Excerpt from The Problem of 'the Merry Wives of Windsor' That the dramatist who had presented the elderly Mistress Quickly and the fat old Falstaff should repro duce them m a different environment is abstraetly con ceivable. Very well, too, might he take the widow (or wife) back to her youth. But why should he make Mistress Quickly relatively young and leave Falstaff old? If the plot involved putting her in love, it would be intelligible, but no such thing is broached; and we have a relatively inefieetive Quickly faced by a rela tively unsuccessful Falstaff. Some Shakespearean touches, indeed, we find in both; and thereby hangs our solution; but in the main Mistress Quickly in the Wives is as unsatisfying as Falstaff. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.