ABSTRACT
In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Sir John Falstaff is presented as compulsively quoting from numerous songs and ballads. Elegy is a mode that has dominated many subsequent productions of the Falstaff plays and their adaptations. The plays have effectively contaminated one another from the time of their first stagings and that contamination is especially inflected by both music and by nostalgia. The musical connections and their contexts substantiate the regular deployments of various nostalgic strategies. Falstaff’s expressed contempt for Shallow’s self-fashioning of their younger days includes one more connection with the cultural past. Stagings of The Merry Wives of Windsor have often engaged directly with musical nostalgia. Falstaff’s musical memory derives from his character’s origins in the Vice figure not only of the Medieval morality plays but also of the Tudor interludes, a powerful locus of cultural nostalgia in early modern England and especially in London, where the interlude served as the progenitor of the public theater.
