Understanding Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor by Robert A. Albano - HTML preview

1957, Northrop Frye: "In The Merry Wives there is an elaborate ritual of the defeat of winter known to folklorists as 'carrying out Death,' of which Falstaff is the victim; and Falstaff must have felt that, after being thrown into the water, dressed up as a witch and beaten out of a house with curses, and finally supplied with a beast's head and singed with candles, he had done about all that could reasonably be asked of any fertility spirit" (Frye, Anatomy 183).

1958, EMW Tillyard: "Here let me interpose the commonplace that Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor is no longer the picaresque adventurer with whom one sympathizes over a great part of the action; adding that it is grossly unfair to Shakespeare to suggest that in any way he ought to be. I conjecture that Shakespeare would simply not have begun to understand the notion that he was obliged to keep Falstaff consistent. … But the idea of Falstaff as a creation to which he must at all costs be loyal was outside his ken. The sacrosanctity of Falstaff was a late development, hardly begun in Dryden's day. … The Merry Wives is a better play than is usually allowed: an excellent, if lightly felt and unsubtle, social      comedy;      less      complicated      and      more conventional than any other of Shakespeare's plays but beautifully contrived within its limits" (Tillyard 10-11).