The Garter Motto in the Merry Wives of Windsor (Critical Essay‪)‬

The famous motto of the centuries-old English Order of the Knights of the Garter--"Honi soit qui mat y pense" ("Shame come to him that euill thinketh")--appears in the midst of the last scene of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, which focuses on the disguised fairies' pinching and burning the would-be adulterer Falstaff. (1) Commentators on the play such as William L. Godshalk, Richard F. Hardin, and Robert S. Miola have claimed that both Falstaff and his adversary, Francis Ford, the husband bent on thwarting supposed adultery, illustrate the truth of the motto. (2) Ford is publicly shamed before townspeople for his malign conviction that his wife Alice sincerely means to cuckold him, while Falstaff, at the hands (and candle flames) of the Fairy Queen's elves, suffers the evil of physical pain for his thinking that Alice Ford's and Margaret Page's thoughts are as faithlessly lecherous as his own lurid imaginings. Surprisingly, claims that Falstaff and Francis Ford illustrate the Garter motto's distributive dynamics amount to no more than passing or brief accounts in articles focused on other topics. (3) No one in an essay exclusively devoted to the subject has shown the relevance of the motto's thought for other characters' words and deeds, for--in other words--the significance of the play taken as a whole. This is what I propose to do in the following pages. Applying alternative translations of the Garter motto current in Shakespeare's time to the verbal and physical behavior of his characters in The Merry Wives of Windsor reveals the characters' individual mixtures of traits as no other touchstone can. This is especially true with respect to their pronouncements about human responsibility for knowing or committing evil. The application of alternative Elizabethan translations of the motto in order to sift the play's characters ultimately yields an idea of "knightly" behavior in The Merry Wives of Windsor that, while located in knighthood and celebrated there, can be approximated on occasion by nonknights. Because I am arguing that the Garter motto has a more extensive application in The Merry Wives of Windsor than those previously described, (4) a survey of different Elizabethan ways of translating--or reading--it seems in order. But first, a brief setting of context, is desirable. In the last scene of the play. Mistress Quickly, disguised as the Fairy Queen, tells the children dressed as fairies who are about to pinch and burn the erring knight Falstaff, to