**This post is Part 1 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.**

The Performance:

I read this play alongside my watching of the Shakespeare in the Park production of the play, as televised by PBS Great Performances, an adaptation by Jocelyn Bioh, directed by Saheem Ali. This performance set the play in Harlem among an immigrant population, and it featured a few post-pandemic interludes (during one of which, Falstaff bemoans to the audience the torture of staying at home and watching Netflix for an entire year), but aside from these distracting-though-crowd-pleasing digressions, the performance stayed very true to Shakespeare’s original text.

I am typically quite suspicious of any “modernizations” or “reimagining” of Shakespeare’s plays, but it’s worth noting that MWW is not a typical Shakespeare play. The story, likely apocryphal, goes that Queen Elizabeth I was so delighted with the character of Falstaff in the Henry IV plays that she requested Shakespeare write a comedy showing “Falstaff in love.” What results is a highly unusual play: Shakespeare’s only comedy set in England, with a rare focus on middle class (vs. royal/aristocratic)characters, written in prose (vs. verse) in a middle-class vernacular.

In many ways, I think we’re supposed to understand this play as being intended for a broader and less “educated” audience, and so I find the idea of adapting MWW for a modern Central Park audience less objectionable than I would for most other Shakespeare works. Relax and enjoy the show, for chrissakes!

The Play:

I found the plot compelling throughout, and there were several laugh-out-loud moments in the play. The subplot of Anne Page and her suitors provided a more typically Shakespearean backbone to an otherwise innovative main plot, wherein two wives (yes, of Windsor… sure, they were merry throughout…) play tricks both on Falstaff and on their husbands.

I do not have an elegant Feminist critique of the play, but I enjoyed seeing these two female leads advance the action amid a cast full of hapless (though often well-intentioned) male characters. This was not Shakespeare caught up in “woke” pandering but rather an authentic representation of human ingenuity and (dare I say it?) boredom in these two gentleladies.

However, the play does lack the wit and wordplay of some of Shakespeare’s other comedies. MWW draws its humor more from farcical elements (physical comedy, disguises, and narrow escapes) than from puns and double entendre.

Additionally, I found the relationship between Mistress Ford and her husband particularly implausible. While the “pranks” she pulls on him are, in fact, pranks, they do seem to go to a point of cruelty. I believe we’re supposed to condemn Ford for his jealousy, but on my reading his jealousy seemed frankly justified given the information at hand. Perhaps, here, I am not being sufficiently sympathetic to Mistress Ford; or perhaps I have not taken seriously enough the insinuation that Ford’s jealous inclinations predate the opening act in an important way. Either way, he ends the play contrite where I would be, if not furious, at least hurt. But again, maybe that’s the point.

The Bloom:

Boy, old Harold really didn’t like this one. He clearly inherits from his reading of the Henry IV plays a love for the character Falstaff with which I was unburdened (having not yet read the H4 plays) in my reading of MWW. One can’t be sure if he’s more offput by the literary and theatrical elements of the play or simply by the plot, which advances at Falstaff’s expense, making a mockery of him from beginning to end.

Bloom also seems to take issue with the populist angle of the play, debasing the craft of farce in favor of the traditional wit of Shakespeare. While my preferences align with his, I’m not sure I feel it denigrates the play in the same way he finds it does.

He seems caught up on the (again, unverified) history of the play, going so far as to basically call Shakespeare a sellout for writing it, saying

Commerce is commerce, but why did Shakespeare inflict this upon a character who represents his own wit at its most triumphant? – Bloom, 317

He even, at one point, insinuates that perhaps Shakespeare made the play bad on purpose, and that a sort of Straussian reading may be the only way to reconcile the genius of the creator with the disappointing creation. This seems–dare I say–dramatic?

Perhaps my biggest point of agreement with Bloom is that, of the Shakespeare plays I’ve read, this one seems the least… Shakespearean? It does feel like another (very talented) playwright could have written this play, but if they did, I would still watch it.

Rating: 6/10