Penguin Classics: The Merry Wives of Windsor

We’ll leave a proof, by that which we will do, Wives may be merry, and yet honest too’

In need of money, the fat and foolish Falstaff devises a scheme to seduce two married women and steal their husbands’ wealth. But the wives soon discover his plan and join forces to plot their own revenge. Relentlessly inventive and yet set in a familiar domestic world of everyday English life, this comic humiliation of a ridiculous would-be Romeo is an exuberant and ultimately joyful celebration of the restorative power of laughter.

‘It never yet had reader or spectator, who did not think it too soon at end.’ Samuel Johnson

General Editor Stanley Wells
Edited by G. R. Hibbard
Introduction by Catherine Richardson