Themes
Key themes of Merry Wives include love and marriage, jealousy and revenge, social class and wealth. Explored with irony, sexual innuendo, sarcasm, and stereotypical views of classes and nationalities, these themes help to give the play something closer to a modern-day view than is often found in Shakespeare's plays.
The play is centred on the class prejudices of middle-class England. The lower class is represented by characters such as Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol (Falstaff's followers), and the upper class is represented by Sir John Falstaff and Master Fenton. The first recorded usage of the word 'chav' is used in Act 2, Scene 5 when describing Sir John Falstaff. Shakespeare uses both Latin and misused English to represent the attitudes and differences of the people of this era. Much of the comedic effect of the play is derived from misunderstandings between characters.
Another prominent Elizabethan theme that runs through the play is the idea of the cuckold. Elizabethans found the idea of a woman cheating on her husband absolutely hilarious and seem to have assumed that if a man was married then his wife was cheating on him. Because a cuckolded husband was said to "wear horns", any reference, no matter how oblique, to horns or a horned animal (for example, the "buck" basket where Falstaff finds himself) probably instilled great hilarity among the audience.
Read more about this topic: The Merry Wives Of Windsor
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)