In short a debased sexuality, which for Shakespeare is a major thematic concern, was raised, unnecessarily I think, to a dominant position. Doubtless it is no accident that Troilus and Cressida describe their love largely in terms of food imagery, that Thirsites condemns, triumphantly, wars and lechery. But to single out for so much emphasis this one element does harm, I think, by narrowing Shakespeare's intents.

Enough of Thirsites. It was perhaps fitting that this play was performed in the grimy heart of London, while The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Winter's Tale were performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company's real home in its theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. There the lawns, though trampled, are green.

The theatre itself is not beautiful. It is a large red brick building, built in 1932 with funds raised largely in America. It hugs the Avon about a half mile from Trinity Church where Shakespeare is buried. Inside, its floors are noticeably worn down in the doorways, which is not surprising considering that it attracts, together with the Aldwych, well over a million people a year.

I arrived in Stratford from Oxford on a Monday morning and was told by the testy, haggard girl at the ticket window that no seats were available for the next week at least. Hence my presence that evening in the ragged, boundlessly hopeful line of ticket vultures which forms every evening to snatch up any reserved tickets which are not claimed. That night it was not hard to get one.

The Merry Wives of Windsor is a play which, though it presents a flat and calcified Falstaff, and though on the page it may drag, nevertheless can, and did when I saw it, overflow with life. It is a farce with typically Shakepearian comic elements. For the most part everyone stays the same, there is no real hero, and the humor consists of the devices which were old hat to Aristophanes. But the pasteboard hero (Fenton) does get his girl (Anne Page), and Ford learns that he has been unreasonably, unnaturally jealous, and calms down.

Karl Marx said of the play, "In the first act alone of The Merry Wives of Windsor there is more life and movement than in all German literature." Few are in a position to disagree.

Dr. Caius is a French physician in the play whose accents, mannerisms and character are constantly ridiculed, and whose energy is one of the play's driving comic forces. He had a habit, selon Terry Hands, the director, of kissing those he presumed to be his friends on both checks. The trouble was that all his friends were Englishmen, or normal height, and he was about 4'10". Hence to reach each check he had to hop, and his helloes and good-byes became increasingly more hilarious sight gags.

Similarly, Ford's consuming jealousy of his wife rendered him totally mechanical, absurd in his stuttering and repetitious rage. When finally it was knocked into him that his wife was indeed true, he changed within from chaos to order, from imbalance to harmony. This was suggested by a correspondent clear change in his behavior; he at once became modest, moderate, and controlled.

Without the energy with which this play was invested it could never have survived for three hours. It has often been noted, that it is very hard to swallow Falstaff's incredible obtuseness. In part we are meant to lay it up to lust; for this he is burnt by candles in the final scene.

But even this lust cannot explain the extent to which he has decayed since Henry IV. Three times he is totally humiliated. It was easy to laugh each time but successively less so, and if it were not for the utter charm which permeated the last scene it would have been difficult to accept it at all. This scene, though perhaps a bit of an addendum, was like Midsummer Night's Dream all over again.

It takes as a starting point the serious theme of purgation, and it is Shakespeare's fault that this is some what out of tune with the rest of the play. On the page it is a simple singing: Faistaff is lying on the ground, the fairies "put the tapers to his fingers, and he starts." Terry Hands amplified it. Falstaff fled up a tree and looked down in horror at the invasion of fairies below him. A torch was set in the tree beneath him, and an ensuing, very loud explosion threw him from the tree ten feet to the ground. This gave the final scene both an additional element of farce, and a mystery which partially vindicated the absurdity of Falstaff's last humiliation.

Puck's words at the end of A Midsummer Nights' Dream were recalled:

Now the wasted brands do glow! Whilst the screech owl, screeching loud,!

Puts the wretch that lies in woe! In remembrance of a shroud.

The two wives were flawless in their middle-class Englishness; Anne Page was charming, and the Host was properly gregarious and effusive.