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| The Yale Shakespeare* |
Shakespeare Monday continues with:
The Merry Wives of Windsor
While my mother preferred the Classics
in music, like Mozart and Haydn, my father had a weakness for
operettas and for the opera buffa. In a tender age I was thus confronted
with the heartily sung: "Als Büblein klein an der Mutterbrust,
heija! bei Regen und Wind ..." [“as a baby boy at my mother's
breast, hi ho! in rain and wind”]. We siblings liked the merry tune,
but as members of a catholic and rather somatophobic society the
Mutterbrust was embarrassing and we rather replaced it with
“Leberwurst” (liver sausage) and pictured us as Kasperl, the
German Punch, who always was fond of sausages.
Anyway, the quoted lines originate from
the opera Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor composed by Otto Nicolai in
the 1840s. Sir John Falstaff sings them in a drinking song in the
second act. The libretto was written by Salomon Hermann Mosenthal,
and it should be "hop heissa" instead of "heija",
but merry 'tis nonetheless.
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| John Norden; Windsor, 1607* |
Tucker Brooke in “Shakespeare of
Stratford” notes:
“In the Merry Wives of Windsor he may consciously have written himself down to the Queen's [Queen Elizabeth I. ] taste.”
whatever that may entail, and:
“... of the Englishmen of his own time he hardly tells us directly anything except that they dress outrageously, outdrink the Dutch, and are stupidly given to staring at strange monsters.”
Available in print among others:
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| Oxford University Press |
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| Cambridge University Press |
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| Palgrave Macmillan |
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| Lambert Schneider Verlag |
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| dtv |
Did you already encounter Shakespeare's Merry Wives? Any memories of former reads or theatre visits or of mental pictures coming up?
I am looking forward to a jolly read in May.
* source, from private shelves: The Yale Shakespeare; Wilbur L. Cross and Tucker Brooke, Editors; originally at Oxford University Press
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