ABSTRACT
In The Merry Wives of Windsor , Sir John Falstaff is presented as compulsively – or strategically, or both – quoting from numerous songs and ballads. A closer examination of the songs can determine exactly how the quotations serve not only to help bolster Falstaff’s self-presentation (and self-image) as lover, but also to connect the Windsor version of Falstaff with the more elegiac version of the character found in Henry IV, Part Two . Elegy is a mode that has dominated many subsequent productions of the Falstaff plays and their adaptations. As Adrian Kiernander has observed, “it is impossible for the [Falstaff] plays not to contaminate each other” (Kiernander 2015: 198). The plays have effectively contaminated one another from the time of their first stagings and that contamination is especially inflected by both music and by nostalgia. Those processes of contamination – or, more benignly, cross-fertilization – can be seen at work across a wide range of musical, stage, and screen realizations and adaptations.
