Globe Education Online

L-R: Mistress Ford [Sarah Woodward[], Falstaff [Christopher Benjamin] and Mistress Page [Serena Evans]. Photo: John Tramper

directed by Christopher Luscombe

The fat knight Sir John Falstaff imagines that Mistress Ford and Mistress Page are both taken with him and so, attracted as much by their husbands’ money as their personal charms, he decides to woo them both. But the women are up to the old lecher’s tricks and turn the tables on him with a series of humiliating assignations, midnight terrors and a very damp, extremely smelly laundry basket. Gutsy, colloquial and bustling with vivid characters, The Merry Wives of Windsor is a brilliantly constructed farce and the only comedy Shakespeare set in his native land. It is also the ancestor of English bourgeois comedy and gave birth to a tradition that reaches down to the modern TV sitcom. The production made merry with the relationship between the life of middle-class Elizabethan England and the late medieval period in which the play is set.

Creative Team

Director: Christopher Luscombe
Designer: Janet Bird
Composer: Nigel Hess
Choreographer: Jenny Arnold  

Cast

Nathan Amzi - Simple
Gareth Armstrong - Evans
William Belchambers - Slender
Christopher Benjamin - Falstaff
Philip Bird - Dr Caius
Serena Evans - Mistress Page
Peter Gale - Shallow
Michael Garner - Page
Gregory Gudgeon - Nym
Andrew Havill - Ford
Edward Macliam - Fenton
Ellie Piercy - Anne Page
Timothy Speyer - Rugby
Jonty Stephens - Host
Sue Wallace - Mistress Quickly
Paul Woodson - Pistol
Sarah Woodward - Mistress Ford
Otto Farrant and Harry Manton - Robin  

Discover the Play

• Discover the actors' experiences making the production in Adopt An Actor:

- Ellie Piercy as Anne Page
- Gareth Armstrong as Evans

• Myths of Honour: Gwilym Jones discusses the significance of the play's Windsor setting.

The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed in 2008, as part of the Totus Mundus Season.