Word: playing
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Many critics have been quick to look down their pedantic noses at Shakespeare's Merry Wives. They decry its lack of psychologic or philosophic depth; they bemoan its coarse language; they complain that almost none of it is in verse. Indeed the play is prose, but not prosaic. And the critics blame Shakespeare for not producing what he never had the slightest intention of producing. There is evidence that Queen Elizabeth I was so delighted with the character of Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV that she commanded the writing of a play about Falstaff in love...
Merry Wives is not tragedy, nor tragicomedy. It is not even comedy; it is farce pure and simple (also impure and not-so-simple). And it is a most significant item in the canon, through being the only play the Bard ever wrote entirely about the ordinary citizenry of his own day and locale. Actually, it is a transferral to the stage of the comic medieval French verse-tale genre known as the fabliau. The fabliaux and the play depict contemporary society and diction, delight in practical jokes, revel in adultery and cuckoldry, and indulge in frank and often obscene...
Here the dramatist, whether in two weeks or not turned out a masterful and hilarious cock-and-ball story. Like the fabliaux, the play is "mosts pour la gent faire rire"; it embodies the English version of l'esprit gaulois. Merry Wives certainly joins the company of the other classic representatives of the fabliau tradition--Boccaccio's Decameron, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Balzac's Contes Drolatiques. So cease, ye carpers...
...current directors took the play at farce value, and acted accordingly. They have come up with a show that is fast, funny, and fluid (in more senses than one). There is not one dull moment. And there is not one inferior performance: every player is at least up to par, and most of them far above it. Praise could be distributed simply by listing the entire roster of performers...
...reason for the general excellence probably lies in the fact that the text does not require the players to convey the music of poetic lines--an area in which the company as a whole is weak. This is not to say that the writing in the play lacks interest; far from it. The text is a rich mine of various kinds of lower-class Elizabethan speech, including laughable treatments of French and Welsh dialects. It is filled with captivating puns, doubles ententes, and novel images; and it constitutes a veritable dictionary of original invectives, insults, and expletives...