SOURCE: “The Town of Windsor,” in Twayne's New Critical Introductions to Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 1-16.

In the following essay, White asserts that The Merry Wives of Windsor provides a realistic portrayal of sixteenth-century life due to its contemporary English setting.

It is dangerous, and perhaps impossible, to claim that any work of literature or art is ‘realistic’. All that art can give us is a model of a possible world, and we as spectators locate ourselves either close to or distant from that world. The work of Ernst Gombrich and John Berger in the field of pictorial art, and the developing ideas of semioticians, prove that art works through conventions and codes which we as viewers and readers feel either comfortable with or uneasy in decoding. Moreover, as ‘metatheatrical’ critics (J.L. Calderwood is the main exponent) have insistently shown, Shakespeare in...