The Merry Wives of Windsor

Sir John Falstaff, fat, broke, and supremely sure of himself, turns up in Windsor and decides to mend his finances by wooing two well-off married women at once. He sends them identical love letters, never guessing that Mistresses Ford and Page are close friends who compare notes and set about teaching him a lesson. What follows is a run of ever more humiliating traps, including a memorable escape hidden in a basket of dirty laundry. A second thread follows young Anne Page and the three suitors angling for her hand. Said to have been written because Queen Elizabeth wanted to see Falstaff in love, this is Shakespeare’s most middle-class comedy, set among ordinary English townsfolk rather than kings and courts. Download it free as a PDF or EPUB.