SOURCE: "Falstaff s False Staff: 'Jonsonian' Asexuality in The Merry Wives of Windsor" in Comparative Drama, Vol. 26, No. 3, Fall, 1992, pp. 254-70.

In this excerpt, Tiffany examines the language in The Merry Wives of Windsor, maintaining that it is characteristic of "humors comedy" in its lack of creativity and its inability to transform or renew.

The Folger Shakespeare Theater's use of a female actor as Falstaff in its 1990 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, besides its witty reversal of the Elizabethan convention of all-male casting, had this to recommend it: the "distaff Falstaff, an embodiment of sexlessness, confronted audiences with the curious absence of regenerative possibility which distinguishes Merry Wives from "Shakespearean" romantic comedy. Unlike, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream, which creates a world capable of transformation and renewal by means of a sexual energy that dominates language and fuels action, The Merry Wives of Windsor presents...