ABSTRACT
The Merry Wives of Windsor has always held a curious status among Shakespeareans. It is Shakespeare’s only “English comedy,” almost entirely in prose and centering on small-town life as opposed to the more momentous business of marriage or war among aristocrats. Yet it is the Shakespearean comedy most closely associated with a court through the persistent anecdote (first promulgated in the early eighteenth century) that its author wrote it in two weeks or less to satisfy Queen Elizabeth I’s desire to see Falstaff in love. Since the early eighteenth century, the anecdote has taken root-witness its concretization in David Scott’s striking but historically inaccurate 1840 painting Queen Elizabeth Viewing the Performance of the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor’ in the Globe Theatre;1 witness likewise the fact that most editors of the play have not only accepted the anecdote but embroidered upon it, despite its shaky historical basis.
