Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Fabliau

Abstract

As far as I know, E. K. Chambers was the first to call Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor a “fabliau.” To be precise, he called the play “acted fabliau” and went on to declare that “of acted fabliau, The Merry Wives is the best English specimen, just as Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale and Reeve’s Tale are the best English specimens of fabliau in narrative.” The identification of the play’s genre stuck: in her introduction to The Merry Wives of Windsor for The Riverside Shakespeare, Anne Barton wrote, “the tradition to which it belongs has never been in doubt. It is a fabliau …” The purpose of this essay is to examine Shakespeare’s handling of this medieval genre in his early modern Merry Wives—the least studied of all Shakespeare’s comedies. The nineteenth-century French medievalist, Joseph Bédier, who famously defined the fabliau as “contes à rire en vers” would not have considered the genre part of the courtly legacy, the subject of this collection of essays exploring the ways in which courtly literature has influenced literature of the modern period. For Bédier, the fabliaux were the “amusettes” of bourgeois audiences while the romances were the secular delights of aristocratic chateaux. His view was effectively challenged, however, in 1957 by the Danish scholar, Per Nykrog, who argued that the origins of the thirteenth-century French fabliaux are courtly, not bourgeois, as Bédier proposed, and that their tone reflects the condescension of the upper classes.