“Wives may be merry and yet honest too”

This chapter aims to examine the treatment in a few plays, mainly by Shakespeare, of a kind of alternative wit in women. Leo Salingar, in examining some possible sources for The Merry Wives of Windsor, traces a ‘joint narrative and stage tradition’ of tales of women outwitting their husbands or lovers going back to Boccaccio. The women of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor seem at first glance more akin to Mistresses Gallipot and Openwork than to Moll, though they operate as she does to destroy certain stereotyped conceptions of women. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, the wives’ wit operates as a means of obtaining revenge for women against the insults offered to their honesty by the male vices of lust and jealousy, and as a way of restoring to the community the values of order and domestic stability which have temporarily been misplaced by Falstaff and Ford.