Merry Wives of Windsor

[RuskinJazz]

Can anyone tell me how marriage is represented in The Merry Wives of Windsor?

[barrowman]

Key themes of Merry Wives include love and marriage, jealousy and revenge, class and wealth. Explored with irony, sexual innuendo, sarcasm, and stereotypical views of classes and nationalities, these themes help to give the play something closer to a modern-day view than is often found in Shakespeare's plays.

The play is centered around the class prejudices of middle-class England. The lower class is represented by characters such as Bardolph, Pistol and Nim (Falstaff's followers), and the upper class is represented by Sir John Falstaff and Master Fenton. Shakespeare uses both Latin and misused English to represent the attitudes and differences of the people of this era. Much of the comedic effect of the play is derived from misunderstandings between characters.

Another prominent Elizabethan trope that runs through the play is the idea of the cuckold. Elizabethans found the idea of a woman cheating on her husband absolutely hilarious and seem to have assumed that if a man was married, his wife was cheating on him. Because a cuckolded husband was said to "wear horns," any reference, no matter how oblique, to horns or a horned animal (for example, the "buck" basket where Falstaff finds himself) probably brought down the house.