The Merry Wives of Windsor: The New Oxford Shakespeare

’Here will be an old abusing of God’s patience and the King’s English.’

The Merry Wives of Windsor is the only Shakespeare play named entirely after female characters and his only comedy set in England. These features underscore some of its most immediately appealing qualities -- its contemporary realism; its depiction of everyday life; its interest in status and gender; and the language and physicality of its comedy. This edition’s introduction focuses on these elements of Merry Wives, setting out their historical contexts but also thinking about what they offer audiences and readers today. It addresses the place of the play within Shakespeare’s career and canon and the enduringly popular figure of Falstaff, before thinking about its generic peculiarities as a mixture of ＂city comedy＂ and domestic comedy. The edition gives readers a rich breadth of historical context and real-life examples through which to understand and appreciate the text. It also addresses Merry Wives’s popular and scholarly reception, to give students, performers, and readers an array of topics, angles, and approaches with which to engage with one of the canon’s most lively and life-like plays.

The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare’s works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare’s work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare’s work.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

William Shakespeare

Callan Davies works across early modern literary, cultural, and theatre history. He has been part of three UKRI-funded projects-Before Shakespeare, Middling Culture, and Box Office Bears-and has taught at several UK universities and as a Globe Education Lecturer at Shakespeare’s Globe. He has published a study of the early modern entertainment industry, What is a Playhouse? England at Play, 1520-1620 (2022), and also widely on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture. His work also includes an award-winning essay on bowling alleys in sixteenth-century London, an article exploring female playhouse ownership and cultural activity in Bristol, a study of Shakespearean bears and bear-keepers, and a book on Jacobean ＂strangeness＂ and drama.

Sarah Neville is an Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University with a courtesy appointment in Theatre, Film, and Media Arts. She specializes in early modern English literature, bibliography, theories of textuality, and performance, chiefly examining the ways that authority is negotiated in print, digital, and live media. She is an assistant editor of the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016-17), for which she edited five plays in both old and modern-spelling editions, as well as an associate coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions.