You’ve probably seen a Mistress Ford this summer, as The Merry Wives of Windsor became a surprisingly popular choice for pandemic programming. It’s a play that has settled into a default production concept: the heightened, parodic world of soap operas and reality TV, reflecting the classed and gendered disdain that many people feel for this play and its characters. An underrated character in an under-explored play, Mistress Ford has more in common with her younger, flashier fellow comedic heroines than she gets credit for.
‘It would give eternal food to his jealousy’
Mistress Ford—Alice—finds herself in the most dangerous position for any Shakespeare heroine, regardless of genre: suspected of adultery. When she receives ridiculous love letters from the lascivious court-connected knight Sir John Falstaff, she struggles to take them with good grace—it’s not like her husband needs any more cause to be irrationally suspicious of her.
Along with her best friend Mistress Page (a fellow recipient of Falstaff’s advances), they decide to turn Falstaff’s lust to Mistress Ford’s own advantage and to humiliate husband and would-be lover alike for presuming she is unchaste. It’s reminiscent of the series of YouTube videos that were popular in the late ‘00s and now are painfully cringe-inducing to remember, imagining how Shakespeare’s tragic heroines’ lives would have been better if they’d had a ‘sassy gay friend’ to ask, “What—what—what are you doing?” But instead, and crucially, it’s only other women who can help Mistress Ford escape Falstaff’s advances and the oppressive force of her own husband’s jealousy.
‘I think if your husbands were dead, you two would marry.’
Though the play divides its attention between the husbands (especially Ford), the wives, Falstaff, and the other denizens of Windsor, as everyone plots and schemes it is only ever Mistress Page and Mistress Ford who understand everything that is going on, because they are only only characters with true confidantes. Everyone else lies, conceals, or fails to understand important information, but the wives help keep each other one step ahead of both Ford and Falstaff’s tricks (there is an exception here, but that’s for the story of the Pages). And in the end, everything turns out just fine.
In Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, we see a kind of friendship between women rarely depicted by Shakespeare, who is so deeply interested in the bonds between men. As the scholar Carl Miller writes, female friendship in Shakespeare tends to exist in the past tense, reminiscing lost childhood closeness, or else is quickly ruptured by disputes over men. But in Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, we face no such difficulties. They are already married, and perhaps all the closer for it.
The quotation at the beginning of this section is quickly answered—“Be sure of that—two other husbands.”— but even so, it reflects the unusual and even transgressive feel of their relationship. Shakespeare places in the hands of women the kind of friendship-fueled narrative engine usually operated by men. Mistress Ford and Mistress Page’s tricks, traps, and misdirections recall the matchmaking antics of the carefree lords of Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labours Lost, even down to what I can’t help but read as a parody of masculine language of familiarity by constantly calling one another “woman,” just as Shakespeare’s male friends use “man.”
Mistress Ford’s tale suggests that the thing that separates comedy from tragedy for a woman may be as simple as having a friend, having a community, not being forced to work things out for herself.
But it’s more than that, too: Mistress Ford not only has a community, she has a position within it. She is a wife, she is a householder, she is wealthy and known to the people of her town. She has her husband’s name (and is known by nothing else, only once called ‘Alice,’ and then as part of a joke). She is insulated by the very things that younger heroines must hurry to marry in order to achieve.
‘You are the happier woman.’
But beneath its light appearance, the relative ease with which conflicts are batted aside, there is a seed of sadness within The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Mistress Ford is very near to its core. Other plays in Shakespeare’s canon depict much darker outcomes to accusations of adultery, and the shadows of these unjust consequences cannot help but haunt the Fords’ relationship, if we only pause to think about them.
Ford’s jealous soliloquies are often delivered in performance as ridiculous, but Shakespeare’s other plays know all too well where such furious, wounded male pride can lead, even at its most irrational and absurd. In fact, I think this thin shade of threat has to be understood to make sense of the story itself, to explain Mistress Ford and Mistress Page’s deep offense at Falstaff’s sexual advances; their determination not only to reject him, but to humiliate him in order to clear themselves of any suspicion of temptation.
This, to me, is one of the defining features of a comic Shakespeare heroine: this tiny grain of sadness that Mistress Ford likewise contains. We are repeatedly reminded of Mistress Ford’s unhappiness in her marriage, in various mouths, including her own. Like Rosalind and Viola’s mourning for their lost family, like Beatrice’s wistfulness, like both Helenas’ incredulity at the idea of being loved. A wrinkle, a bit of texture, another flavor to cut through the comedic sweetness.
The Merry Wives of Windsor is generally seen as lacking such an alternate tone, and perhaps the notes of Mistress Ford’s sadness never do rise high enough to break through the comedy’s fluffy exterior. But these hints are enough to establish Mistress Ford as an alternate version of her fellow heroines’ lives, a glimpse of and perhaps even a commentary on the wealth, status, and pure luck that it takes to protect a woman from living at the mercy of men’s moods and suspicions.
Thank you for reading dramatis personae! If you enjoyed this letter, do share it with your friends. You’ve helped get this project off to a fantastic start, and I’m so excited and grateful for your support!