Women Who Laugh, Men Who Stumble

William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor in the Debate of the Querelle des femmes

Abstract

This article considers Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor as an intervention situated within the broad discursive framework of the Querelle des femmes, understood not only as an erudite debate but also as a transnational cultural formation that, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, disputed the nature, capabilities, and public status of women. The study first reconstructs the historical and ideological coordinates of the debate (from Christine de Pizan to the seventeenth-century English polemicists) to show how, in the English context (marked by the reign of Elizabeth I, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of the printing press), the dispute articulated misogynistic positions, female defenses, and a popular repertoire of songs, jokes, and theatrical practices where gender representations were also negotiated.

Within this framework, the reading of the comedy revalues its political density by centering Mistress Ford and Mistress Page, whose actions destabilize the imaginaries of female moral fragility, invert the logics of masculine desire, and reconfigure the domestic space as an arena for agency. The play deploys a system of inversions (economic, discursive, and corporeal) that ridicules the patriarchal authority embodied by Falstaff and Ford, and resignifies female shrewdness as a civic virtue rather than a moral threat. Thus, Shakespeare attempts an indirect critique of the misogynistic mechanisms of his time through a comic dramaturgy that recognizes the collective intelligence of women.