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, 2007

1. King Lear. This is Emsworth’s favorite Shakespeare.  We identify in an alarming way with Lear, with his monumental mistakes of judgment, with his inability to swallow his pride, with his instinct for the grand and the dramatic.  And Emsworth has three daughters too (and is counting on them to take care of him in his old age)! 

The comic moments in King Lear almost overshadow the tragic. Just when his heartache is most acute, Lear has the presence of mind to address “Poor Tom” with a self-deprecating witticism: “Didst thou give all to thy two daughters?”