Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 54

And Be Short, What Not. That’s Sweete and Happie

James Burbage had died at the end of January 1597 and was buried in the little church of Shoreditch in the presence of his family and the players.  It has been assumed by some that he expired from disappointment or depression at the failure of his scheme to convert the Blackfriar's refectory into a playhouse. He was, in any case, experienced manager to succumb to local difficulties.  He was past his mid-sixties and in sixteenth-century terms had reached an advanced age.  He left everything to his two sons who had continued in their father’s theatrical business.  He gave the Theatre to Cuthbert and the Blackfriars to Richard.  Both properties may have seemed to his sons at the time to be the theatrical equivalent of a poisoned chalice.  The ground lease for the Theatre was due to expire in April 1597.  Giles Allen agreed to an extension of the lease but then objected to Richard as one of the guarantors.  So it seems that in the late spring and early summer of 1597 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed at the Curtain.  While the dispute continued over the now deserted Theatre, it was the Curtain that the two completed parts of Henry IV were played.

Shakespeare had, in fact, stopped work on the second part of Henry IV in order to concentrate upon The Merry Wives of Windsor.  It is generally supposed that this latest comedy was written for the Garter Feast celebrated at Whitehall on 23 April 1597.  It was a feast held in honour of the newly elected knight and Lord Chamberlain, George Carey after the death of Lord Cobham, and became the patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.  The company’s winter had turned to glorious summer.

The Merry Wives of Windsor was set in Winsor simply because the new knights were ceremonially installed at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.  There is no indication of any full-length drama being presented at such Garter celebrations, but the masque at the end of the play in which Mistress Quickly, absurdly disguised as Queen of the Fairies. Might have been performed at the castle rather than at the feast in Westminster Palace.  Shakespeare then subsequently wrote the rest of the play to lead to this celebratory climax.

The characters of Falstaff and Shallow, Pistol and Bardolph, were just too good to relinquish.  In the first printed edition, the principal attraction is made clear in the description of “an excellent and pleasant conceited comedies of Sir John and the merry wyves of Windesor.”  Shakespeare may also have included material that he was unable to use in the history plays themselves.

The fact that the drama flowed so fluently from his pen suggestion it came from his natural wit, means, in turn, that it can be interpreted as a traditional English comedy.  Here are the ingredients of English humour – a continual bawdiness of intention, a salacious narrative and a man farcically dressed in drag.  Others have noticed how in the play, the English language is twisted and turned in a hundred different ways but this is only another aspect of the variability and variety of Shakespeare’s style.

The comedy would have been a gift to his players too, with the emphasis on mistaken identities and sudden changes of plot.  If Kempe continued to play Falstaff, he would have proved a hit dressed up as the fat woman of Brentford.  It has been supposed that Shakespeare borrowed his comic plots from Italian drama, but in the crossing, they suffered a sea of change.