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The Merry Wives Quarto, a Farce Interlude

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

Vincent H. Ogburn
Vincent H. Ogburn*
Affiliation:
Eastern New Mexico College
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Extract

That strange dramatic compound of “gross corruption, constant mutilation, meaningless inversion, and clumsy transposition,” the 1602 quarto of The Merry Wives of Windsor, has furnished Shakespearean scholars with one of their best puzzles. The garbled condition of the text has long been considered as being the result of the “stolne and surreptitious” method of obtaining the copy. But there are fundamental conditions in the quarto which are hardly to be accounted for thus. The material and the manner of treatment continually suggest some special influence, some distinctive and integrated molding force other than the effort to obtain the play by oblique devices.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 1942 , pp. 654 - 660
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942

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References

Notes

1 W. W. Greg, Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, 1602 (Oxford, 1910), p. xxvi.

2 J. O. Halliwell, The First Sketch of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare Society Publications, ix (London, 1842).

3 Can it be mere coincidence that “the fat woman of Brainford” comes into the play as a means of trapping Falstaff?

4 E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London, 1925), p. 170.

5 H. C. Hart, The Merry Wives of Windsor (London, 1904), p. xx.

6 Greg's interesting parallel-column list of oaths from the quarto and folio shows a considerable taming of the folio group. Greg, op. cit., liv-lvi.

7 Op. cit., 88, notes on lines 1436 ff.

8 Ibid., 89, notes on 1473-78.