"The Merry Wives of Windsor" presents a different action, and exhibits Falstaff in another position, and under another point of view. He is, indeed, the same man; it would be impossible to mistake him; but he has grown older, and plunged deeper into his material tastes, and is solely occupied in satisfying the wants of his gluttony. Doll Tear-Sheet, at least, still abused his imagination, for with her he thought himself a libertine; but here he has no such thought; he is anxious to make the insolence of his gallantries serve to supply him with money; and his vanity still deceives him with regard to the means of obtaining this money. Elizabeth, it is said, had desired Shakspeare to describe Falstaff in love; but Shakspeare, who was better acquainted with the personages of his own conception, felt that this kind of ridiculousness was not suited to such a character, and that it was necessary to punish Falstaff in a more sensitive point. Even his vanity would not be sufficient for this purpose; for Falstaff could derive advantage from every disgrace in which he was involved; and he had now reached such a point as no longer even to seek to dissemble his shame. The liveliness with which he describes to Mr. Brook his sufferings in the basket of dirty linen is no longer the vivacity of Falstaff relating his exploits against the robbers of Gadshill, and afterward getting out of the scrape so pleasantly when his falsehood is brought home to him. The necessity for boasting of himself is no longer one of his chief necessities; he wants money, money above all things, and he will be suitably chastised only by inconveniences as real as the advantages which he promises himself. Thus the buck-basket and the blows of Mr. Ford are perfectly adapted to the kind of pretensions which draw upon Falstaff such a correction; but although such an adventure may, without any difficulty, be adapted to the Falstaff of "Henry IV.," it applies to him in another part of his life and character; and if it were introduced between the two parts of the action which is continued in the two parts of "Henry IV.," it would chill the imagination of the spectator to such a degree as entirely to destroy the effect of the second part.
Although this reason may appear sufficient, we might adduce many others in justification of Johnson's opinion. They must not, however, be sought for in chronology. It would be an impracticable work to endeavor to harmonize the different chronological data which Shakspeare is pleased to establish, often in the same piece; and it is as impossible to find, chronologically, the place of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" between "Henry IV." and "Henry V.," as between the two parts of "Henry IV." But, adopting this last supposition, the interview between Shallow and Falstaff in the Second Part of "Henry IV.," the pleasure which Shallow feels at seeing Falstaff again, after so long a separation, and the respect which he professes for him, and which he carries so far as to lend him a thousand pounds, become shocking improbabilities; for, after the comedy of "The Merry Wives of Windsor," Shallow can not be caught by Falstaff. Nym, whom we find in "Henry V." is not numbered among Shakspeare's followers in the Second Part of "Henry IV." With either supposition, it would be somewhat difficult to account for the personage Quickly, if we did not suppose that it referred to another Quickly—a name which Shakspeare found it convenient to render common to all procuresses. The Quickly of "Henry IV." is married, and her name is therefore not that of a girl; but the Quickly of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" is not married.
After all, it would be superfluous to seek to establish in a very accurate manner the historical order of these three dramas; Shakspeare himself did not bestow a thought upon the matter. We may, however, believe that, from the uncertainty in which he has left the whole affair, he was at least desirous that it should not be altogether impossible to make "The Merry Wives of Windsor" the continuation of "Henry IV." Hurried, as it would appear, by the orders of Elizabeth, he at first produced only a kind of sketch of this comedy, which was nevertheless acted for a considerable period, as we find it printed in the first editions of his works; and it was not until several years afterward that he arranged it in the form in which we now possess it. In this early play, Falstaff, at the moment when he is in the forest, alarmed by the noises which he hears on every side, inquires if it is not "the mad Prince of Wales stealing his father's deer." This supposition is suppressed in the revised copy of the comedy, in which the poet apparently wished to endeavor to indicate a rather more probable order of facts. In the piece as we now possess it, Page reproaches Fenton with "having been of the company" of the Prince of Wales and of Poins. At all events, he no longer belongs to it; and we may suppose that the name of "wild prince" was still retained to show what the Prince of Wales had been, and what Henry V. no longer was. However this may be, although "The Merry Wives of Windsor" may present a less exalted kind of comicality than the First Part of "Henry IV.," it is, nevertheless, one of the most diverting productions of that gayety of mind which Shakspeare has displayed in several of his comedies.
A number of novels may contest the honor of having furnished Shakspeare with the substance of the adventure upon which he has based the plot of the "Merry Wives of Windsor." It was probably from the same sources that Molière borrowed the idea of his "Ecole des Femmes." Shakspeare's own invention consists in having made the same intrigue serve to punish both the jealous husband and the insolent lover. He has thus imparted to the drama, with the exception of the license of a few expressions, a much more moral tone than that of the novels from which he may have derived his subject, and in which the husband always ends by being duped, while the lover is made happy.
This comedy appears to have been composed in 1601.