Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor

Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor was first printed in 1602 and reprinted in 1619, before it appeared in 1623 in a version that was nearly twice as long. (A surviving copy of the second quarto is held in the Stanley J. Kahrl Renaissance and Restoration Drama Collection of the Ohio State library.) Though the play has been a perennial favorite with audiences throughout the intervening centuries, these performances have always been based on the Folio version of the play. This naturalization of the Folio as the “complete” or “authentic” version of Merry Wives has caused critics to make specious and often inaccurate claims about the provenance of Shakespeare’s plays in print and the performability of the earlier text onstage. Characterized as the baddest of Shakespeare’s so-called “bad quartos,” the 1602 play text has endured little from scholarship but scorn. The Lord Denney's Players' student-driven production in April 2018 redeemed Q1’s crossed-fortune by giving it an opportunity to stretch its legs upon the boards.
And make no mistake, this production was not only student-driven, but student flown, ridden, piloted and steered. Alongside their work learning lines, practicing choreography, designing costumes, sets, sound, makeup and music, undergraduate students collaborated on promotional material, organized ticket sales and commissioned poster artwork, constructed props and managed spreadsheets. They did all this while simultaneously completing the written work of an upper-level undergraduate course in Shakespeare specializing in thorny textual problems and the eccentricities of early modern book publication, allowing the laboratory space of the theatre to inform their reading of primary and secondary material. As a result of their long and deep investigation, these students’ knowledge of the Q1 text of the play surpasses that of all but a handful of Shakespeare scholars, many of whom traveled many miles in order to come see the production and participate in a conference on this text of the play.
For more information, visit our website: www.lorddenneysplayers.com/productions/merry-wives-of-windsor