Seminar given to the Shakespeare Institute, March 2014.

Walking in a Windsor Wonderland: Some ramshackle reflections on directing Shakespeare's greatest comedy.

Introduction

In late 2011 I was called by Michael Boyd. “Hi Phillip, are you available to direct a Shakespeare on the main stage next winter? I can’t say what it is yet”. Ever since I was a fourteen-year-old boy sat in the gods having his mind blown by Iain Glen in Mathew Warchus’s Henry V and Des Barritt’s Malvolio in Judge’s Twelfth Night, to direct a Shakespeare play for RSC had been my dearest wish. The answer was an enthusiastic “yes!” “Great,” said Michael, “let’s talk on Monday.” I spent the weekend fantasising about what the play might be. “Would it be Hamlet?” I asked myself. Measure for Measure? I’d done a version of Measure at Theatr Clwyd and perhaps a slot had become available. Would it be the Henry IVs, the greatest of them all? Or King Lear? Whatever the play, I thought, I’m being recognised by the theatre company I’ve loved almost as much as Liverpool Football Club since adolescence. My toiling in the regions had finally paid off, just at the point where it was stretching credibility to refer to myself as a young director, I was being taken seriously.

When the phone went on Monday morning, I answered it before the end of the first ring. Michael said, “Um. Yeah. It’s The uh Merry Wives Of Windsor,” in a way that a doctor might tell you that you had a urinary infection. “But I think you’ll make a really good job of it.” My heart sank. One learns a lot about oneself as an artist when the call comes from the RSC and it’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. It was at that point around position thirty-seven in the list of Shakespeare plays I wanted to do. I told Michael that I was delighted, it was a play I’d always admired and that I couldn’t wait to start work.

Then I asked myself, why did I have such a disappointed reaction to being given the Merry Wives? What was it that had shaped that response? Why did it matter to my ego? Why wasn’t a famous director going to do it? Then I thought, how had Merry Wives become something of a pariah play in the canon? How did it get its reputation as “Shakespeare-lite”? Why was Merry Wives proof positive that the greatest poet in the English Language was in fact mortal, suffering a regrettable off day? Hack-work? You know the story: Queen Elizabeth was so enamoured of the Falstaff of the Henry IVs that she ordered a spin off, which Shakespeare reluctantly assembled in a fortnight.

This seminar is the story of how this director came to regard The Merry Wives Of Windsor as being out of Shakespeare’s top drawer and one of the greatest flowerings of the English renaissance; a play ahead of its time. This is Shakespeare’s Blue Velvet, or Abigail’s Party. A play with sedition and heresy smuggled between its lines like a late Elizabethan Samiszdat. It is an exploration of how certain of Shakespeare’s plays get reputations that blind us to their true value.

I also want to touch on how a case like The Merry Wives contributes to the prevailing idea in the theatre culture that we have had all the ideas we are going to have about how Shakespeare plays are going to be produced. To coin a phrase that we have reached “the end of history” when it comes to thinking about the canon, that we are somehow “post-Shakespeare”. And that perhaps our only recourse as contemporary directors therefore is to engage in the business of post-modernity, making productions about productions and ideas about ideas. The idea that Shakespeare’s dead and we need auteurs and not advocates.

In making a case for Merry Wives as a great play I do it as someone engaged in the ugly practicalities of the rehearsal room. I am not an academic by any stretch of the imagination. There are many more learned treaties than this on the play. It is intimidating to see so many learned people here. I hope you’ll forgive my dodgy scholarship, my wild hunches and inconsistencies. I hope there aren’t too many gaping holes in my thinking.

This seminar is also a reflection of the successes and failures of my own RSC production of the play. It was set in Windsor in the autumn of 2012, after the diamond jubilee and the Olympics – I was looking for the most deeply inauspicious time in history. It was also a time where reckonings had to be paid and money was scarce. I will, along the way, explore some gaps between my ideas about the play and how they were rendered practically. For the record I was quite pleased with the final outcome, although largely felt that it was enjoyed for the wrong reasons. I hoped people would cry more.

Finally I want to talk about the problem of comedy. I have observed that some theatre critics have a quite backward attitude to stage comedy, the funnier a play is and the more an audience laugh the less inclined they are to perceive the "art". This is perhaps Merry Wives' biggest problem; perhaps it is too funny, not Shakespeare funny, but actually funny. And those boring old bastards in the press often don't feel like they’ve been properly “cultured” unless they’ve been bored out of their minds for three hours; or are the only ones who’ve perceived the “joke”. David Foster Wallace in trying to explain how Kafka is funny, expresses the idea beautifully:

“It’s not that students don’t ‘get’ Kafka’s humour but that we’ve taught them to see humour as something you get – the same way we’ve taught them to see that the self is something you just have.”

For those who think humour is something you just get and the self is something you just have, then Merry Wives is a problematic work. There are no jokes in Merry Wives, only situation and character; bacchanalian laughter and chaos.

I also ask whether Shakespeare’s comedy has more in common with our most sophisticated comedians such as Woody Allen, Mike Leigh, and Chaplin, artists adept at eliciting lots of different types of laugh, rather than our quite route-one presentation of stage comedy, born out of the nineteenth-century panto tradition where gestures are made to illustrate the dick jokes, and comic characters are forbidden complex psychologies.

We laugh at transgression and discomfort. Perhaps this is Shakespeare’s funniest play because it is his most transgressive and discomforting – particularly for a modern audience who through Facebook, Twitter and Sky Plus need not face anything that they don’t want to see.

While it’s true that the Shakespeare plays that are popular at a certain time in history tell us something about the concerns and preoccupations of the people who lived in those times, perhaps it is also instructive to look at what Merry Wives status as a “pariah play” says as an “abstract and brief chronicle” of our attitudes to love, sex, children, masculinity and getting old in the early twenty-first century.

Karl Marx said, “There is more life in Act One of The Merry Wives of Windsor, than in the entirety of German literature.” Verdi the doyenne of the late nineteenth-century European stage, who in his eightieth year, could have chosen to adapt any work of European literature for his great swan-song, chose The Merry Wives as the source material for his great comic opera Falstaff. So what’s happened since? Is it simply that Merry Wives, like another borderline surreal sex comedy, The Benny Hill Show, is destined to be only truly appreciated on the continent?



The Reputation Of The Play

So how did I come to unthinkingly consider that I’d got the booby prize when being given the Merry Wives? I turn to two not unrepresentative examples from books of popular Shakespeare scholarship. Harold Bloom, in his seven hundred and forty-five page tome Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, dismisses Merry Wives in a mere three-and-a-half pages. He concludes by calling it a “weak play”, that the Falstaff of the Merry Wives is “a nameless impostor masquerading as the great Sir John Falstaff”. James Shapiro in his introduction to the brilliant 1599 asks how Shakespeare went from “writing The Merry Wives of Windsor to writing a play as inspired as Hamlet”.

The RSC in its 2006 Complete Works Season did not give the Merry Wives to the Schaubühne. In its own way it did get a radical treatment as Merry Wives: The Musical! It was a very witty, riotous treamtment of the Merry Wives story with additions from the Henry IVs and songs to flesh out the Falstaff / Mistress Quickly love story, it was the gang show at Christmas. The aim was never to take it particularly seriously. As You Like It: The Musical! anyone? Twelfth Night: The Musical! anyone? No didn’t think so. Those plays were given to Sam West and Sheffield Theatres and Declan Donnelan’s Russian wing of Cheek by Jowl respectively.

Newspaper critics for much of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century begin usually begin by expressing surprise at how good the play is. Take these (again not unrepresentative) samples of reviews of my own 2012 production. Charles Spencer of the Daily Telegraph repeats the notion that “the play itself is hardly one of Shakespeare’s greatest” but despite this lavishes a glowing four-star review on it. Neil Norman of the Express in his rave review of the production opens his byline with the view that “Any production of Shakespeare’s least amusing comedy that concludes with Superman... must have something going for it”. The British Theatre Guide’s critic opens his glowing assessment with “The Merry Wives of Windsor doesn't often come in the top ten of people’s favourite Shakespeare plays”. On reflection I am amazed at the regularity with which directors manage to save this hopeless play.

Most of the reviews repeated the myth originated by Nicholas Rowe in his 1709 book The Life of Shakespeare that

“The Queen was so well pleased with the admirable character of Falstaff in the in the two parts of Henry IV that she commanded him to continue it for one play more and to show him in love.”

Interestingly in 1702 John Dennis, who coincidentally had written his own adaptation of The Merry Wives, asserted

“I know very well that it hath pleased one of the greatest Queens that ever was in the world... This comedy was written at her command, and by her direction, and she was so eager to see it acted that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days.”

There were many reasons for this myth to have taken hold at that time. Dennis in order receive more reflected glory for his own adaptation by its Royal association for example. Helen Hacket in her Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths observes that

“Writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries had a particular incentive for disseminating in print the oral legends which associated Shakespeare with the Monarchs: [namely] their own sense of grievance at their lack of royal patronage.”

Why ultimately does this matter?

The implication that Shakespeare didn’t much care for the play has offered tacit permission for its under consideration and dismissal in some cases. It has also opened the door for huge licence to be taken with the performed text of the play based on the assumption that its apparent inconsistencies are down to Shakespeare shirking his duties as playwright. The adaptation of the play, as we have seen, has a long history.



The ‘Hands Text’

Shortly after getting the job, I received a call from Terry Hands. He’s an important character in this story. Briefly, he trained me, he gave me my first job in theatre, I assisted him more times than is healthy and, as with many of his former assistants, there always remains a part of me in the rehearsal room that asks myself, “what would Terry do”. He’s the greatest. I still have an irrational desire to please him. He has that effect. He’s part Jean Vilar, part Bill Shankly, part ninja assassin. I also knew that he had made his RSC debut in the RST with The Merry Wives Of Windsor (and he never missed an opportunity to remind me that he was five years younger than I was when he did it). But as luck would have it I had written an essay in John Russell Brown’s compendium Director’s Shakespeare on exactly the subject of Hands’ RSC debut.

Terry’s Merry Wives is coincidentally his signature piece. He did his production for the last time in the early 90s at the National Theatre. The first one was in 1968 at Stratford, the cast was remarkable, Brewster Mason as Falstaff, Elizabeth Spriggs and Brenda Bruce as the wives, Roger Rees as Fenton and Ian Richardson giving one of his celebrated performances as Ford – a Ford by which all other RSC Ford’s would be measured. It remains one of the most iconic moments in the history of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

The production, designed by Timothy O’Brien had a glorious Elizabethan period setting; its evocation of a bustling middle class that through trade and commerce had hewn itself out of the woods but still had one foot in the pagan traditions of the medieval world, was influenced by the Berliner Ensemble’s visit to the World Theatre Festival earlier in the decade. It was period but in a way that had rarely been seen on the British stage, gone were the wig joins and the 5 and 9 greasepaint, in came a period aesthetic that moved from the representational to the expressionistic and the abstract.

The phonecall ran thus. “Phillip, it’s Terry”, “Oh, hi Terry”, “You do know that mine is the only performable text of The Merry Wives”. At that point in my process I had no reason to disbelieve him. I went back to the interviews I conducted with him for my essay in which he discusses the genesis of his production – I quote it at length as it contains many fascinating insights in to the director’s craft, and into the way The Merry Wives is often handled.

“The more I read the play in the folio,” he said, “the less sense it made. Then I had a stroke of luck. Oxford University Press at the time were publishing the bad quartos of Shakespeare. I looked at the bad quarto of Merry Wives, and there, gaps were being filled in and plotting ‘mistakes’ corrected. There were missing links and clarifications. There’s no clarity in the folio. There is in the bad quarto. So I steadily built up my own script, one that made total sense.”

So I went to the Birthplace Trust, got myself Terry’s text, and the texts of all of the RSC Merry Wives, from Nunn’s 1978 production with Ben Kingsley as Ford, Bill Alexander’s 1950s set ‘new Elizabethans’ version, David Thacker’s early 90s version, Rachel Kavanaugh’s 2000 text, the Folio and the bad quarto. The first thing that struck me about having all of these texts in front of me was the astonishingly high “production to hit” ratio the play has – even production to “iconic hit” ratio. There was only really one notable failure. This is all pretty good going. The other thing I was struck by was how influential Hands’ text had been on all subsequent versions of the play. Nunn had tried to hide the direct influence by some additions of his own but the text he began with was Hands’ version.

To my relatively untrained eye, it made perfect sense. It had been tidied, streamlined and cut back. It seemed sensible to cut the Latin scene (IV.i), it has no impact on the narrative. It seemed sensible to solve the huge gaps in the Ann Page / Fenton love story by adding a section from the bad folio before (III.iv) where the two unambiguously declare their love for each other – (that section of the Hands text also has a number of lines that as far as I can tell are just written by Terry Hands). It made sense to add ‘asides’ to the disjointed non sequiturs spoken by Ford and Page in II.ii. And in an age of realistic sets it also made sense to subsume the very short IV.iii scene between the Host and Bardolph in to the main body of the long IV.v Garter scene. So as not to slow the production up by rolling off the Ford House, rolling on the Garter Inn for 11 lines and rolling the Ford House back on again. As someone who lived through a Merry Wives technical, these are the things that give you nightmares. The infamous Germans in IV.v were also further explained in this text, and cut in most subsequent versions. And as for the timeline of the play, in the Folio it’s a contradictory mess. These are just some of the things that seemed to be addressed by the Hands text. There was no doubting the neatness of this solution. I went almost unthinkingly in to my rehearsals in August 2012 with that version pretty much in its entirety.

Looking back on it, it’s astonishing how influential the Hands text is and by extension the attitudes to the play’s authorship that are encoded in his compilation and, in places, authorship of the performance text. The views and insights of the brilliant and ambitious but – let’s face it – twenty-seven-year-old Terry Hands have dominated the production history of this play over the past fifty years. The idea that the play somehow needs rescuing from itself or apologised for dominates. Why shouldn’t it? When it has been infrequently done it has frequently been a big hit. As I was making my debut, I wanted a big hit.

Looking at the various texts, this treasure trove of practical insight into the staging of the play, I realised with a wry smile, that I was probably not the first director that had THAT phonecall from Terry in the most early and impressionable stage of his process. That chilly whisper stating “you know mine is the only performable text of The Merry Wives”. In many ways he’s the best Prime Minister we never had.



Treating it like Hamlet

Before I got in to the rehearsal rooms I had begun to have some small doubts about my adherence to the Hands text and by extension his philosophy. I was disappointed to learn that it didn’t tally with many of my first instincts about play when I read it in the folio. When I first read it I was struck by two arresting images.

The first was Mistress Page standing alone reading a mysterious letter stating

“What have I ’scaped love letters in the holiday time of my beauty and I am now a subject for them?”

By logical extension, because of Ann who is rising seventeen, she is at least thirty-three but is more likely in her early to mid forties (as most middle class people at the time married at around the age of twenty-five). So we had this rather heartbreaking story of a woman who had been married for nearly twenty years who’d never received a love letter; even from her husband. This also started me thinking about the kind of man Page was.

The second image was that of an insanely jealous, cudgel wielding man, beating the shit out of a “woman” in full view of the wife who he is convinced is cheating on him. The “woman” that was simultaneously the wife’s secret confidant, but was also unbeknownst to him her putative seducer, and his confessor. Was this a threat, wish fulfillment, release, an expression of a deeper lying misogyny? Either way it seemed to me a strikingly complex in its approach to psychology and a painful, jet-black portrait of a marriage with real problems.

Then I started to look at the other characters. The Knight who is the least chivalrous character in the play, the preacher who is incomprehensible to his flock, the homicidal doctor, the cunning and wise young female love interest, the young male lead who seems not only disinterested in sex but only has a hazy idea of the mechanics, the justice of the peace constantly agitating for a fight, the publican who acts as the referee. We seemed to be in this strange under-world, where the received laws of the stage had been turned on their head. All this set in a town that is the spiritual home to the Order of the Garter at St George’s chapel and its old French motto “honi soit qui mal y pense” – a place where the characters spend the bulk of their time doing the precise opposite of this.

I looked at what Falstaff had actually done – written two speculative and scheming love letters that are rumbled very quickly – and then looked at the disproportionate revenge that is meted out to him. Waterboarding in the freezing Thames, (the water can flow through the basket, but the person inside cannot get out), being beaten with a cudgel (Mistress Page watching the beating of the ‘Witch of Brentford’ says “are you not ashamed? I think you have killed the poor woman”), after Falstaff has been beaten “in to all the colours of the rainbow” he’s then terrified out of his wits in the forest at midnight, humiliated, pinched, burned and buried alive. This felt to me extraordinarily violent and twisted in its conception.

Then I started to imagine Hugh Evans on the doorsteps of the parents of his pupils after he has left IV.ii: “Good afternoon, Mrs. Smith. Would you mind if little Johnny joined me in the woods at midnight tonight? The thing is we’re going to ambush the old man who lives above the Garter Inn, then we’re going to burn him, pinch him and kick him. We’re going to do it while singing. I’ve written a song about it, here’s the lyrics, which they’ll be required to learn. And I’ve made them costumes for the occasion. Why? Thank you for asking that question, Mrs. Smith, you see he’s been doing his best to unsuccesfully seduce the wife of this guy I sort of know from up the road, and we are going to teach him a lesson. So is that ok? Can I meet little Johnny near the park at about quarter to twelve?” I suspect that even in a world without police checks, and health and safety this aspect of the play jarred a little. But perhaps this is just down to slapdash plotting, a rushed cut and shut job from Shakespeare, or evidence of how Elizabethan playwrights didn’t care too much about the “how” as long as something entertaining happened.

None of these images tallied with the play I thought I had “known” by reputation. This rough dramaturgy couldn’t all be down to accident and carelessness. What if all of this was intentional? What if I spent a few days treating this basket case of a play like Hamlet? What if we’re supposed to feel an increasing unease with what happens to Falstaff and the relish and laughter with which the central characters do it? What if we’re supposed to feel that they’re getting increasingly carried away and that their actions are absolutely crackers? What if we’re supposed to feel that these children shouldn’t be involved in the final scene? What if we’re supposed to feel uneasy with what the children Robin, William, and Ann are witness to in this play? What if the Latin scene is one of the most important scenes of the play? What if these are precisely the complex and troubled marriages that they appear to be? What if we’re supposed to feel that Page’s micro-management of his teenage daughter’s sex life is a bit creepy? What if in this universe Ann’s feelings towards Fenton are intentionally ambiguous? What if we’re supposed to see this uneasy courtship immediately following the scene where the darkness of the Ford’s marriage is publicly exposed in the buck-basket scene? What if it’s supposed to jar with us that Ann’s deceased grandfather has left a tonne of money to his granddaughter and not his son or daughter? What does this tell us about how we’re supposed to view the Pages? Did this important off-stage character (like Portia’s father) know his children rather better than they knew themselves?

What if instead of trying to solve all of these inconsistencies and rescue Shakespeare’s hack work, as production history tells us we should, we assume he meant everything? I found it a richly rewarding experience. I junked all the cut scripts and went slowly though the folio again. It works. Timeline and all. Although one has to assume that an awful lot happens before breakfast. Mine was the only RSC version to play the folio version of the text with every scene in the order laid out in the folio. The few cuts I had were for the exigencies of time but they only amounted to maybe 50 lines in total.

So what does this actually mean to a director? From a textual point of view there were three specific things that opened up to me immediately when I assumed the folio was a masterpiece. They deeply influenced how I approached the production. The first was the exchange between Ford and Page in II.i.



Asides

[PHOTO OF MELCHIORI’S ARDEN EDITION II.ii LINES 125-132]

As you can see in the slide from Melchiori’s Arden edition of the text, he lays out lines 125-132 as a series of asides. This is pretty uniform across the vast majority of published editions of the play. There are, of course, no asides in the folio. It appears that editors have tried to solve the problem of what at first glance appears to be a series of non-sequiteurs. They don’t appear to be talking TO each other at all. When I read the scene with John Ramm (the actor who eventually played Ford) in the audition, a different texture emerged. It seemed these men are talking AT each other, preoccupied, not really listening. Because that’s what men do right? Men don’t talk TO people they talk AT them. QED. This is one of the key observations of the play. When one removes the asides, one can see also a rough demotic quality to the dialogue. A writer trying to write how people actually speak rather than how they speak in plays – it naturally gives the actor a lovely interiority. I set it thus.

[PHOTO - JOHN RAMM AND MARTIN HYDER IN RUGBY GEAR ]

But this little exchange opened my eyes to something else that is in operation in II.i, the contrasting reactions to Falstaff’s putative seduction of the wives. The women not only can precisely imagine what the disgusting experience of sex with Falstaff would be like, but take great delight in relating it to each other. Their descriptions of the putative sex act is full of graphic, obscene colour, larded with fecundity, designed to make the other roar with laughter

Mistress Ford: I could be knighted

And….

Mistress Page: He cares not what he puts in to the press when when he would put us two. I had rather be a giantess and lie under Mount Pelion.

And…

Mistress Ford: What Tempest I trow threw this whale with so many tonnes of oil in his belly ashore at Windsor…. [let’s] entertain him with hope until the wicked fire of lust have melted him in his own grease.

And…

Mistress Ford: Boarding call you it? I’ll be sure to keep him above deck.

And…

Mistress Page: If he come under my hatches, I’ll never to sea again.

Lets contrast this with the response of the men. The first response is the section we’ve just seen. Monosyllables. Interiority. Isolation. The diametric opposite of an ‘aside’. The ladies have a facility and vocabulary with which to discuss sex and the men, well, don’t.

At first glance so much of the Merry Wives dialogue looks outlandish and extraordinary, particularly those lines spoken by Caius and The Host Of The Garter. So often in performance they have led to cariacature. Whether you think this is a play of 1597 or that it’s a later play of 1600 as I do, Merry Wives is a play that is surrounded by bold experiments in character, language and psychology by Shakespeare. This is a play written within a year of the Henry IVs and The Merchant of Venice or of As You Like It, Henry V and Hamlet, depending on your belief. I’m more persuaded that this play is in these traditions rather than existing as a ‘Vatican City’ within this. This small exchange began to open my eyes to a more realistic playing style. The language of the play started to feel like an imperfect experiment in the demotic, an experiment in three dimensions.



Ann Page and the Bad Quarto

[PHOTO – BAD QUARTO ADDITION PRIOR TO III.iv]

In this slide you can see the addition prior to the III.iv duologue between Ann Page and Fenton. It seems the compiler of the bad quarto also felt that because neither Ann nor Fenton behave like conventional stage lovers, that this must just be a mistake. Once more the characters in Windsor are behaving badly. It feels to me that this is the point. When I looked at what every character in the play said about themselves and others, I saw that Ann Page is by far the most discussed character in the play. Everyone has an opinion on her mainly that she’s “sweet”, “good”, “fair”, “pretty” and “honest” – Fenton doesn’t appear to offer anything different to the general opinion. There’s nothing he says about Ann that someone else doesn’t also say about her. But she only has 17 lines. Who Ann actually is outwith the Windsor men’s opinion of her is largely a mystery. It seems as far as they’re concerned almost immaterial. This leaves us with a fascinating dramatic riddle at the centre of the play. What does Ann Page think about Fenton, her parents and the whole business of marriage? On its feet Ann’s silent presence is luminous. Perhaps her ambiguity is the point. This exchange from the folio, talking about Page, Fenton says

Fenton: And tells me it is but a thing impossible
That I should love thee only as a property.
Ann: Maybe he tells you true.

This doesn’t feel like the exchange of conventional stage lovers. Fenton (explicitly linked to the wastrel Hal) even says that he regards Ann

“more than stamps in gold or sums in sealed bags”.

Shakespeare could have chosen to write a less ambiguous scene. This particular exchange doesn’t appear in the bad quarto, the Bill Alexander version or in the Hands text. In the sumptuously period set recent Globe Theatre version, while undertaking the most brutal textual cuts to the play (omitting whole characters and narrative strands) time was found for an exquisite Elizabethan love duet between Ann and Fenton sung to the tune of a lute. The two lovers simpered in to each others eyes like a pastiche of a Nicholas Hilliard cameo.

The Hands text here, explicitly adds the unambiguous

Ann: Good M. Fenton, you may assure youselfe
My hart is setled upon none but you,
Tis as my father and mother please:
Get their consent, you quickly shall have mine.

I think what Shakespeare is pointing to is the pain of the imperfection of her choice of husband. It throws light on all the other imperfect marriages that the play has focused on. In this episode he observes with extraordinary psychological acuity that neither husband nor wife are dreaming the same dream (more of that later). In act V we see a marriage at its inception and the lunacy of two marriages in their pomp set in opposition to each other. We can see how from this asymmetry of expectation between the couples, (and no little parental meddling) marriages begin like Ann and Fenton’s and become the Ford’s. In a late rehearsal of act 5 Sylvestra Le Touzel, playing Mistress Page on seeing Ann and Fenton together in the Windsor wood at midnight began to weep uncontrollably. It felt right as the woman who had never received a love letter from her husband saw her own daughter embark on a lifetime of trying to change a man (and sees the result of what has happened to her daughter’s real life while she was cavorting around in her fantasy life). Like so many Shakespearean heroines (and I thank Professor Carol Chillington-Rutter for the link to Guys and Dolls), Anne has decided to ‘marry the man today and change his ways tomorrow’. She’s not the only one. I’m tickled when I Imagine Christmas dinner round at Angelo and Mariana’s place, or a summer barbecue with Rosalind, Orlando, Celia and Oliver or cheese and wine with the middle aged Portia and Bassanio.

This is not a nihilistic view of love. The beauty of the whole business comes in the fact that we daily attempt the impossible in love. The amazing fact that in spite of its ludicrousness that we try at all. Shakespeare observes with a gimlet eye through Ann’s silence and her actions the realpolitik of real relationships. We rarely choose our husbands and wives from a wide-ranging and perfect menu. Out of the quick tempered Dr Cauis, the terminally clueless Slender and Fenton there’s no competition. I know who’s faults I’d rather work with. The presentation of her absurd and specific choices is mimetically brilliant. But furthermore within Merry Wives, the question of how we are supposed to live in spite of these absurdities, is harder edged; it takes place within the detailed and concrete ‘real world’ of Windsor, not the Athenian Forest, Ephesus or among the fictional characters of the Forest of Arden.

Stephen Greenblatt in Will In The World remarks that

“There are two significant exceptions to Shakespeare’s unwillingness or inability to imagine a married couple in a relationship of sustained intimacy, but they are unnervingly strange. Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet and the Macbeths”

After working on The Merry Wives Of Windsor I couldn’t agree less. Both on the point of his “unwillingness or inability” to imagine married couples, but also on their “strangeness”. This so called strangeness is merely the observation that relationships are not lived generically, but in the midst of a series of very specific circumstances created by and thrust upon the couple in question. I’m persuaded by Greer’s idea in Shakespeare’s Wife that the worlds of Stratford-upon-Avon and London were much more porous than is commonly thought and that his own marriage, fuller than is commonly imagined, had a very specific dynamic. Ann’s ambiguity as a romantic lead opened my eyes to the idea that Merry Wives is a poem that reflects the deep truths of real marriages.



The Fuckative Case

Which brings me on to the third aspect that rather than dismissing I assumed that Shakespeare meant; namely Act 4 scene 1 or the “Latin scene”. Once more I have to thank Carol Chillington-Rutter for her important insight in to what this scene is doing in the play (and more generally the idea that often it is the children in Shakespeare that lead us to complex mystery at the heart of the matter). “The Latin Scene” is the poetic Rosetta Stone of the Merry Wives of Windsor. A demonstration of why, in bourgeois Windsor, men and women speak different languages. How they come to be dreaming different dreams. It is not simply a dispensible comic etude that sits outwith the main thrust of the play. But is another vital reflection on main theme – the glorious and impossible mess of relationships and the “construal” and “misconstrual” between the sexes.

Here young William and his boys are taught Latin. They are in effect being given access to the World Wide Web the ability to speak to people all over Europe. Thoughts are structured differently in Latin than they are in English; what is being dramatized is how the thoughts of boys and girls are structured differently. Girls don’t learn Latin. Boys do. Ostensibly the joke of the scene is that Mistress Page who because she is a woman, cannot speak the men’s language, Latin. Yet she harangues the local schoolmaster like all sharp elbowed mothers who are spending a fortune on their son’s prep school in to making her son “William” demonstrate just what he has been learning in his Latin lessons. The result is a series of obscene quibbles on pissing, spitting, fucking, genitalia, and whoring. The punchline being that Mistress Page believes him to be a better scholar than she first thought even though she hasn’t understood a bloody word he’s said.

In quite grotesque terms, just before the plot’s plausibility is (deliberately) stretched to breaking point, Shakespeare is drawing our attention to the theme of the play and reminding us of his presence as an author. In a 60 line exchange the word William is used 12 times, often twice in the same sentence. It just engages our brain, attunes our ear to obscene double meanings, and prepares us for further “misconstrual” in the coming scenes.

Incidentally, in my production we had a very young looking William Page, He was ten but looked eight. While his chaperone would take a very dim view of my habitual use of expletives in the rehearsal room, solemnly reminding me of my responsibility to leave young minds uncorrupted, she would sit there helping him learn his lines about “fuckative cases”, “La-piss” and “Horum, harum, horum”. In the buckbasket scene, the chaperone would look for permission from others before laughing like a drain at Alexandra Gilbreath’s effortlessly lascivious playing of the line “he’s too big to go in there…”. But she’d sit there stony faced during the Latin scene, while all the actors rolled about laughing. This then is the contemporary English problem with Merry Wives captured in miniature.

Watching the Latin scene play in front of an audience there appeared to be a feeling abroad, which was “Oh. should I laugh at this?” An innocent looking boy smiling and saying “piss”, “fuck” and “whore” with unbelievable relish on the main stage of RSC was dramatic plutonium. Some pockets of the audience snorted with glee, but my overwhelming reading of the audience response was that they were uneasy. But after the first preview I came to strongly believe that the laughter was supposed to be uneasy. Perhaps it was supposed to beg the question ‘should I be laughing at this’, precisely at the point where we were going back to the second buckbasket scene (buckbasket as we know was Elizabethan slang for the vagina of an older woman). It’s a bold, confrontational and original use of the child actors that were enjoying such a vogue. I sometimes wonder whether Middleton nicked this brilliant idea when he wrote Mad World, My Masters for the boys company in 1605.



“Will” teaching us how to read “Shakespeare”.

There’s also a great link with the other ‘William’ scene in Shakespeare, Act 5 scene 1 of As You Like It. Here I am persuaded by the idea that Shakespeare himself played the role of William, in perhaps the first new production at the Globe, four acts through a dazzlingly conceived dramatic poem “William” is asked by Touchstone “art thou wise?” “William” responds “faith sir I have a pretty wit”. He’s also asked in front of, probably a full house at the Globe ‘art thou rich?’, to which one can imagine Shakespeare taking a look at the three thousand or so ticket buying spectators and saying “faith sir, so so”. And that eliciting huge laughter. At this point in his career there is no hiding Shakespeare’s celebrity, people know who he is, why not use it.

It seems that Shakespeare grasps that a large part of the richness of the experience of watching a ‘Shakespeare’ play resides in the interplay of ideas, structures and motifs from other Shakespeare plays. Or to put it another way old ideas are deliberately put in to service to efficiently create new ideas. The delight of watching ideas communicate with each other is in some more ways, a more dense than the individual play itself as we move from Two Gentlemen of Verona to The Tempest. To cite an example from the contemporary cinema – the visual style and first person narration that Scorsese employs in his banker biopic The Wolf Of Wall Street (2012) is (I suspect subversively) deliberately the same as his gangster biopic Goodfellas (1990). We have a sort of ‘dialectical materialism’ of dramatic structures at work.

But it is also a subtle reminder that as the plot contrivances get ever more ludicrous, Oliver’s story about the snake and the lioness, Jacques de Boys arriving from School to tell us that Duke Frederick has renounced his Dukedom in favour of a religious life, the arrival of the goddess Hymen and so on that this is all intended.

Rather like the appearance of Hitchcock in Psycho as Marion Crane is just about to leave the city and head for the freeway in order to randomly end up in the carpark of the Bates Motel. Or how Hitchcock literally walks us in to the pet store and up to the bird cages at the top of The Birds. These bird cages are the poetic Rosetta stone of the film. It’s as if to say that it is no accident that Tippi Hedren’s character works amongst caged birds – he’s telling the audience that this is not simply a horror film. He’s teaching us how to read the film.

In As You Like It the plot is supposed to get ludicrous in order that we don’t read the conclusion of the play as the end of a conventional love story. The point of As You Like It is that “love” is not a uniform or abstract thing it must become action, imperfect and “real”. We see the role “Lady Fortune” plays in throwing couples together, how Phoebe ends up silently settling for Silvius, how Touchstone rushes in to marriage out of sheer carnality, how Oliver and Celia rather beautifully accept each other as a kind of salvation, a tacitly acknowledged silver medal. And how Rosalind and Orlando, no closer to knowing to knowing what the other one desires, accept that they are going to trust each other to dream different dreams.



Big Sets

As a conclusion to this section about the dramatic impact of the textual tinkering with The Merry Wives, I want to briefly discuss the importance of IV.iii. The eleven line scene between The Host of the Garter and Bardolph, which heralds the arrival of the Germans.

[PHOTO – ACT IV.iv IN THE FOLIO ]

The scene bisects two Ford House scenes IV.ii (The Old Woman of Brentford scene) IV.iv (where the plot is devised to terrorise Falstaff in the Windsor forest at midnight). And on the surface of things it seems it can effectively wait. In every production of Merry Wives whose prompt scripts I have studied this tiny scene is either omitted in its entirety or grafted on to the front of IV.v. The reason for this is simple, directors don’t want to roll off the Ford House set, roll on the other significant set, that of the Garter Inn for eleven lines and roll on the Ford House again. I assume that there is also a feeling that IV.ii and IV.iv segue fairly seamlessly in to one another. But (you will not be surprised to learn) I think the placing of it in the folio is of great importance. At the end of the III.v, having seen Ford as “Brook” discover that Falstaff was in the Buckbasket all along, ‘Ford’ / ‘Brook’ says

“…hee cannot ‘scape me: ‘tis impossible hee should: hee cannot creep in to a halfpenny purse, nor in to a Pepper boxe”

But what routinely happens in IV.ii is that Ford leaves the stage after having beaten the shit out of the ‘Old Woman of Brentford’, he then goes off to search his house for Falstaff. The wives then have a twenty line exchange playing time (approximately a minute) after which Ford returns sweaty, defeated and contrite. No-wonder some contemporary critics think of Merry Wives as some of Shakespeare’s poorest playwrighting. He’s been unfairly judged for a mistake that he has not made. The stakes on Ford’s rage are drastically reduced if he returns to the wives a minute after he left. It seems that he has given up. By adding the little scene between Bardolph and the Host between Ford’s exit and his re-entrance you are given two wonderful gifts. The first is the time lapse, it’s a technique commonly used in television sitcoms, we are left to imagine delightedly what has happened in the interim. In a recent episode of Family Guy the Griffin’s new dog confesses to Stewie that he has been humping his teddy bear Rupert. Cut immediately to Stewie dragging a blood sodden refuse sack down the drive. The second gift is the opening line of IV.iv when Huw Evans says

“Tis one of the best discretions of a o’man as ever I did looke vpon…"

In the eleven lines that we are away from the Ford house, an awful lot has happened. That line brought the house down every night. But what we get in the Hands is this

[PHOTO OF THE HANDS TEXT ]

The Huw Evans line is cut and Ford re-enters with an apology. So we are already in the new ‘reality’ rather than watching the men abandon the old ‘reality’ and create a new one. It also casts doubt on whether he cared that much all along, and perhaps most importantly there is no time for the information that the scene relies upon to be imparted. But following the Folio, Ford has stopped looking for his wife’s lover, and the wives have confessed almost everything to the men. The scene opens with the men slowly and stupidly catching up with their wives invention, their fantasy. Now we are getting to the psychological meat of the play.



‘We are such stuff as dreams are made of…’

A brief digression if I may. Let us imagine the owner of a factory who is convinced his workers are stealing from him. He doesn’t know what they’re stealing or who’s doing the stealing. So he hires a security firm to check all the workers as they leave the factory each day. The firm is thorough they check every man, they search their pockets, their coats, their toolbags and their wheelbarrows. The thieving goes on. The factory owner is still losing money hand over fist. Until one day he realizes that his workers are stealing the wheelbarrows.

Shakespeare and in particular The Merry Wives Of Windsor can be approached in a similar way to the factory owner who is so determined to find the solution to his problem that he is blinded to the very thing that is in front of his eyes – in this case the dramatic poem. The assumption that because this play refuses to behave exactly like our expectations of a play, it is therefore a mistake – and perhaps that the implications of its inconsistencies present an audience (or perhaps more properly a director) with an uncomfortable ontological problem.

In The Matrix Keanu Reeves is given a choice between a blue pill and red pill. If you take the blue pill the story ends and you wake up in your bed and believe what you want to believe. If you take the red pill you stay in wonderland and see how deep the rabbit hole really goes. The choice, to paraphrase Slavoj Zizek is not between ‘illusion’ and ‘reality’. “If you take away from reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it” says Zizek, “you lose reality itself”. He invites us look for “an imaginary third pill; a pill not to see the reality behind the illusion, but reality in illusion itself”.

Peter Brook in There Are No Secrets says something similar about the unique thrill of the theatre. Two men walk in to an empty space, one man says “can you point me in the direction of the pyramids” so in our imaginations we are in Giza. The second man says to the first man “can you point me in the direction of the Eiffel tower” to which the first man responds “I don’t know what you’re talking about we’re in Egypt”. Both fantasies melt away and we are in a strange intermediate space, simultaneously in both places and in neither. Suddenly we’ve taken the third pill.

To put it simply if we take away the stories we tell about ourselves, what is left is not the ‘real’ integral self, or the ‘real’ truth, but nothing, a void; a thing as human beings we don’t know, don’t understand or cannot control. It is in ‘fantasy’ that we are at our most ‘real’, where as much as ‘truth’ exists, we say the ‘truest’ things. Twitter ‘trolling’ and anonymous ‘confession’ in the Catholic church is liberating. Shakespeare understands this very well, and I think he’s fascinated by the idea. We must pay close attention to the operation of fantasy in Shakespeare’s plays.

“Madness in great ones” as he tells us in Hamlet “must not unwatched go”. Throughout the canon Shakespeare constantly directs our attention towards his characters fantasies – it’s through the way in which they use and create them that they become the most vivid to us. He understands that it’s a more complicated question than simply whether something is an “illusion” or whether it’s “reality”. We structure our subjective ‘reality’ out of fantasy, as a barrier to the abyss. It’s how we cope with the problem of the void and our unknowable and untamable selves. The elementary mistake we make with Shakespeare is to dismiss the ‘fantasy’ as incidental to the ‘real’ plot. To once more return to David Foster Wallace – a self isn’t something you just have.

It is not simply that there is an integral “Rosalind” who knows who she is and “Ganymede” who is at all times the authorial creation of, and controlled by “Rosalind”. The point is that both are contingent. Both are as ‘real’ as each other (Shakespeare deliberately gives her the name of the fictional heroine of Lodge’s popular romantic novel of 1564). He reinforces this idea in Act 3 scene 2 when Touchstone, in full earshot of Corin embarks on his

“If a hart should lack a hind,
let him seek out Rosalinde”

Touchstone gives us five “Rosalindes” in this bawdy poem. She is of course still ostensibly ‘Ganymede’ at this point. How are we to understand Corin’s thought process as he watches on? Through Touchstone’s consistent playing with ‘reality’ in this play we begin to see the poetic truth of the play i.e ‘Rosalind’s’ adolescent experiments in self hood.

Through Touchstone (very aptly named) our attention is drawn to the inherent ‘fantasy’ in the notion of ‘wedding’. We get three “fake” weddings in As You Like It, each more ludicrous than the last. Touchstone and Audrey’s in front of Oliver Mar-Text is in some way the least complicated and most sane. This wedding “under a bush” immediately precedes Ganymede / Rosalind and Orlando’s semi-improvised ceremony with Celia in the role of priest. In act V all of the couples marry in the woods, still not in a church, in front of a Greek Goddess. Why should we view the final weddings as any more ‘real’ than the first two. Shakespeare is telling us to view the end of the play this way, through this ‘fantasy’ we see the poetic “real” of marriage.

Marriage is not two people certain of who they are, giving their essential selves to each other at a time of their choosing, but two people who don’t know really know themselves marrying at a time when they are expected to do so by society, making absurd promises of eternal love and future fidelity. But I think ultimately for Shakespeare, the fact that in the face of this that we do it at all is the beautiful and tender thing.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, horny adolescents escape from the court and disappear in to the forest wanting freedom of desire, after waking from their terrifying ‘Dream’ at the end of act 4, they are bashing on the walls of the palace to be let back in, in order to be married before the Duke in the most conventional way imaginable. The lovers, after they have collectively woken up from this nightmare of desire and remembering their extreme behaviour, seem to want to disavow it. Demetrius says

“It seemes to mee,
That yet we sleepe, we dreame”

Finally they head towards the palace, on the way they will “recount their dreams” (although Hermia sees things with a “parted eye”). On the way they’ll try and tame the trauma of their collective ‘dream’ by narrativising it. So to their weddings.

Last night these children were irresponsible adolescents. Today they’re getting married before the Duke. Pyramus and Thisbe is not just a comic epilogue. The Duke chooses it very deliberately – the mechanicals play is the PERFECT entertainment for the marriages of Helena and Demetrius and Hermia and Lysander. The play Pyramus and Thisbe and these marriages are romantic fantasies, hastily and shoddily thrown together at the last minute to hit a deadline, where the participants have slightly different ideas about precisely what is in the narrative. It is essential to the drama that Theseus continually points out the ludicrousness of the spectacle that’s presented to the young lovers – and by extension to us. It is another wonderful alienation device thrown in by Shakespeare to ensure that we read the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the right way.

Michael Boyd once said that “we can’t do A Midsummer Night’s Dream any more because we don’t believe in fairies”. I think that’s interesting - the idea that if we did believe in fairies, or we found a way to make them actually fly or some such, the play would somehow magically work again. I think Brook in his seminal white box Midsummer Nights Dream grasped the key point. You’re not supposed to believe in the fairies. The fairies are there to help us not believe in the people. Our problem today is not that we believe too little, but we believe too much in the illusion of an integral self and that through Shakespeare seek comfort in concrete meaning, rather than truth in all of its frightening and radical ambiguity. Shakespeare doesn’t offer us lullabys he offers us nightmares. Not solutions but irreducible problems, problems that remind us of our common humanity.

But in both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It we get an epilogue. Puck says

“If we shadows have offended
Think but this and all is mended
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear
And this weak and idle theme
No more yielding than a dreame”

How might the shadows have offended? That’s a very interesting question and one perhaps only truly addressed in the Brook. There was plenty to be offended by in that production. But at the end of both plays we are told that we shouldn’t take any of this seriously that we were just watching a play. We are given a get out of jail free card. We are taken out of the drama, as if through a decompression chamber back to our own ‘reality’.

In Merry Wives we get no such comfort. Shakespeare audaciously attempts to explore similar ideas in the same way but within the context of a richly detailed ‘reality’ rather than the Athenian Woods or the Forest of Arden, and among middle aged people who’ve been married for years rather than young innocents. Its one thing to depict the ambiguous truth of the marriages of children, quite another to catch up with these marriages twenty years down the line, where they’re still grappling with the same questions, but with serious jobs and responsibilities. The result is crueller, darker, harder edged, and very, very funny. As all the great magical realists know, the realer the real’, the more magic the ‘magic’.

As I’ve tried to illustrate with Merry Wives, the roughnesses, the inconsistencies and the difficult questions are precisely where we should be looking to mine this plays real richness. But because we believe we know how Shakespeare wrote plays and composed characters, and that because these characters don’t cohere to those ideas we have, literally, to borrow from Harold Pinter attempted to cauterize the wound, by ironing out the play’s problems.



Why is Falstaff there?

Lets look at the obvious, basic question of act I scene i. Why is Falstaff there? On the surface there seems to be no good reason for Falstaff and his pissed cohorts to be having dinner at Page’s house in this ostensibly realistic late Elizabethan setting. Also, and this is no small matter, Falstaff is from the 15th century and depending on when you believe the play was written, conceptually back from the dead. Why / how has he traveled through time / come back to life? As most directors do I just ignored the time travel and mortality issues and began to look for the reason behind why / how he came to be at the Page house. Page had invited Falstaff because he wants to impress his visitors from Gloucestershire with his social connections, Falstaff had inveigled his way in, in order to prey on low hanging fruit of bored rich housewives and so on. I had assumed from my 21st century viewpoint that Shakespeare had not given us a clear answer to these mysteries out of some dereliction of playwrighterly duty. After all it’s only The Merry Wives Of Windsor.

But on reflection that’s paying too much attention to the ‘realism’ of the play and not enough to the poetry. It’s not enough to say that Falstaff is part of the natural set up of reality. Rather it is as if a foreign dimension has intruded that literally tears apart reality. Or to put it another way Falstaff’s fictionality is his very point, Harold bloody Bloom.

We have no problem with this idea in cinema, in to the ostensibly ‘realistic’ setting of The Birds and the creepily oedipal tea party at Mitch’s house where his mother, his lover and his little sister negotiate the problem of where the his lover is going to stay that night, come a thousand homicidal birds. So we can read in elementary Freudian film theory that the birds represent an explosive outburst of maternal super-ego when trying to grapple with that particular mystery. When something gets too traumatic, too violent, it shatters the co-ordinates of reality and we fictionalize it. Or to put it another way, when reality stops being edifying to us, we just make a new reality. Take dirty talk, while having sex we seem unable to enjoy the thing in itself, we say things like “I want to do such and such a thing to you”, “the other day I was thinking about you doing this”, “wasn’t it amazing that night in Kidderminster” etc. Sex is always enjoyed in the way that we want to enjoy it – though our imaginative rendering of it.

So we see that Falstaff’s presence is a mystery deliberately unsolved to allow his poetic function to be considered. In to the incestuous imbroglio of the Page house comes Falstaff – pure unbridled, unashamed, undead, unkillable appetite. He is a major poetic theme of the The Merry Wives writ very large - the fake of masculinity. Take James Bond. Men’s fantasy of themselves is that they are confrontational, direct, violent, brave, sexually confident, sexually alluring, effortless conversationalists, ruthless, great dressers, never aging, heroic - of course for suburban British men in particular the opposite is closer to the reality. In Falstaff we see the tension between what Freud calls ‘libido’ endless undead energy and the poor, pathetic, finite, mortal reality of the body. Masculinity as a panicked response to an unknown and unknowable world. One can read classical paintings of spent, wounded Roman soldiers in the arms of busty Goddesses as a picture of male heroism and female nurturing – we imagine a speech bubble in which she might be saying :”there, there you amazing brave soldier”. One could also imagine the obverse, a thought bubble in which the Goddess thinks “Oh is THAT it?”



Hiding in plain sight

Let's examine another major fictional construction in the play; ‘Master Brook’. As we have already touched upon it is a mistake to assume that a unified ‘Ford’ exists and that ‘Ford’ is always in full authorial control of ‘Brook’. But where as in As You Like It, on the surface, the gap between ‘Rosalind’ and ‘Ganymede’ is quite big and the blurring of the lines between the two is a surprise to ‘Rosalind’ and the audience. Shakespeare sets up something more daring here. We begin with the idea that the gap between ‘Brook’ and ‘Ford’ is tiny to begin with. It’s a crap choice of pseudonym, let’s face it. The clue is in the fact that the two words are practically synonyms.

A fascinating detail that the company wrestled with at length in rehearsal was Ford’s line

“I have a disguise to sound out Falstaff”

He already owns the ‘Brook’ disguise. I read many a scholarly article on the play which said that the time that the actor playing Ford has off stage, after II.i denotes time provided for a big costume change in to ‘Brook’.

We played with this idea a lot, we thought of a number of costumes or looks we could have used to make the disguise really excellent - a disguise that would REALLY have fooled Falstaff. But firstly we identified the (presumably deliberate) fact that he didn’t have to fool Falstaff. Falstaff and Ford have never met, he has no idea what he looks like. This thus heightens the sense in the audience’s mind that any disguise is for ‘Ford’s’ benefit not for Falstaff’s. The only person in the play other than Falstaff who does see ‘Brook’ is the boy Robin – always look to the children. Robin’s silence as he watches Mistress Page and Ford lie to each other in III.ii is comic and dramatic gold.

Secondly the consistently funniest idea we came up with for the ‘Brook’ ‘costume’ and the one we went with in the end was a tiny little toupe – which unbeknownst to Ford kept slipping off. As far as Falstaff was concerned he was having a conversation with a strange man with a very peculiar hairpiece. Which he was.

I incidentally wondered whether Shakespeare did the same thing - deliberately playing with his audiences expectations in an implicit dialogue with Two Gentlemen of Verona, or As You Like It by setting up the expectation of a big costume and give them something tiny in keeping with the ‘Ford’ / ‘Brook’ conjunction? It’s an interesting thought. This blurring of the lines is happening all over the play - even Huw Evans “spies a great peard under [the old woman of Brentford’s] muffler”.

There is a further dimension to ‘Brook’. He behaves not unlike what Freud later perceived as a super-ego. Super-ego is an obscene, hyperactive agency bombarding us with impossible demands and laughing at us when we cannot fulfill those demands. There is always an element of obscene madman in the agency of super-ego. ‘Ford’ is monosyllabic, anti social. ‘Brook’ is hyperactive, he talks non-stop, he throws large sums of money around with abandon. Freud’s lesson also is that super-ego and the mysterious ‘id’ drive are deeply connected – ‘Id’ like the whole ‘Brook’ ruse is a combination of childish innocence and utter corruption. ‘Brook’ compels ‘Ford’ to attempt the impossible, namely to see what his wife desires. But the point is that he will never see what his wife desires, because sexual desire doesn’t exist in a form that you can see. Rather than us assuming that ‘Ford’ is driving ‘Brook’ perhaps a more interesting reading is to see the extent to which ‘Brook’ is driving ‘Ford’.

‘Brook’s’ relationship with ‘Ford’ teaches us a profound lesson about how sexual fantasy works for men. What I think Shakespeare is tackling through the ‘Brook’ / ‘Ford’ character is a man terrorized by the enigma of his wife who does not respond properly to his sexual advances. He doesn’t know what she wants, he has

“Not only bought many presents to give her, but have given largely to many, to know what she would have given”

In this play of conspicuously large numbers of children we know that they are childless. This is a fascinating clue, one that fascinates students of Macbeth. But the ‘Scottish Couple’, are royalty, they exist within the mode of tragedy, they die at the end; much easier to cope with for an audience. This tang of sexual dysfunction is teased out in the following exchange

Falstaff: Have you received no promise of satisfaction at her hands?
Ford: Never
Falstaff: Have you ever importuned her to such a purpose?
Ford: Never.
Falstaff: Of what quality was your love then?
Ford: Like a fair house built on another man’s ground, so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.
Falstaff: Why have you unfolded this to me?
Ford: When I have told you that I have told you all.

Lets for a moment take ‘Brook’ at his word. So how does ‘Ford‘ / ‘Brook’ deal with the implied sexual deadlock in his marriage? Ostensibly Ford finds out that Falstaff wants to have sex with his wife, but rather than going to Falstaff as Ford, telling him he knows about his plot and putting a stop it, he dons a thin disguise withdraws a tonne of cash, goes to see Falstaff and pays him an awful lot of money to ensure he does it. And the rationale is given as follows

“Now, could I come to her with any detection in my hand, my desires had instance and argument to commend themselves. I could then drive her from the ward of her purity, her reputation, her marriage vow and a thousand other her defences, which now are too, too strongly embattled against me”.

Richly fascinating stuff – assuming we are looking at the wheelbarrow. Why does he ‘plot’, ‘devise’ in this way? Why does he want his wife to be a ‘wanton’? The banal answer is that if she is sexually aroused then she will become sexually active with him. But I don’t think that this is it. The important thing for Ford is that she’s wanton in a scenario of his creation. He wants her to conform to the co-ordinates of his fantasy. He doesn’t know what his wife wants so rather face this ontological horror, his strategy is to completely reinvent reality and recast her as the sexy leading lady in his tawdry drama. In ‘reality’ the obstacle is inherent, the sex doesn’t work, but in the fantasy space authored by ‘Brook’ the obstacle is externalized and made manifest in Falstaff. He is crafted in to the schism in their marriage.

This is in effect the myth of Pygmalion, or the story of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, he can only become aroused by the woman as long as she is part of the co-ordinates of his fantasy. Or he tacitly erases his wife as a desiring entity so that his fantasy alone rules. She’s too terrifying a prospect for ‘Brook’ / ‘Ford’ to want her in all of her ambiguity, so he creates a sexy narrative over which he has full control.

The idea that Shakespeare picks away at here is that while sexuality seems to be about concrete real bodies, it isn’t. It exists in fantasy and words and how bodily activity is reported afterwards. The author of the Sonnets understands this fine well, he understand that sensuality’s true locus is not partly in words and mainly in the body, but sensuality exists solely in our imaginative rendering of it. ‘Ford’ seems less concerned with the act and more about how his wife ‘plots’, ‘ruminates’ and ‘devises’. He flies in to a psychotic rage at the presence of his wife’s confessor, the person to whom she tells everything, ‘The Old Woman of Brentford’.

But for me the truly disturbing moment in the play is not the shift from the ‘reality’ in to the ‘fantasy’ space as in the curiously empty Garter Inn scene in II.ii - we find watching him invent as an audience a lot of fun, we enjoy the thrilling ambiguity of wondering who is speaking ‘Ford’ or ‘Brook’. It’s funny. No, the truly disturbing moment is in the III.iii buckbasket scene when his fantasy disintegrates before his (and our) eyes. There is no Falstaff. His wife is telling the truth. He’s left psychologically naked before his neighbours who are laughing at him. As an audience we are left in an intermediate place, neither fantasy, nor reality, it’s a space of primordial violence, depression and ontological confusion. “See the hell of having a false woman”?

The greatness of the Merry Wives resides in the fact that within the concrete geography of Windsor the whole drama oscillates between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ several times – and we witness in detail the precise creation and dismantling of ‘reality’ each time. Coming out of the other side of the dream only usually happens at the end, in Merry Wives, it happens throughout. I think Shakespeare is fascinated by this thrilling dramatic dynamic, and in the seeming paradox that the more one reveals of the mechanism of what one is doing the deeper connection to the inner life of the character. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It we only have one flip from reality to fantasy and back again, and only briefly toward the end of both plays do we have both modes running in tandem. In Merry Wives Shakespeare tries to keep both modes running in tandem for most of the duration of the play. At the height of the confusion at the end of act III ‘Ford’ / ‘Brook’ asks the audience “Is this a vision? Is this a dream? Do I sleep?” Lets take the question at face value and assume that at this point he doesn’t know. He then adds “Master Ford awake, awake Master Ford” perhaps at this point ‘Brook’ hasn’t got much of a grip on ‘Ford’, perhaps at this moment there’s not too much of ‘Ford’ left. This is where, for me the genius of the play resides.



The curious case of Reeva Steenkamp’s sexy photos

To digress for a paragraph, one only has to examine the case of Oscar Pistorious and Reeva Steenkamp. One imagines the dynamic in the relationship between a balding double amputee (albeit a gold medal winning balding double amputee), a man defined by his disability to a degree, and a woman defined by her feminine perfection. One can imagine him worrying away at the question of why she finds him attractive. What’s the catch? Is it the gold medals? The money? Surely the novelty will wear off? Surely she will leave me when I’m a faded fat former paralympian. She’s wrong, she’s made a mistake, she loves me for the wrong reason. Why has she made a present of sexy photographs of herself to me? That’s pretty left field. What does she think she knows about what I like? Does she think I like looking at sexy pictures of women? What does she know? When one night – if speculation is to be believed - she catches the South African National hero without his prosthetic legs engaged in the tawdry act of masturbating to pornography on his iphone. He does this thinking she’s asleep in the next room; another fascinating psychological detail. Perhaps he does this as a subconscious revenge for the perceived attempt to re-shape his fantasy world. So. He is discovered; in all of his psychological nakedness, without the prosthetic legs, the co-ordinates of his reality blown apart, her looking at him with shock and disgust, she articulates a feeling of betrayal. She makes the mistake of taking the phone and running in to the bathroom, using her physical advantage to do so. The phone’s history has recorded all of the sites he has visited. He has to get in to the bathroom, he has to stop her looking at the phone. He has to reconstitute a reality he can bear and quickly. In a tearing rage, standing on his stumps, he reaches for his gun and shoots his way through the door killing Reeva in the process. Through violence he changes his reality. One can imagine his state of mind as the noise of the gunshot faded away and he was left staring at Reeva’s body through the holes in the door. It’s Victor by WH Auden. Its Othello. It’s Ford.



Aston’s shed

But ‘Ford’ is not the only man in this play who’s plots and fantasies come to naught. Falstaff’s plot as far as we can ascertain is to get hold of the wives money, by ‘making love’ to them, this doesn’t happen. The Dr. Caius and Sir Huw sword fight doesn’t happen, Page’s plans for his daughter’s marriage, Shallow’s plans to woo Ann on behalf of Slender is also a disaster, as is the Host of the Garter’s attempt to gull the visiting German dignitaries. Unresolved tension between the men hangs in the air. These moments of male failure, (impotence if you like) hang unresolved through the drama like a series of unresolved chords in a symphony. In considering the men in the play I was put in mind of my step-father’s ten and a half year plan to renovate his kitchen, and my mother’s queasy and faintly disappointed mantra “It’ll be nice when its done”.

We can set these failed plots against the men’s pathetic attempts at wooing (or more properly) having sex in this play. We have already discussed Ford’s Byzantine strategy. Mistress Page tells us that her husband is “as far from jealousy as [she is] from giving him cause”. There’s Slender’s hamfisted attempts at seducing Ann Page with a ludicrous brag about seeing a loose bear and “taking him by the chain” – and in a wonderfully Freudian conclusion to that speech he says “But women indeed cannot abide em: they are very ill-favoured rough things”. What are mate, the women or the bears?

As true sexuality begins and ends in our ability to talk about it, Falstaff can only partly remember the best lines of Philip Sidney (‘Have I caught thee my heavenly jewel’ the only line he can recall from Astrophil and Stella) and Sir Huw recalling Marlowe’s Passionate Shepherd to His Love remembers all the stuff about “vagram poesies” but cuts out before “come live with me and be my love”. In Act III scene iv we cut to Fenton refusing a confrontation with Page and failing to persuade Ann to marry him without her father’s permission. The counter plot of dressing the boys up as “Ann” in the forest is Ann’s idea not Fenton’s, he is merely acting on her prompting. Like her mother in the previous scene, she sends her man on a plot to get him out of her hair. The entire play is a story of men’s desperate attempts to catch up with female fantasy, which ends in failure – and how despite this, men and women mete out a way of living together.

By contrast the female plots in the play are successful, Falstaff is taught a lesson, as is Ford and the most successful of all is the largely silent Ann who proves her mothers adage that “still swine eat all the draff”. She fools them all. One of the funniest and most perceptive moments of the play is after the second time ‘Ford’s’ ‘fantasy’ disappears in front of his eyes after he has half beaten to death the ‘old woman of Brentford’. The wives attempt to get the men out of the deadlock of this intermediate space where no-one knows what is real by attempting to engage the men in a new collective fantasy. Ford appears happy to jump to the new idea just to get him out of his own nightmare. Caius’ silent presence is very funny, he REALLY doesn’t know what’s going on. Evans and Page appear unable to comprehend what the women are talking about constantly interrupting them and seeking clarification and broadly dismissing their ides to ensnare Falstaff. Page says

“Fie, fie he’ll never come”.

Mistress Page knowing her husband very well launches in to the lurid Herne The Hunter speech all in verse, as if telling a ghost story to a child. Some 25 lines later Page says

“Well let it not be doubted but he’ll come"

The experienced Mistress Page understands that eternal truth: in order to get a man to do anything, and I mean anything, you have to convince him it’s his idea. The whole exchange is a wonderfully vivid vignette of the Page’s private life. We don’t get many clues as to what goes on behind closed doors at the Pages, but we do get is extraordinary. Page uses this as an opportunity to take ownership of the idea by throwing cash at it, he goes off to buy silk. Evans goes off to write a song, make some costumes and rehearse. Ford, released from his hell by the invention of a new safe shared ‘reality’ not only says that he’ll buy the children vizards (of course he knows where the fucking mask shop is), but he’ll also use this as a licence to once more become ‘Brook’. I love Ford’s enthusiasm and Mistress Page’s patronizing response at the end of the scene, exhausted by her neighbour’s lack of self awareness, the brilliant Sylvestra Le Touzel almost sighed as she plodded though her single syllables

Ford: I’ll to him again in the name of Brook:
He’ll tell me his purpose. Sure he’ll come.
Mistress Page: Fear you not that. Go get us properties
And tricking for our fairies.



So what do we do then?

And so to the end. Men are from Mars Women are from Venus. We don’t speak the same languages. We don’t dream the same dreams. How then are we supposed to live? In the final moment of ontological crisis in the play, the final time that the fantasy structure of ‘reality’ dissolves in front of our eyes, and all the characters see that they are stood in the woods at midnight being watched by their children who just acted out an obscene comic musical re-enactment of their parents behaviour towards Falstaff. Two of the children have been through the trauma of being abducted and taken to a church and married to Slender and Dr. Caius, and there’s a wounded and terrified old man half buried in a hole. We stand somewhere between the self consciously ‘authored’ horror of the Herne’s Oak fantasy and the true horror of what they have done.

In to this scenario walks Fenton and Ann Page, ‘married’; Ann probably no longer a virgin. Shakespeare reminds us, as he often does, that despite it all life goes on. Life has to be lived. This is first time anyone has had sex in the play, it is depicted in a beautifully and ambiguously real way. Shakespeare refuses to allow Ann to behave like new wives behave on stage. She has only one line of seven words in act 5, which Naomi Sheldon played beautifully. Remaining ambiguous, tears welling in her eyes, fresh with knowledge, standing half way between her new husband and her parents, (dressed as Superman and Bambi respectively) she said

“Pardon good father – Good my mother pardon”

She has made her bed. There is still no resolution to this traumatic scene. No possibility of collectively forging a new reality in which they can all engage. Now Shakespeare returns to one of his favourite themes, through Ford (perhaps in a moment of self revelation)

“Money buys lands, but Wives are sold by fate”

To reference As You Like It as far as Ann Page is concerned “Lady fortune[’s] gifts are mightily misplaced, and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women”.

Despite all of our imagining and fantasizing, despite our desire to shape our destiny what we get is ‘reality’ in all of its troubling ambiguity. Fenton’s not great, he’s not as bad as the others, he’s ok. Ann like her mother understands that we have a word for fantasy realised that is ‘nightmare’. She now understands the fragile balance between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’ in sexual activity.

Mistress Page suggests they all go home “Sir John and All” and “laugh this sport o’er by a country fire”. What can one do in such a situation but laugh? But this somehow doesn’t feel like a satisfying reconstitution of a new ‘reality’. Is anyone going to break the deadlock? Once more its left to ‘Ford’ to attempt to forge a new ‘order’, perhaps he’s proven to be least at ease in this intermediate space between ‘fantasy’ and ‘reality’. Perhaps he needs familiar phantasmogorical co-ordinates in order that he can experience this ‘reality’ as ‘normal’ again. He says to Falstaff

“To Master Brook you yet shall keep your word
For he tonight shall lie with Mistress Ford”.

This great unresolved play does not end with a major key cadence, but strange minor key half rhyme and the return of ‘Brook’. Perhaps he never went away. It’s as if Shakespeare leaves us with this line to draw our attention to the fact that sex and sexual relationships can only operate with the support of ‘fantasy’. The mistake I made in my production was to allow Mistress Ford to accept her husband’s offer and run off in to the woods implicitly for the long overdue sexual encounter – perhaps in my production they just needed to make love just to ground the excessive real that they encountered in their fantasizing. But on reflection this was saying too much. In this moment we eventually succumbed to the temptation to smooth one of the plays rougher edges. I think that Shakespeare is leaving the response to that question to us. I wish I had kept it ambiguous. But that end scene was so hard to rehearse, we all found it so emotionally draining that we kind of ran out of time.

I’m fascinated by how Hands and Alexander decided to close their productions. In both versions Ann’s line “pardon good father – good my mother pardon” is cut (although interestingly its added back in to the Alexander’s prompt script in pencil). In the Hands the final line is given to Mistress Ford

“To Master Brook you yet shall hold your word,
For he tonight will shall lie with Mistress Ford”.

This implies that Mistress Ford knows the details of the conversation between ‘Brook’ and ‘Falstaff’. That she at some point found out about their bargain, and that she implicitly forgives him. In both versions there is a line, that I’m 99% sure was written by Terry Hands given to Ford which reads

“Let it be so, Sir John, here’s my hand; all’s forgiven at last”



Conclusions

So to conclude I think, like Greer and many others that Shakespeare was backwards and forwards to Stratford more frequently than is popularly thought. I think that his marriage to Ann Shakespeare was probably quite fully lived, and therefore had its own ultra specific dynamic; its difficulties, sadnesses and pleasures. It’s interesting to speculate on Shakespeare being away thinking about his wife and how the reality of her body impacted upon and differed from his imagining when he returned home. Jonathan Bate tells us Shakespeare knew that Heraclitus wept at how people gather up treasure for themselves while neglecting to bring up their young; perhaps Shakespeare wept himself for the same reason. Perhaps he returned home one night, saw an artefact out of place in his home and in a moment wondered who might have been sleeping in his bed and where they might be hiding. Perhaps he looked at paintings like the one hung in Hall’s croft from 1585 of a protestant family sat piously and happily at dinner, viewing it as we view aggressively happy family photos pasted on Facebook. Perhaps he raised an eyebrow and privately said to himself “yeah right”. Perhaps he thought about writing a play about it. But of course this is just some more useless speculation that only serves to justify my version of the play.

The first image of my production was taken from Stratford Rugby Club on a Sunday morning, where I’d go with my partner to drop off her son. I saw a woman standing by the side of the rugby pitch standing next to a cool box, looking off in to the middle distance with a blank expression on her face. She was holding a dog lead and wearing a hiking jacket and walking boots, no make up, had perhaps had one too many glasses of red wine in front of Strictly the night before. It was the very image of casual neglect. She stood on the sidelines while the men in her life inflicted sublimated violence on their neighbours in an unconvincing display of masculinity. After a while the husband, forties, bald, came over to the cool box, he struggled unsuccessfully to get the lid off. His wife casually turned the handle over to the other side and lifted off the lid with ease. He grabbed a slice of orange and got back to the game with a cursory kiss to his wife’s forehead. She looked out in to middle distance once more. I imagined Robin running up to her with a love letter. “What? Have I ‘scaped love letters in the holiday time of my beauty and am now a subject for them?”. This woman had a Range Rover. Where did she live? Probably in one of the big Tudor period houses on Tiddington Road with a barn conversion. An interesting synthesis of periods started to emerge. Modern dress, Tudor Houses. Virginia Creeper. Kitchen suppers. Halloween parties where, without the right kind of self awareness, women in their late forties dressed as slutty halloween cats, and their husbands as Marvel Superheroes. A class of people like the new Tudor merchant class, confidently asserting their identity – convinced of their own rightness. Private schools. The notion that one is a good parent as long as one is chucking money at one’s kids. Using that money to ensure they mix with the right crowd and marry within their social class. A quiet desperation to ensure that their kids don’t make the same mistakes they did. A quiet acceptance when they do. Shared lies between spouses, secret yearnings, and family mythologies drawn over us like eiderdown when the weather gets cold. Unnamable anxiety. And again the eiderdown.

Was I successful? No. Of course. We all fail. I think I just about failed honourably. I allowed my vision of the play to be diluted and to become a bit too much like other people’s version of the play for fear that it would not be liked and that I wouldn’t get another go at the Royal Shakespeare Company. I didn’t quite have the courage of my convictions on certain matters. I hoped the audience might cry as well as laugh, they didn’t. Although one lovely old lady said that she found it very moving. That made my day.

I was pleased with my choice of music for the buckbasket scene, I wanted a CD that I was convinced the Ford’s owned, and was perhaps the record they first made love to. The track was Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye

“I’ve been really trying baby
Trying to hold back these feelings for so long
And if you feel like I feel
Come on. Oh. Come on.
There’s nothing wrong with me loving you
And giving yourself to me can never be wrong.
If [and only if] the love is true”

I had an idea that after the second scene in the Garter Inn that Ford would go over to the Juke box and play the track again as a reprise, and he would stand there looking at the audience weeping as the scene dissolved in to the Old Woman of Brentford scene. I bottled it. I think audiences that liked it did so largely for the wrong reasons, it looked and smelled like a sex comedy, so phenomenologically that’s what they thought they got. What it actually was is immaterial. I guess that’s the plays genius and its principal lesson for us.

The Merry Wives of Windsor’s popular reputation as a lesser Shakespeare is unfairly earned. There are reams written about internality in Hamlet, sexuality in As You Like It, parents and children in Henry IV, Englishness in Henry V and so on. I think its one of the great Shakespeare plays because it manages to deeply explore themes that Shakespeare was fascinated by throughout his whole career. I think it represents a bold experiment in character and structure and dramatic energy more dazzling than even As You Like It. I think it’s his funniest play by far because it’s his most troubling and people laugh at discomfort and when they’re most discomfited. In saying that I’m also aware that Ken Dodd reminds us that Freud’s theory of laughter is all very well and good, but Freud never had to play second house Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night. While Shakespeare of course hadn’t read Zizek, Lacan, Freud or Dodd, he had read Ovid and Montaigne and he saw something of what they saw in how human beings relate to their dreams and how desire tears apart and remakes the very substance of reality. He smuggled all of this between the lines of a popular stage comedy that is so funny (and so coarse) it has blinded many theatre critics to its artistic value. It’s a great artistic achievement of the English renaissance – he took a series of complicated and heretical ideas about humanity and rendered them in the lingua franca of the common man. I wonder whether it’s an indication of the lofty ambitions he had for the play that he set this expose of Homo-Elizabethensis in Elizabeth’s Windsor in the foothills of her castle. Rather like Mike Leigh setting his exploration of Thatcher’s new middle class in its spiritual home; suburban Essex. I think the play was probably written in 1600; pretty much halfway through his career. I think it was deeply felt, and he was deeply connected to it, which partly accounts for its knottiness and difficulties. I think there are ideas and breakthroughs in perception in Merry Wives that he liked and used again in Othello, Macbeth and King Lear. It’s just a hunch, supported by circumstantial evidence, I’m probably wrong; but as we’ve discussed love and obsession does that to a fellow.

As a post script I’d like to share some of the letter I was sent by Terry Hands after he saw the production. I was of course very keen to please him as always. He is a great director and his opinion meant everything. He told me how much he’d enjoyed the production, that Des Barritt was the best Falstaff ever. I was over the moon. Then he wrote

“Forgive me if I wish you had used more of my text. With respect you are not yet ready to find your way through the labyrinth of various versions. More Shakespeare productions will come from this auspicious beginning. Don’t yet abandon the scholars”.

I haven’t yet been offered another Shakespeare play.

© Phillip Breen