SOURCE: Tiffany, Grace. “Falstaff's False Staff: ‘Jonsonian’ Asexuality in The Merry Wives of Windsor.” Comparative Drama 26, no. 3 (fall 1992): 254-70.

In the following essay, Tiffany contends that Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor is an early experiment in Jonsonian humors comedy, and that Shakespeare participated in the formation of the genre.

The Folger Shakespeare Theater's use of a female actor as Falstaff in its 1990 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, besides its witty reversal of the Elizabethan convention of all-male casting, had this to recommend it: the “distaff” Falstaff, an embodiment of sexlessness, confronted audiences with the curious absence of regenerative possibility which distinguishes Merry Wives from “Shakespearean” romantic comedy. Unlike, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream, which creates a world capable of transformation and renewal by means of a sexual energy that dominates language and fuels action, The Merry Wives of Windsor presents a static community for...