SOURCE: Clark, Sandra. “‘Wives may be merry and yet honest too’: Women and Wit in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Some Other Plays.” In “Fanned and Winnowed Opinions”: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, edited by John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton, pp. 249-67. London, England: Methuen, 1987.

In the following essay, Clark studies the literary tradition of women's wit, particularly in The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I should like to examine the treatment in a few plays, mainly by Shakespeare, of a kind of alternative wit in women. Wit in drama, at least of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, tends to be thought of in terms of qualities exhibited in dialogue, like quickness of speech, eloquence, skill in the arts of rhetoric; such qualities, though found in women, are more commonly the prerogative of men, especially if combined with powers of argument and strength of...