SOURCE: "Romantic Comedies," in A Kind of Wild Justice: Revenge in Shakespeare's Comedies, University of Delaware Press, 1987, pp. 57-125.

In this excerpt, Anderson studies the device of comic revenge in The Merry Wives of Windsor, examining the numerous revenge plots in the play and exploring the motivations behind them.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is the changeling of Shakespeare's comedies. Not only is the play unloved by critics, it is sometimes not even acknowledged.¹³ One of the few critics to devote an entire book to the play concludes that Shakespeare merely adapted an old play, "a play of bourgeois life based on some Italian story," of which the hero was Sir John Oldcastle; that he made a botch even of mere adaptation: "the time-system of the Folio remains incurably irrational"; and that, finally, "it is not a play in which Shakespeare seems to have taken much pride or...