The Merry Wives of Windsor by William ShakespeareMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
One of my least favorite plays by Shakespeare.
The last act is kind of entertaining, but I don't love the rest. Falstaff is portrayed here as just a fat fool to be mocked, and that's not too fun. He wants to seduce a couple of married women, really just to get some money from them, and he goes about it in the rudest, clumsiest way. But the rest of the story is how they lead him on just to trick him and let him embarrass himself. To escape an angry husband, he gets carried out in a basket and then tossed in the Thames with laundry. To escape a second time, he dresses as a woman--a well known witch, in fact--and gets beaten on the way out. And the last episode has him dressed like Herne the Hunter, with stag horns, going out to a haunted wood at midnight, where a bunch of actors and local people dress up like fairies and the like. They have prepared a song that they scare him with as they pinch him black and blue.
I'm thinking: people sure had a lot of time on their hands to go to so much trouble to embarrass a guy like they did here.
The good part was a subplot with a young woman who wants to marry one guy but her mom wants someone else and her dad wants a third man. They're all part of the midnight pageant, and the mom and dad's picks are told to come find her dressed in white or in green and steal her away to get married. She tricks them both, having other people dress in white and in green, so that she can leave with the man she loves. Yay! a happy ending. I would have liked it better if the play was mostly about her, not Falstaff.
Maybe it's funny on stage. I thought it was mostly mean-spirited and didn't love it. YMMV
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