SOURCE: "The Ingenious Compliment: A Consideration of Some Devices and Episodes in The Merry Wives of Windsor" in Studies in Medieval, Renaissance, American Literature; a Festschrift, Texas Christian University Press, 1971, pp. 64-72.

In the following essay, Lewis argues that The Merry Wives of Windsor was meant to pay tribute to the Queen's noblemen and their chivalric code of love and honor by satirizing those who falsely claim to be chivalrous.

When an Elizabethan playwright had the task of providing a script to be presented before an audience of noblemen who were being celebrated for their chivalric virtues, tradition and occasion dictated the conventional themes of love and honor. The Merry Wives of Windsor was William Shakespeare's unconventional solution—a play satirizing not love and honor but ridiculous pretenders to love and honor.

Attempting to assign a definite date to the play, scholars have tried to attach the first...