Myths of Honour
The Merry Wives of Windsor (2008)
It was no accident that Shakespeare set his play in Windsor, as Gwilym Jones reveals.
At the dénouement of The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Quickly, dressed as the
Queen of Fairies, delivers a speech to the disguised children:
Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out.
Strew good luck, oafs, on every sacred room,
That it may stand till the perpetual doom.
As disguises go, Mistress Quickly’s speech is every bit as effective as her costume. She
has spoken prose exclusively until this scene, and whereas before she was given to rambling
circumlocution, she now speaks in a precise rhyme. The transformation of her speech reaches
its zenith with the phrase ‘And Honi soit qui mal y pense write / In emerald tufts.’ The same
character who earlier in the play was made comically and salaciously to misunderstand Latin,
now seems effortlessly to weave French into iambic pentameter. How can this be?
Mistress Quickly’s French phrase is, in fact, the motto of the Order of the Garter, and
translates as ‘shamed be he who thinks evil of it.’ That she is able to weave it into her language
points to the fact that the play’s setting of Windsor is linked inextricably to the Garter knights.
The instruction to write out the motto in ‘flowers, purple, blue, and white’ seems to yearn that
the Order not be forgotten, and that it be imbued with a certain magical idolisation.
Windsor was the location of the procession and feasts of the Garter ceremony from 1559
through to 1572. Given that Shakespeare’s play was not written until a quarter of a century later,
the setting might seem outdated in its constant references to the Order. The location is even
stranger when it is remembered that rival playing companies were producing successful comedies
based in London, or that Falstaff, the star draw of the play, was virtually synonymous with Eastcheap.
It seems likely that the play was first performed at the Garter Feast in 1597, in Whitehall.
Shakespeare would have taken special interest in the ceremonies of that year, as George Carey
was to be elected to the Order. Carey, second Baron Hunsdon, was soon to take up the office
of Lord Chamberlain. In this capacity, he would be patron to the company of players for whom
Shakespeare wrote and performed. It is probable that Carey commissioned Merry Wives to be
performed at the Feast as a celebration of the honourable institution he was set to join. Windsor
also had regrettable associations for knights, however, as many were forced to take retirement
there on the measly pensions offered to knights in hard times. Such knights became known
as the poor knights of Windsor: Thomas Middleton’s Sir Bounteous claims ‘I was knighted at
Westminster, but many of these nights will make me a knight of Windsor.’
© 2013 The Shakespeare Globe Trust. Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only.
Commercial copying, hiring, lending, is prohibited.
Sixteenth-century Windsor was not a large town, but its aspect, dominated by the
imposing castle would have been instantly recognisable to Elizabethans. Following a history
of royals who had added to the Castle, Elizabeth began the Terraces, a striking feature.
Shakespeare displays an intimate knowledge of Windsor and its environs. In addition to the
Castle, there are references to Datchett Mead, the Garter Inn, Frogmore and the Thames.
Datchett Mead is the meadow between Little Park and the Thames: Mistress Ford’s evocation of
the ‘whitsters’ there is a reference to the locals’ habit of laundering clothes at the Mead. Falstaff’s
ducking, then, is closely tied up with the community’s emblem of sanitation. Although there is
no trace of the Garter Inn remaining today, there is no reason to suppose that it wasn’t an active
pub in the Elizabethan era.
Shakespeare’s Windsor is a tight-knit community, whose citizens take care of each other.
They are particularly wary of outsiders. Falstaff is the most conspicuous of these, but the French
Doctor Caius and the Welsh Parson Evans are other examples. In order to make the basis of
their revenge more convincing, they play on the inherent fear of foreigners by inventing a ruse
based on German thieves. The irony of this – that the Host depends on tourism for his business
– is characteristic of the aesthetic ethics of the play.
Merry Wives is often held up as being Shakespeare’s play about topical English
provincial life. The Garter ceremonies provide the holiday occasion suitable for comedy. In a
less simplistic way, the play is invested in the structures of idolatry that make up contemporary
conceptions of the Garter and of Windsor itself. Just as Mistress Quickly’s instruction to write
the motto with flowers seeks to immortalise the Order of the Garter and conflate it with its royal
setting, so several artists had commemorated Windsor after the processions and feasts had
moved to London. Marcus Gheeraerts painted the procession at Windsor in 1576: four years
after the last such occasion, this shows how quickly the town entered into the gamut of emblems
common to Elizabethan custom. Even in the ceremonies at Whitehall, the arrangements of the
hall and chapel were made to be reminiscent of those at Windsor. The casual utopia of comedic
resolution in Merry Wives owes its debt not to English provincial life per se, but to the idea of a
town devoted to the honourable code of royalty and knights.
It appears, furthermore, that Shakespeare himself was keen to indulge in and build upon
mythologizing aspects of Windsor. The tradition of Herne the Hunter seems to have been
his invention, and generations of enthusiasts have earnestly claimed to have located Herne’s
Oak. Of course, the real act of mythologizing is in the creation of the play itself. Throughout
his career, the playwright was fascinated by the longevity of poetic language: ‘Not marble, nor
the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme’, begins Sonnet 55, the
conclusion of which echoes Mistress Quickly’s speech. In setting his play in Windsor, then,
Shakespeare asks that not the Castle, but the fantastical timeless notion of the town ‘may stand
till the perpetual doom’.
© 2013 The Shakespeare Globe Trust. Permission granted to reproduce for personal and educational use only.
Commercial copying, hiring, lending, is prohibited.