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Inside Out and Outside In: The River Thames in William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor

ABSTRACT The revels accounts for November 1604 record a performance of “Merry Wiues of Winsor” on the “Sunday” after “Hallamas Day” by his “Matis Plaiers” in the Banqueting House at Whitehall. This paper asks what The Merry Wives of Windsor might have sounded like to an audience at that site. By resituating Merry Wives in that cultural moment as part of an “aqueous” Christmas season it is possible to reexamine the places “inside” and “outside” of the play as well as the sites “inside” and “outside” of the Banqueting House. This paper offers the first sustained reading of the significance of the Thames for Merry Wives. The geographically informed structure of the paper takes the reader on a journey through the site of Whitehall and the working landscape beyond it. It begins by tracing a “thick description” of the palace architecture before exploring performances, journeys, and labour on the river. It puts the play performance in dialogue with the journeys that brought the actors and audience to Whitehall. The paper argues that the increased liquidity of the Folio is especially attuned to the wider geography of this “event” both “inside” and “outside” the palace in 1604. The paper concludes by turning to the threat Falstaff’s wet permeable body poses to the space of the court. Through an examination of the working world of the river it is possible to see how a threatening potentially subversive Thames intruded upon courtly space in 1604.