Shakespeare
Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2010, 20!33
Cunning, cozening and queens in The Merry Wives of Windsor
Kirsten C. Uszkalo*
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English Dept., Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC V5A1S6, Canada
William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597) provides a representation of the female cunning person, cozener and fairy, as they appear in the
popular imagination and legal record through the use of a cozening tale as a
conceit. It is compelling to consider the possibility that Shakespeare, an adept
literary borrower operating under demanding time constraints, may have
borrowed from contemporary concerns and ephemeral publications including
Henry Chettle’s Kind-harts Dreame (1592), and the anonymous pamphlet The
Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a Rich Churle (1594) to construct constructs of
cunning and cozening, strong women and supernatural tomfoolery in his play.
Keywords: The Merry Wives of Windsor; A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Macbeth
Much of the critical analysis of the role of maleficium in William Shakespeare’s work
has focused on the fertile connections between James I and the Weird Sisters in
Macbeth (1606!1607), a play which establishes the royal lineage of a monarch who
was, in practice, print and legislation, a witch-hunter. The Weird Sisters are not
Shakespeare’s only witches, however. Preceding the demonology of James I, and the
performance of witchcraft in Macbeth, The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597!1602)
provides a representation of the supposedly supernatural during the reign of
Elizabeth, a monarch who disallowed fortune-telling. In Merry Wives, Mistress
Ford and Mistress Page are so enraged that Falstaff has tried simultaneously to
seduce and to steal from them that they decide to exploit his misogyny and
superstitions to punish his hubris. They string him along through a series of
humiliating misadventures associated with cunning, witchcraft and fairy magic: they
swim him in the Thames, dress him as a witch and, finally, with the promise of long
awaited sexual satisfaction, convince him to appear in horns at Windsor Park.
However, not long after he arrives, Falstaff is greeted by a pageant of pinching fairies
keen on burning ‘‘sluts’’, and finds the reward for greed and lasciviousness is a
climax of cozening.
Contemporary criticism about the power of witches and cunning women to
exploit and transform greedy men likewise appeared in Elizabethan laws and texts,
including Henry Chettle’s Kind-harts Dreame (1592), and in the anonymous
pamphlet The Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a Rich Churle (1594). The same
story is told in both: deceitful women, Judith Philips in The Brideling and the
walking Mort in Kind-harts Dreame, pretend to be powerful cunning women, able to
contact supernatural woodland agents and secure hidden gold. The cunning women
*Email: [email protected]
ISSN 1745-0918 print/1745-0926 online
# 2010 Kirsten Uszkalo
DOI: 10.1080/17450911003643084
http://www.informaworld.com
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gull couples out of their money and exploit the belief in fairies to publicly humiliate
the men they defraud. On stage, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page also recognized
and knowingly played with the ways in which fairies, witches and cozening queens
existed somewhere in the grey area between belief and doubt. Merry Wives extends
and complicates the anxieties and plots that appeared in Chettle’s Kind-harts Dreame
and The Brideling. The play, and the women who play within it, borrow the best from
those cozening tales to increase the masculine humiliation and feminine delight,
producing an extended exemplum of clever and playful women subverting and
profiting from the systems put in place to control them.
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Sourcing cunning, cozening women, and queens
Andrew Gurr argues that for seekers of Shakespearean source texts, verbal parallels
and echoes ‘‘imply either a very accurate memory in the imitator or a book to hand’’
(189). David Bevington notes that, although there is no ‘‘particular recognizable
source’’ for the plot of Merry Wives, aspects of its story-line, including the need to
‘‘outwit parents and rivals in the name of young love’’, appear in the comedy of
Plautus and neo-classical comedy (257). The concealment of the lover appears in
Italian novelle, including ‘‘Of Two Brethren and Their Wives’’, from Riche his
Farewell to Military Profession (1581), ‘‘Two Lovers of Pisa’’ from Tarlton’s News
Out of Purgatory (1590) and Ser Giovanni Fiorentino’s Il Pecorone (1558) (257).
Building from the premise that Shakespeare read widely and actively followed
contemporary events, this study will explore some of the mapped and undiscovered
verbal and thematic topology of The Merry Wives of Windsor in light of
contemporaneous textual, social and legal concerns. The shared language and
themes seen in Chettle’s Kind-harts Dreame, The Brideling and Merry Wives provide
insight into the range of sources available to Shakespeare and greater context for the
gender roles shared across this cycle of patterned stories.
Mistress Ford and Mistress Page’s play with cunning, witchcraft and fairies was
based in beliefs that may not have been fully endorsed, but not entirely discounted
either. This is part of Ford’s aggravation about Mother Prat, the witch of Brainford !
not that she had power, but that she did not. The ability to call one cunning woman a
fraud, however, was based on the predominant cultural belief that other cunning
women were real. The practice of witchcraft, and the feigning of witchcraft, were both
legal concerns in early modern England. Henry VIII’s Bill Ayest Conjuraracons &
Wichecraftes and Sorcery and Enchantmants (1542) made illegal ‘‘invocacons and
conjuracons of Sprites, pretending by such meanes to understande and get Knowlege
for their owne lucre in what place treasure of golde and Silver shulde or mought be
founde or had in the earthe or other secrete places’’ (33. Hen. VIII, c. 8). Passed by
Henry and repealed by Edward, the 1542 Witchcraft Act makes it a felony to use
spirits, as Judith Philips and the walking Mort are supposed to have done, to treasure
hunt. The 1563 Act against Conjurations, Enchantments and Witchcrafts reasserted the
state’s awareness of the on-going ‘‘Invocacons or Conjuracons of evill and wicked
Spirites’’ and on-going practice of ‘‘Witchecrafte Enchantment Charme or Sorcerie’’
to treasure hunt, cause unlawful love, hurt or kill (5. Eliz. I, c. 16). If convicted for
these crimes, first time offenders would be imprisoned for a year and pilloried
quarterly; second time offenders would forfeit their possessions or, if witchcraft was
used to cause death, they would forfeit their lives. The first witchcraft tract, John
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Phillip’s The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chensforde (1566)
recorded the final confession of Mother Waterhouse who was executed for using her
spirit familiar Sathan as a means of destroying property and committing murdering.
The Poor Law Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, and for the Relief of the Poor
and Impotent (1572) proclaims that ‘‘rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars’’ who
are found to be begging, wandering or mis-ordering themselves, could be jailed,
grievously whipped and ‘‘burnt through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’’ in
order to visibly mark them as criminal (14. Eliz. I, c. 5). This statute could be used to
blur the boundaries between witches, cunning women and cozening women in that it
suggested that one could define a rogue, vagabond or sturdy beggar as one who went
about the country ‘‘using subtle, crafty, or unlawful games or plays, some of them
feigning themselves to have knowledge in physiognomy, palmistry or other abused
sciences whereby they bear the people in hand they can tell their destinies, deaths and
fortunes, and such other like fantastical imaginations’’ (14. Eliz. I, c. 5). This act
made the practices and travel of fortune-telling women suspect and illegal. However,
the 1581 Witchcraft Act, The Act Against Seditious Words and Rumours uttered
against the Queen’s most excellent Majesty outlawed the ‘‘setting or erecting of any
figure or figures, or by casting of nativities, or by calculation, or by any prophesying,
witchcraft, conjurations’’, to predict the queen’s death. This law fuelled the anxieties
about the politics prediction and invocation that appear in print (23. Eliz. I, c. 2.).
The on-going tension between doubt and belief which appears in law likewise
appears in textual debates. In The Discovery of Witchcraft (1584), Reginald Scot
argues that the ‘‘life of witchcraft and cousenage [is] manifestly delivered in the art of
juggling’’ (226). However, Reginald Scot’s early scepticism was not shared by other
critics who argued that witches would adopt the identity of cunning women as a
cover. In A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (1593), George Gifford
explicitly argues that Satan works through witches known as ‘‘cunning men and wise
women to confirme all his matters, and by them teacheth many remedies’’ (A3).
Cunning women appear to be healers and unwitchers; the devil used the appearance
of goodness to deceive and corrupt. The dark origins of the cunning woman’s
abilities justified her harsh legal and social treatment. Two women were executed in
Brainford as witches in 1595.
Shakespeare was well aware of the existence of practicing cunning-folk, according
to Richard Levin, and used the idea of the cunning woman as a ‘‘bawd, witch, and
midwife’’ in Pericles, which was composed shortly after Merry Wives (3, 6).
Shakespeare’s construction of the cunning woman in this play may have been
influenced by continuing cultural anxiety about witches. This anxiety was meant to
be partially mollified by the appearance of the Act Against Conjuration, Witchcraft,
and Dealing with Evil and Wicked Spirits (1604). Witchcraft, especially that done via
keeping or consulting of spirits, remained a legally recognizable issue in early modern
England and was an area of special interest to the new king (1. Jac. I, c. 12). Cunning
women were therefore located, legally, conceptually and dramatically, during the
periods around the composition and performance of Merry Wives, within multivalent categories of witch, healer and fraud. Shakespeare could make his cunning
women representative of any one category, or all three of them.
Shakespeare’s work was likely informed by stories of cozening women who
knowingly exploited all these slippages. One of these stories appears in Chettle’s
Kind-harts Dreame. A number of circumstances support the possibility that Chettle’s
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pamphlet provided Shakespeare with elements of the cozening plot in Merry Wives.
Interaction between Shakespeare and Chettle is a matter of historical record. Chettle
may be best known for his possible involvement in the ‘‘disputed passages of Q1
Romeo and Juliet’’ (Jowett, ‘‘Concluded’’ 521). Current critical consensus also
attributes to him Greenes Groatsworth of Wit (Greene 1592), which means that it was
he who called Shakespeare an
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upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a
player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you,
and, being an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in
a country. (E4)
However, Chettle’s Kind-harts Dreame, published the same year, also comments on
Shakespeare directly and personally, though it uses less vivid and less offensive terms.
The pamphlet’s opening consists of a fulsome apology:
I am as sory, as if the originall fault had beene my fault, because my selfe haue seene his
demeanor no lesse ciuill than he exelent in the qualitie he professes: Besides, diuers of
worship haue reported, his vprightnes of dealing, which argues his honesty, and his
facetious grace in writting, that aprooues his Art. (A4v!A5)
Lukas Erne argues that there is no proof that this apology refers to Shakespeare, and
proposes that biographers might silently accept the arguments to avoid compromising their account of Shakespeare’s early years in London (435). Nonetheless, these
literary references suggest a possible interaction between Shakespeare and Chettle’s
work.
Parts of Shakespeare’s cunning plots look substantially like aspects of the cunning
woman narrative in Kind-harts Dreame. Chettle’s walking Mort (a vagrant or gypsy),
‘‘went about the Countrey selling of tape’’ and would ‘‘sing sometime to serue the
turne: she would often be a leach, another time a fortune teller’’ (H!Hv). Kind-harts
Dreame recounts in detail the story of how the walking Mort met with a farmer’s wife,
read fortune in her brows and predicted that she would be ‘‘be possest of so infinite a
sum of hidden treasure, as no man in England had euer seene the like’’ (Hv). Although
herself unable to claim the hidden treasure, which was ‘‘by spirits possest, who
preserve it’’ for its intended recipient, she nonetheless claimed that she would be able
to tell if the farmer and his wife ‘‘were the lucky ones’’ meant to receive it, if they
would hang white linen in a chamber and put ‘‘seuen candles’’ inside, with an ‘‘Angell
[gold coin] . . . laide in euery candle-sticke’’ (Hv). This being done, she mumbled for a
while, and ‘‘at last shee cald the man vnto her, whome she sadled and brideled, and
hauing seuen times rid him about the roome, causd him to arise and call his wife, for to
her belongd the treasure’’ (H2). She left to force ‘‘the spirits to release the tresure’’,
instructing the hopeful couple to keep her whereabouts secret, and not eat or drink
until she returned. The fortune-teller waltzed away with the money, chuckling to
herself (H2). The couple sat, arguing and starving through the night and following
day, until informed by a neighbour of a ‘‘woman coosener that by a Iustice was sent to
Winchester for many lewd pranks’’: the ‘‘coosener’’ and the fortune-teller were one
and the same (Hv!H2).
As in Chettle’s Kind-harts Dreame, The Brideling, Sadling and Ryding of a Rich
Churle equates female cunning with the exposure of male covetousness at the hands
of a cozening queen. Ann Rosalind Jones, Diane Purkiss (Bottom) and Matthew
Woodcock reference the Judith Philips pamphlet when looking at reversals of power
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and representations of fairy lore. Jones, in looking at Twelfth Night and Merry Wives,
invokes Judith Philips simply as a ‘‘woman who had actually and locally humiliated a
powerful man’’ (23). Specifically interrogating the creation of fraudulent fairies,
Purkiss notes that ‘‘the tricksters who lure a greedy man to come to the wood and be
deceived in his hopes . . . recall the notorious cozener Judith Philips’’ (Bottom 193).
Likewise, Woodcock gestures towards the ‘‘frauds at the hands of those ‘playing’
fairy queens (like Judith Philips)’’ evoked in the taunting of Falstaff (23). Although
each of these authors looks at Judith Philips’s cultural cachet, little investigation has
been done on the many other details concerned with cunning, currency, fraud, fairies,
hubris, and humbling seen in The Brideling, and which likewise appear in Kind-harts
Dreame and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
The narrator of The Brideling begins by arguing that ‘‘the grievous sin of
Covetousness’’ is ‘‘the root of all iniquity, the puddle of all perdition, and the
alluring bayt of hell’’, then spotlights one particular ‘‘woman, the mirror and map of
all cosonage and deciete’’: the ‘‘cun-maker’’, Judith Philips (A2!A2v). Unhappy with
her husband’s ‘‘poor estate of living’’, Philips left to find a more profitable lifestyle.
She came to the parish of Uspbryne, Hampshire, and there she practised ‘‘many
cosoning rites and devices to deceive the simpler sort of people in the Countrey: Only
she betook herself to the profession of a cunning woman, a fortune-teller, and these
which she knew did abound in wealth, she daily saught means to bring into a fooles
paradise, and by one devise or another, cosen them of some store of crowns’’ (5!6).
Having learned that Sir William Kingsman was enthusiastically covetous, Philips
visited his home one night and ‘‘under a hollow holly tree buried an angel of gold,
and five pence in white mony’’ (6). Returning to his home the next day, Philips
claimed to know, from reading ‘‘certain figures’’ in Kingsman’s forehead and
‘‘perceiving good fortune sit’’ in his wife’s brows, that ‘‘he was in sute with some great
man in that country and how he should prevail in that sute’’ (6!7). Philips performed
a charm which involved draping their largest chamber ‘‘with the finest linen’’ they
could find, placing five candlesticks in five places around the room and putting an
angel of gold under each (7). The couple went, as per instruction, to get a bridle and
saddle and meet her outside. This ‘‘cozening queen’’ saddled and bridled Kingsman,
and demanded of him and his wife, ‘‘lie three hours, one by another groveling on
your bellies under this tree, stir not, I charge you, until I come back again, for I must
go into the chamber to meete the Queene of Fairies and welcome her to that holy and
unspotted place’’ (8). Philips went in the house, robbed them, and returned to the
holly tree dressed all in white, and ‘‘with a thing on her head all white’’, and a stick in
her hand, she returned, disguised as the Fairy Queen, then ‘‘as spirits with night
spells do, vanished away’’ (8).
She was caught and punished for the robbery, and appeared to repent, but soon
fell into the company of ‘‘two certain bad minded men of the same conviction and
quality as she was’’ (9). These two villains, P and V, would try to convince rich
widows, for a fee, that they could help them snare good, wealthy husbands. The three
of them went on to cozen the rich widow of a ‘‘trype’’ [tripe] seller, by forging a letter
from her trusted friend and advisor, Master Grace. The letter introduced Philips as a
‘‘wise woman [who] could tell fortunes’’, and asked the widow to invite her into her
home for his sake, and ‘‘especially for the secret qualities she had’’ (12). Dressed as a
country woman, and calling herself a cunning woman, Philips read the widow’s
hand, reciting a medley of local gossip which P and V had carefully collected
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beforehand. Impressed, ‘‘the Trype wife [said], I think you know all things’’ (13).
Philips convinced the widow that spirits haunted her house because her husband had
hidden his wealth there. P and V, to bolster this lie, secretly came to beat on the
widow’s door late at night and early in the morning. The pattern continued: Philips
stole gold and silver from beneath five candlesticks, and tricked the widow out of a
purse full of gold and rings by swapping out the valuables and swapping in some
stones. Judith Philips, a social engineer and confidence artist, was able to find work,
not because her clientele necessarily believed in fairies and fortune-telling, but
because they were not willing to discount them.
The large number of fertile similarities between these two pamphlets ! with the
cozening woman as intermediary between mortals and the illicit wealth of the
supernatural world ! speaks to the possibility that these two texts are not just telling
similar stories, but the same story. The gendered twists and trickeries in these tales
likewise appear, fully formed, in parts of the legislation against witches and cunning
women and in the complex and cunning scenarios created by Mistress Ford and
Mistress Page in Merry Wives. These women use feminized spaces of home and
woods to exploit Falstaff’s greed and avarice, but complicate the above plots with
dunking, cross dressing and physical punishment, and ultimately surpass the skills of
the walking Mort and Philips in that they ensure Falstaff is the one caught and
punished for cozening.
Cunning Falstaff: The witch and the cozeners in Merry Wives
Alongside the marriage plots in Merry Wives, involving Anne Page, Fenton, Caius
and Slender, which include their own share of deception, Mistress Ford and Mistress
Page unreservedly cozen Falstaff. Ford suspects that Falstaff is trying to seduce
Mistress Ford. Knowing this, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page time Falstaff’s visit to
coincide with Ford’s arrival home. Under the auspice of protecting him from the
furious Ford, they dress Falstaff as a witch, in the ‘‘fat woman of Brainford’s’’ gown,
‘‘thrumbed hat’’, and muffler, which are all hidden upstairs (4.2.74!79). The women
choose a disguise that can pass as a legitimate means for concealing Falstaff (there
are not that many ways, after all, to camouflage an obese old knight). Mother Prat’s
costume, as her name suggests (the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘‘prat’’ as a
trick, a fraud, a prank or a practical joke, and as the word for a person’s buttocks), is
not meant to protect Falstaff through concealment, any more than the laundry
basket he was bundled into earlier was meant to keep him safe and dry. The two
women choose to pass him off as the Witch of Brainford because they know Ford
loathes her. She, like Falstaff, has a way of appearing at someone’s door and leaving
with that person’s purse. The idea of being knowingly cozened in his own home,
when he already suspects that he is being cuckolded there, is (as the two women
predict) enough to send Ford into a violent rage.
Ford’s vitriol points to the anxiety cunning women could cause. He accuses
Mother Prat of being:
A witch, a quean, an old cozening quean! Have I not
forbid her my house? She comes of errands, does
she? We are simple men; we do not know what’s
brought to pass under the profession of
fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells,
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by the figure, and such daubery as this is, beyond
our element we know nothing. Come down, you witch,
you hag, you; come down, I say!
(4.2.172!79)
Nancy Cotton identifies this moment as the transference of Ford’s worries about
infidelity onto Mother Prat, reading ‘‘queane’’ and ‘‘polecat’’ as projected insults
meaning, primarily, ‘‘whore’’ (321!26). Ford, however, is describing Mother Prat in
the same terms with which one would describe a witch, or a practising, if dubious,
cunning woman. She makes her money in ‘‘fortune-telling, [and] works by charms,
by spells, by the figure’’ (4.2.176!77). She might not have actual magical powers, but
Mother Prat’s ability to take his wife’s money and time makes her threatening
nonetheless.
Mother Prat is well-known for plying her trade as a cunning woman. The Host
easily recognizes Mother Prat by reputation, and Simple voices a wish that ‘‘the wise
woman of Brainford’’ would predict whether his master will end up with Anne Page
(5.5.26!27). Their responses suggest that Mother Prat has established her credentials
and authority among the Windsor women, thus ensuring herself a lively business as
she runs her errands in the proximity of people whose fortunes need telling. This is
hardly a new trick; authority is a necessary part of the role whether it is backed up by
genuine magic or only by clever manipulation. Resentment over that authority is
what gives the term quean its derogatory sense. The cunning woman in Kind-harts
Dreame positions herself as the heir to infamous cunning-royalty, a gypsy queen,
claiming that her ‘‘father was the cunningst Jugler in all the countrey, [her] mother a
Gipsie, and [she] haue more cunning than any of them both’’ (Chettle H1v). She
pretends to happen upon the farm of her victims, and manipulates the Farmer and
his wife into trusting her (H1v). The narrator of The Brideling also describes Judith
Philips as a ‘‘cozening queane’’ who came upon Kingsman and his wife and
manipulated them into trusting her (8). The reaction to the arrival of a cunning
woman was a mixture of misogynist belief and doubt, but also a curious mix of
resentment and entitlement.
Ford’s response to Mother Prat’s unwelcome presence in his house is multivalent.
He acknowledges his own ignorance, positioning his household as a space containing
‘‘simple men’’ (Merry Wives 5.2.174) whose lack of experience with the supernatural
makes them vulnerable to being cozened by fortune-tellers. Ford’s violence seems
reasonable enough to the men who stand by watching him beat Mother Prat, because
those simple men, as Richard Helgerson argues, ‘‘share at least enough of his fear to
think his action appropriate’’ (172). However, this very ignorance sets him on guard
against ‘‘what’s brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling’’ (Merry
Wives 4.2.174!76). Ford represents himself simultaneously as a ready victim of the
cozening queane and as a person less likely to be taken in than his wife. Peter
Erickson argues that this scene ‘‘doubles male exposure and humiliation since Ford
and Falstaff’s delusions about women are simultaneously punished’’ (122). Chettle’s
farmer displays a similarly contradictory character; though ‘‘very simple’’, he is still
more willing than his wife to challenge ‘‘what learning’’ the fortune-teller had, and
‘‘how she came by knowledge of such things’’ (Chettle H1v). The narrator of The
Brideling also laments how easy it was for Judith Philips to dupe her marks. She was
able to cozen the ‘‘simpler sort of people’’ with the ‘‘devices to deceive’’ used in ‘‘the
profession of a cunning woman, a fortune-teller’’ (6). These three examples feature
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the battle of simple men against the power of a cozening queane. Their simplicity
simultaneously holds them above the cunning woman, and makes them vulnerable to
her cozening ways.
Beyond his conceptual elision of witchcraft, cunning, and cozening, Ford is
dismayed that an enemy to whom he has specifically forbidden entry has penetrated
his home through his wife’s agency. Although the women invited Falstaff into their
domestic domain to better control his actions, Ford sees women as powerless against
the insidiousness of witchcraft and the cunning crafts. Regardless of whether he
perceives her as a real witch or not, Ford is aware that Prat has the potential to
swindle him out of his domestic possessions and his patriarchal authority. Ford’s
concern that this ‘‘cozening queane’’ has the ability to fascinate his wife with her
spells, charms, and fortunes is conflated with the fear that Mother Prat will take his
real purse, while robbing him of his metaphorical one.
Ford’s fear is not entirely misplaced. Although neither woman nor witch,
Falstaff, the man who is actually in the witch’s dress, is well-trained in running the
kind of errands which Ford accuses Prat of running: financial scams against women.
Falstaff explains that he will make love to Mistress Ford, and steal ‘‘her husband’s
purse’’ because it ‘‘hath a legend of angels’’ in it (1.1.53). By seducing Mistress Page,
who ‘‘bears the purse too’’, he can ‘‘be cheaters to them both’’ and have them be
‘‘exchequers’’ to him, doubling his pleasure and his profit (1.1.68, 70!71). By sending
the women duplicate love letters, he can set his plot in motion. This is, of course,
another old trick; the more people one can con, the higher the possible pay-off. Kindharts Dreame’s walking Mort likewise aims at, and temporarily succeeds in, robbing
the farmer and his wife of their ‘‘seven angels’’ (H2). Judith Philips outdoes them
both, charging Kingsman and his wife fourteen pounds to perform the charm that
gives her time to steal their ‘‘five angels’’ (8). She later complicates the subterfuge,
tricking the widow by presenting a forged letter from her good friend, which
instructs the widow to trust Philips because of her ‘‘secret qualities’’ (13). She soon
cozens the widow out of a purse containing a hundred pounds’ worth of ‘‘gold, rings,
jewels, and chains’’ (14). Although the thieving cozener connects Kind-harts Dreame
and The Brideling to Merry Wives, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are the only two
who recognize the con in advance, and exploit it not for profit but for their own
continued amusement. Their cozening is framed as good fun which doubles as a
morality lesson. Whereas Philips and the walking Mort are made to face legal
charges, Mother Prat’s punishment is swift, brutal and impossible to escape.
Mistress Ford coaches her husband on what he might consider an appropriate
reaction to a sexual or spiritual threat in his home, and delivers the cozening coup de
grâce when she ensures that Ford does indeed remember to use his cudgel on Mother
Prat. Mistress Ford cries out: ‘‘Nay, good, sweet husband! Good gentle/men, let him
not strike the old woman’’ (Merry Wives 4.2.180!81). By beating Mother Prat, Ford is
performing more than the revenge of the patriarch on the male interloper: he is
breaking the witch to gain back control. Ford’s thundering exorcism of Mother Prat !
‘‘out of my door, you witch, you hag, you baggage, you/polecat, you ronyon! out, out!
I’ll conjure you, / I’ll fortune-tell you’’ ! metaphorically deconstructs female oracular
power as it deconstructs Prat’s personage though the assault (4.2.172!74). Prat
becomes a series of negative sexual and spiritual female stereotypes, all of which are
unseemly, but all of which are ultimately, in one way or another, controllable. Ford
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ends with ‘‘Hang her, witch!’’ as a way of reasserting that the state has power to do
away with the unruly women he only has the power to assault (4.2.179).
Whereas this violence appears to support patriarchal power, in practice it
undermines it. Mistress Page’s claim that she will ‘‘have this cudgel hallowed and
hung o’er the altar; it hath done meritorious service’’ is a nod to her hand in
organizing Falstaff’s punishment and the way women can use the angry arm of their
husbands to do their dirty work (4.2.204!5). This claim echoes Falstaff’s earlier
boats to Master Brook (who was Ford in disguise) that he could help him seduce
Mistress Ford through the power of his stare and his awe inspiring ‘‘cudgel’’ which
would ‘‘hang like a meteor o’er’’ Ford’s ‘‘cuckold’s horns’’ (2.2.267!70). However, it
is Ford who uses his cudgel unwittingly against Falstaff. Rather than becoming a
monument to the power of male sexuality, the cudgel is wielded by an enraged, but
misguided patriarch, to beat a witch, who is actually a man in disguise, at the behest
of two women, who appear horrified but who are actually sniggering. In the end
Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are the only ones to derive pleasure from the
pounding of that meritorious phallic object.
Falstaff emerges from his role as Mother Prat with a new clarity of the danger in
donning a costume which would gain him access to a woman’s chamber and access to
her place in the stocks. He claims Mother Prat taught him ‘‘more wit than ever [he]
learned before in [his] life’’ ! a lesson that is dearly paid for, but only partially
internalized (4.5.57!59). Falstaff still has the link between witchcraft and housewifery on his mind when he recounts that he was ‘‘wash’d and cudgell’d’’ and melted
‘‘drop by drop’’ (4.6.96!97).
I was beaten myself into all the colours of the rainbow;
and I was like to be apprehended for the witch of
Brentford: but that my admirable dexterity of wit,
my counterfeiting the action of an old woman,
delivered me, the knave constable had set me i’ the
stocks, i’ the common stocks, for a witch.
(4.6.115!20)
Falstaff knows legal measures can be taken against cozeners and witches, which
means at the very least they may be publicly exposed as dangerous and/or
fraudulent, and at the worst might be punished at the stocks or at the gallows, as
happened to the walking Mort and Philips. However, the constable fails to catch Prat
and Falstaff runs out of breath before he can repent. Falstaff plays the witch so
convincingly that when he runs upstairs in disguise, and comes down as Falstaff,
Simple still tries to arrange a consultation with the hidden Prat and the Host
proclaims that he wishes she would just leave his establishment.
Falstaff laments his sense of helplessness with an expressed desire to have the
whole world feel as much (4.4.27!49). His language then erupts into a symphony of
‘‘cozenage’’, ‘‘cozening’’ and ‘‘three cozened-germans that has cozen’d’’ (63, 66, 77).
Patricia Parker argues that the cozening-germans in Merry Wives can be understood
as ‘‘honest-seeming thieves’’ (179), the type of thieves that appear in Kind-Hartes and
The Bridling, the type of thieves one would not expect and one would not soon
forget. Falstaff confesses he has been bested by better cozeners than he; in always
seeming honest, he has become blind to the lack of honesty in others. Falstaff pouts,
concluding that he wished all the ‘‘world might be cozen’d, for I have been cozen’d
and beaten too’’ (92!93). He does not connect the cozening he has done in the past,
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29
however, to the cozening he has suffered. The full lesson has yet to sink in: cozening
no longer has a king. Nancy Cotton suggests that, by the end of the play, all the
women become Mother Prats (325): they outwit Falstaff at every turn. Windsor
Forest, the scene of Falstaff’s final lesson, becomes a world constructed to trick,
pinch, burn, humiliate and break Falstaff, thoroughly and communally. In that
moment, a world run by women becomes a space filled with relentless cozening and
fairy chants, as his previous cozening is coming back on him threefold. Having
suffered a dunking and beating as a witch, Falstaff has yet to suffer a humiliation at
the hands of fairies.
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Finding fraudulent fairies
Like witches, fairies were connected to supernatural categories that directly involve
female authority. An elite fairy culture was immortalized in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie
Queene (1590), which features Elizabeth Regina as both Queen of England and
Queen of the fairy realm. Merry Wives, Kind-harts Dreame and The Brideling invoke
the authority of the Fairy Queen, as well: Judith Philips claims to need to consult
with the Fairy Queen, the walking Mort in Kind-harts Dream is a kind of gypsy
queen, in the quarto version of Merry Wives Mistress Quickly plays the Fairy Queen,
and in the folio version of the play Anne Page becomes the one dressed as the Fairy
Queen. In one sense, these personae are created ! and this stagecraft is
choreographed ! largely by women. Mother Prat obviously runs a profitable cunning
business and there is no doubt that Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are running the
show. The walking Mort may not be able to command forest spirits to relinquish
treasures and Judith Philips may not have the ear of the Queen of Fairies. Mistress
Quickly performs as the Fairy Queen only momentarily before the scene explodes
into chaos. However, these references to queenship nimbly dance close to dangerous
territory. In the lurid string of insults which Ford flings at Mother Prat, the use of
‘‘quean’’ is assuredly derogatory because it speaks to an anxiety women with power
could create. Like the threat of witches, the promise of a powerful fairy queen directs
attention to female power. The walking Mort and Judith Philips make female and
fairy power exploitative; the merry wives make it subversive. However, when
commanded by a female monarch, this power was real: in literature, on stage and
in the courts. In commanding power over the politics of predictions in the 1563
Witchcraft Act and the 1581 Sedition Act, Elizabeth I makes this power actually
manifest.
Nancy Cotton argues that Ford equates witchcraft with a wife’s power of
cuckoldry. In dehorning him in the woods, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page
symbolically castrate Falstaff (323), as they had similarly done in dumping him from
the bucking basket and unsexing him by dressing him as Mother Prat. However,
representation of witches in Merry Wives moves beyond the tensions of cuckoldry
and castration. As Cotton notes, the Continental idea of a witches’ Sabbath, which
included a sexual liaison between witch and horned devil, is out of place here. The
incidents in Windsor Park are not ‘‘witch’s revels’’ (325), and any idea of sexuality
implicit in this scene comes from reading Falstaff as a rutting buck, of whom Ford
asks ‘‘who’s a cuckold now’’ (5.5.109). Anne Parten’s suggested reading of the
Windsor Park revels as a type of ‘‘skimmington’’, or a ritualized public humiliation
of masculine ineffectuality, gets us closer to the contemporary idea of cozening
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K. C. Uszkalo
which runs throughout the play (187). The point is not that Falstaff is sexualized, but
that he is duped.
Mistress Quickly, Page and Ford’s final plot involves convincing Falstaff, dressed
as a buck, to meet the two women at Herne’s Oak in Windsor Park for a late-night
romantic tryst. The movement into Windsor Forest, in the final act, offers the
women a final opportunity to manipulate Falstaff. Along with a colourful cohort,
they disguise themselves as fairies to pinch and frighten Falstaff before finally
exposing their own fraud and exposing him as one. If Mistress Ford and Mistress
Page’s greatest personal feat of cunning was the creation of Mother Prat out of
Falstaff, the most significant success for the female community of Windsor was
creation of the fairy court in Windsor Park. This artifice allowed for the temporary
inversions of normative expectations and social hierarchies which define the
imagined and feminized realm of the fairy.
The woods allow for an exploitation of fairy beliefs and a nod to the known
craftiness of fairies, a space where matriarchal power can exist and space where
normative male power is frustrated. The fraudulent woodland site of a mysterious
haunted tree as a location for treasure likewise appears in the 1542 Witchcraft Act,
the first witchcraft statute which prohibited the consultation of spirits to find gold or
silver hidden in the earth or other secret places, and in Kind-harts Dreame and The
Brideling, which recount the stories of women doing just that. In Kind-harts Dreame,
the walking Mort claims she is going to force ‘‘the spirits to release the tresure’’
which lies three miles from the farmer’s home and ‘‘lay it in some conuenient place
for them to fetch’’ (Chettle H2). Similarly, Philips planted gold in the holly tree in
Kingsman’s yard to enable her to return and discover it the next day. Kingsman
allowed Philips to bridle, saddle, and ride him out of his house to the tree and, as per
her instructions, to lie with his wife, ‘‘groveling on [their] bellies under this tree’’, for
three hours with their eyes closed (Brideling 8). Philips then went in the house,
proceeded to rob Kingsman and his wife, and returned to the holly tree disguised as
the Fairy Queen (8). The woods are women’s spaces, liminal spaces. The women’s
disguises as fairies are significant, because fairies are known to trick humans: women
dressed as fairies would multiply the effect.
Falstaff’s double agenda of securing sexual and financial gratification from
Mistress Page and Mistress Ford seems finally to be in arm’s reach as he pulls the
two women towards him under Herne’s Oak. As in the above stories, the treasure is
located under the tree and the punishment Falstaff will soon encounter is likewise
made public. The Fairy Queen arrives to punish ‘‘sluts and sluttery’’ by burning
unchaste hearts (Merry Wives 5.5.45). Falstaff does not take time to interrogate the
scene critically, but acts on the scraps of folklore he remembers. Fearing that ‘‘he
who speaks to [the fairies] shall die’’, and that ‘‘no man their works must eye’’,
Falstaff worms his way into the dirt to hide his eyes and hide from the fairies (5.5.46!
47). He fears his fat will allow the ‘‘Welsh fairy’’ to ‘‘transform [him] to a piece cheese
(5.5.82). Falstaff cries out after being burned with tapers, and the Queen of Fairies
concludes he is ‘‘corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire!’’; she commands her fairy
retinue to pinch and burn him to the beat of their dance (5.5.90).
The moral of these narratives appears to be in the problem of over-reaching and
the humility learned in public shame, humility which is deepened by having come via
the women’s schemes. The farmer and Kingsman both discover that they have been
robbed and cozened in short order, and that they were not the first ones to have
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31
fallen for the stunt. Both men discover through their neighbours that a woman has
been charged with fraud, only to find that she was the same cunning woman who had
defrauded them. The narrator specifies that part of Kingsman’s penance was his
‘‘infamy and shame’’ and the ‘‘base and ridiculous manner of his saddleing’’ (8). The
farmer’s public penance was being told by the walking Mort that she saddled and
bridled him ‘‘onely to see how like an Asse he lookt’’ (Chettle H2). Falstaff’s
punishment for his unchaste desire and his greed is a round of vigorous pinching and
burning by a pack of fraudulent fairies, and the similar knowledge that he was
cozened by ‘‘all the world’’ he knows (Merry Wives 4.4.93). Not acting on his ‘‘three
or four’’ suspicions that ‘‘they were not fairies’’, Falstaff pays for his cozening ways
with public humiliation, not the least of which is having to acknowledge his guilt and
surprise that the women managed to outwit him (5.5.120!26). Although Falstaff
appears to be disguised as a buck (as he was hidden in a buck-basket), his disguise
functions in the same way as his disguise as dirty laundry and the fat woman of
Brainford functioned: to reveal rather than to protect. He realizes that he was more
like his namesake than he thought, and was ‘‘made an ass’’ and, according to Ford,
‘‘an ox too’’ (5.5.118!19). The merry wives expose Falstaff to ridicule him in a way
that represents his true self and exposes him as a chimera of all his forms ! as a fat,
dirty, ass.
However, the fairy plot and confidence game does not end with Falstaff brushing
dirt off of his blushing face. All of the cozeners are duped by a final pair of
confidence artists: Fenton and Anne Page. Anne Page was among the group of fairies
tormenting Falstaff under the tree. Mistress Page planned to use the chaos to arrange
Anne’s stealth wedding to Caius, and told him to find a fairy dressed in green with
whom to abscond. Page made the same deal with Slender. Both men return to the
scene amazed that they had eloped with boys. Fenton and Anne Page chastise her
parents for attempting to make her marry men she did not love. Like the greedy men
in Kind-harts Dreame and The Bridleing, Page is cheated out of his authority over his
household and his valuables; he loses control of his assets by losing control of his
daughter. Regina Buccola notes the differences between the folio, in which Mistress
Page suggests that her ‘‘Nan shall be the queen of all the fairies,/dressed all in white’’
(4.4.70!71), and the quarto, in which Page suggests that Anne, ‘‘like a little Fayrie
will be disguised’’ (102). Buccola argues that this assertion represents a ‘‘maternal
assertiveness about marital matters which was not entirely acceptable in early
modern England’’ (102). More is at stake here than casting and the decision of who
will give away the bride, however. Although both parents position Anne (as fairy) to
have her stolen away at night by the suitor of their choice, her father dresses her as
‘‘little fayrie’’ and her mother dresses her as the Fairy Queen. Her mother represents
Anne as a woman and a matriarch. The return to order at the end of the play is
hardly a return to order at all ! the women were in control all the way through ! and
the only one able to trick the women is Anne. Power is simply passed to the next
generation of cunning women, cozening women and imagined fairy queens.
Conclusions
The Merry Wives of Windsor is not merely a comic performance of the turn of the
wheel of fortune; something much more fundamental underlies the carnivalesque.
Whereas A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens with a powerful matriarchy and ends
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with a marriage, and Rosalind’s reversal of roles in As You Like It represents a
radical but temporary claiming of power by women, the women in Merry Wives
(Mistress Page, Mistress Ford, and even Anne Page and Mistress Quickly) claim
power in a setting far more ominous than a night masque in a park. The figures they
play with, Mistress Prat and the Fairy Queen, exploit, as Diane Purkiss mentions,
‘‘inventions of (feminine) cunning allied with (masculine) superstition’’ (Witch 193).
Ford’s fear of the cunning woman in their midst suggests a cultural understanding of
the possibility of a real fortune-teller and the anger associated with false fortunes.
Finally, although he is judged, sentenced and punished by the fraudulent Fairy
Queen, his fear still lands him face down in the dirt; the possibility of fairies is
enough to frighten him.
The malleable intersection between supernatural and domestic categories within
Merry Wives echoes the slippage among these categories in Chettle’s Kind-harts
Dreame and in The Brideling, Sadling and Ryding, of a Rich Churle. These texts,
through their plots, language and tone, can be read as source texts for Shakespeare’s
construction of witches, cozening queens and fairy frauds. Shakespeare might have
needed to have some source texts close at hand if the literary legend about the play’s
rapid composition for the Garter Feast, held at Westminster, 23 April 1597 in honour
of the attending Queen is true. The legend begins with John Dennis, who claimed in
1702 that the ‘‘Queen was so eager to see it acted, that she commanded it be finished
in fourteen days’’ (Bevington 256). In 1709, Nicholas Rowe added that the Queen so
liked the ‘‘character of Falstaff, in the two Parts of Henry the Fourth, that she
commanded him to continue it for one Play more, and to shew him in Love’’ (4).
There are advantages to considering the potential ramifications of this apocrypha. In
doing so, we can imagine Shakespeare anxiously reaching for Kind-harts Dreame and
The Brideling as source texts which would do the double duty of helping fill out the
plot and acknowledging the interests of the Queen who was herself, at least legally,
interested in eliminating witchcraft and prognostication. By invoking the elisions
between witchcraft and fraud which appear in law and in print, the play illustrates
the ways in which smart women can exploit masculine greed and illustrates the good
fun cunning women can have subverting superstitions and expectations.
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