_The Merry Wives of Windsor_ is a brilliant and delightful
comedy, quite worthy of its great author (though not in his most
exalted mood), who probably wrote it because his mind was naturally
impelled to write it, and no doubt laboured over it exactly as he did
over his other writings: for we know, upon the testimony of Ben Jonson,
who personally knew him and was acquainted with his custom as a writer,
that he was not content with the first draught of anything, but wrote it
a second time, and a third time, before he became satisfied with it. Dr.
Johnson, who had studied Shakespeare as carefully as any man ever
studied him, speaking of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_, says that "its
general power--that power by which all works of genius should finally be
tried--is such that perhaps it never yet had reader or spectator who did
not think it too soon at an end." A comedy that deserves such praise as
this--which assuredly is not misplaced--need not be dismissed as a
pot-boiler.

Knight's conjecture that _The Merry Wives_ was written before the
histories were written is a plausible conjecture, and perhaps worthy of
some consideration. It is not easy to believe that Shakespeare, after he
had created Falstaff and thoroughly drawn him, was capable of lessening
the character and making it almost despicable with paltriness--as
certainly it becomes in _The Merry Wives_. That is not the natural way
of an artistic mind. But it is easier to credit the idea that the
Falstaff of _The Merry Wives_ was the first study of the character,
although not first shown, which subsequently expanded into the
magnificent humorous creation of the histories. Falstaff in the comedy
is a fat man with absurd amorous propensities, who is befooled,
victimised, and made a laughing-stock by a couple of frolicsome women,
who are so much amused by his preposterous folly that they scarcely
bestow the serious consideration of contempt and scorn upon his
sensuality and insolence. No creature was ever set in a more ludicrous
light or made more contemptible,--in a kindly, good-humoured way. The
hysterical note of offended virtue is never sounded, nor is anywhere
seen the averted face of shocked propriety. The two wives are bent on a
frolic, and they will merrily punish this presumptuous sensualist--this
silly, conceited, gross fellow, "old, cold, withered, and of intolerable
entrails." If we knew no more of Falstaff than the comedy tells us of
him we should by no means