William Shakespeare

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The Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor, written probably in 1599 but first published in 1602, is Shakespeare’s only comedy of middle-class life. The “merry wives,” Mistress Page and Mistress Ford, outwit Shakespeare’s greatest comic invention, Sir John Falstaff, who had first appeared in Henry IV. Falstaff’s unsuccessful efforts to seduce the two wives and their comic revenge upon him make up the main plot of the play. The comedy also includes the story of Anne Page, who is wooed by two inappropriate lovers, but who finally is united with Fenton, the man she loves. According to an early 18th-century tradition The Merry Wives of Windsor was written at the request of Queen Elizabeth I, who wished to see “Falstaff in love” following his comic appearance in both of the Henry IV plays.

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Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night is the most mature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies and one that recalls his own earlier plays. It was written probably in 1601 and was published for the first time in the Folio of 1623. We know it was performed in the winter of 1602 at the Middle Temple, one of London’s law schools. It is a play of great emotional range, from farcical misunderstandings (based on a set of separated twins, as in The Comedy of Errors) to poignant moments in which a woman in disguise must serve the man she loves (as in Two Gentlemen of Verona). The play ends with lovers happily paired, but with the ambitious Malvolio isolated (like Jacques in As You Like It or Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) and swearing to “be revenged upon the whole pack of you.”

The comedy may have been written specifically for presentation at a festival of Twelfth Night, which occurs 12 nights after Christmas Eve and was once a time for mirth and merrymaking, marking the end of the Christmas revels. The play’s outrageous antics, especially for Sir Toby Belch, reflect in spirit the outrageous behavior permitted at Twelfth Night celebrations during the Middle Ages. Yet there is a darker side to Twelfth Night. Not only is Malvolio unreconciled to the community at the end, but Sir Andrew, Antonio, and the clown, Feste, all stand apart from the final celebrations, and Feste’s final song reminds the audience of how far our day-to-day world is from the idealization of comedy.

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Problem Comedies

Three plays—All’s Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure—written soon after the mature comedies are usually called by modern critics “problem plays,” a term first coined for them in 1896. The problem comedies touch on complex and often unpleasant themes and contain characters whose moral flaws are graver and more difficult to change than the shortcomings of the characters in the farces or the joyous comedies. Little of the light-hearted humor of the earlier comedies, nor the easy satisfactions of their endings, appears in these plays. They are, however, emotionally rich and dramatically exciting, and have become increasingly successful on stage and stimulating to readers.

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All’s Well That Ends Well

All’s Well That Ends Well, written about 1603 but not published until the 1623 Folio, adheres to the conventional pattern for comedy, as its title promises, ending with the reunion of a separated couple. But the reunion is deeply troubled and troubling. The callow, cowardly, and ungenerous Bertram is finally successfully paired with Helena, but they have reached that point through a process that has humiliated each. He immediately flees to Italy, and she must trick him to consummate the marriage. At the end they accept each other, but the ending is appropriately hedged with conditionals: “All yet seems well, and if it end so meet,/ The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.” The stability of even this muted resolution is itself unsettled by the King’s offer to Diana, a young woman Bertram has tried to seduce, to choose a husband for herself. At best this offer reveals how little the King has learned and at worst it threatens to start the dispiriting action all over again.

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Troilus and Cressida

Critics always have had trouble classifying Troilus and Cressida (written about 1602) as a tragedy, a history, or a comedy. In many ways it qualifies as all three, and its earliest readers did not seem to know what kind of play it was. The editors of the First Folio placed the play at the beginning of the section of tragedies; the 1609 quarto titles the play The Famous Historie of Troylus and Cresesid; and the prefatory note in that edition considers the play one of Shakespeare’s comedies and worthy of comparison with the best of the classical comic playwrights. Some critics believe that Troilus somewhat resembles the satiric comedy in fashion at the time it was written. The play has two plots. The first, a dramatic version of the siege of Troy by Greek armies during the Trojan War, and the second, which gives the play its name, a rendering of the medieval legend of the doomed love between Troilus, son of the king of Troy, and Cressida, daughter of a Trojan priest who defects to the Greek side during the war. The legend inspired a number of other works, including the tragic poem Troilus and Criseyde (1385?) by Geoffrey Chaucer. Shakespeare’s play, however, brilliantly combines the two plots in a withering exploration of the realities of both chivalric honor and romantic love.

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