SOURCE: "The Play: Suitably Shallow but Neither Simple nor Slender," in Shakespeare's English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context, University of Nebraska Press, 1979, pp. 61-83.

In the excerpt below, Roberts contends that Falstaff s lust and adulterous intentions disrupt the social order, and maintains that his punishment and ultimate humiliation effectively quell the sexual hostility in the play.

[Shakespeare's] play [The Merry Wives of Windsor], a true domestic drama, focuse[s] on marriage—the problems of achieving it and the perils of maintaining it. The enemies of good marriage which he singles out are greed, lust, jealousy, and stupidity. Greed appears in two forms and provides a thematic link between the two plots: it is Falstaff s greed which motivates him to attempt to seduce the wives (though vanity and lust become operative later), and it is greed also, in a more innocuous-appearing form, which is...