It is my contention that those critics are right who hold that the Q text of the Merry Wives of Windsor is a reported text -- that is, that some stage of its transmission was memorial. I certainly cannot believe that Q represents a Shakespearian first draft and F a Shaskepearian revision, or that Q is a farce interlude adapted from F. Limitations of space prohibit discussion of the possibility that Q is a stenographic report. But the problem of Elisabethan shorthand has been thoroughly investigated by competent scholars, and their findings convince me that there was no contemporary system capable of reproducing the best reported parts of Q from performance in the theatre. Surely, on the basis of the shorthand theory, we should have to assume an extraordinarily low standard of accuracy in the actors of Shakespeare’s company to account for the wholesale memorial corruption also observable in Q. The only reasonable hypothesis seems to me to be that the ‘gross corruption, constant mutilation, meaningless inversion and clumsy transposition’ in Q are solely the result of inept memorial reconstruction. It is my further belief that Q is a report of an original in substantial agreement with the F text. I propose now to adduce fresh evidence pointing to the conclusion that the Q text is indeed memorial; at the same time attempting to show that the theories which represent Q as a first sketch of the F text or a farce interlude adapted from F are untenable. [...]

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Current scholarship on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor mostly focuses on topics surrounding Sir John Falstaff’s presence, mythical allusions, and the questionable date of publication. Although their actions are the driving force of the play, the woman frontrunners, Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, receive little scholarship attention. Anne Page, daughter of Mistress Page and wife of Fenton, also dictates the course of the play by taking control of her betrothal. Yet she remains underappreciated in scholarship. This thesis highlights important characteristics of all three wives of Windsor in addition to justifying Anne Page’s role as a wife of Windsor. Through close readings of the text and analyses of scholarship immediately relevant to these wives and common attributes of women in Renaissance England and Shakespeare plays, I argue these strong, multifaceted women refute stereotypical female roles and undermine patriarchal authority aligning themselves with other idolized outspoken woman characters in Shakespeare plays.

After an extensive survey of available literature in Readers Theatre and Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, the purpose for this thesis was to cut and convert The Merry Wives into the twentieth century idiom from the authorized version found in the 1623 folio.

This dissertation examines how early modern English playwrights employ absence to enrich their representations of the unknown, including witchcraft and the supernatural. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries magical themes were often dramatized through visual and linguistic excess. Whether this excess was manifested through the use of vibrant costumes, farcical caricatures, or exaggerated dialogue, magic was often synonymous with theatricality. Playwrights such as William Rowley, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare, however, challenge stereotypical depictions of magic by contrasting excessive magic with the subtler power of restrained or off-stage magic. Embedded in the fantastical events and elaborate plots of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, absence, whether as an unstaged thing or person or an absent ideology, becomes a crucial element in understanding how playwrights represented and understood occult issues during the early modern period. Further, when gendered feminine, magical absences serve to combat oppressive silences within scripts and provide female subjects with an unimpeded and inherently magical space from which to challenge pre-established patriarchal systems of control. Each chapter in this dissertation, therefore, appraises the magical possibilities that theatrical absences provide to women as a platform from which to develop their narrative voice. Partnered with a complementary discussion of Jonson’s The Masque of Queens and two thematically linked witchcraft cases, my first chapter argues that Mistress Ford uses the complete stage absence of both a witch and a queen in The Merry Wives of Windsor to reform her community and critique her society’s unjust categorization of women. In chapter two, I examine a series of “vanishing acts” in The Birth of Merlin and argue that Rowley’s female characters use their final moments on stage to contextualize their impending absences for audiences as moments of magical defiance rather than defeat in the face of male tyranny. In my final chapter, I look at how magical objects, such as the handkerchief in Shakespeare’s Othello or the belt in Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd resist the absence of their female creators and continue to provide physically absent or dead women with magical agency. By structuring my dissertation on these three specific gradations of absence, I provide a nuanced analysis of the purposes these dramatic omissions serve by focusing on how these shades of absence subtly alter the ways in which we interpret and define early modern magical belief. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)