"Gentleness" and Social Class in The Merry Wives of Windsor

First performed almost certainly on a date in the last two or three years of the sixteenth century, The Merry Wives of Windsor in its Folio text is remarkable, among other things, for the frequency with which forms of the word gentle appear, mainly in the singular and plural compounds of gentleman and gentlewoman. All told they appear thirty-seven times. This frequency is even more singular when one considers that this comedy is often cited as the playwright's middle-class drama, in which members of the aristocracy are least apparent. One suspects that the play may be partly concerned with describing, perhaps defining, authentic gentleness. That this possibility should have preoccupied Shakespeare at the end of the sixteenth century is not surprising, once one remarks the relatively recent elevation of Shakespeare's father in 1596 to the ranks of armigerous gentry. Taking up and considering the senses in which forms of the word gentle, notably gentleman, occur in The Merry Wives comprises the substance of this essay, with the result that the traits and figures of unconventional Shakespearean gentleness emerge from the analysis. On 20 October 1596, William Dethick, Garter Principal King-of Arms, granted John Shakespeare's application for armigerous status, which included a coat of arms showing a falcon supposedly shaking a spear, the motto Non sanz droict (Not without right) and gentleman status for himself and—after his death (in 1601)—his playwright son.1 Apparently Johns son William commissioned this particular heraldic device and paid the considerable expenses—about one hundred pounds—involved in ac quiring armigerous status.2 After 1601, William regularly signed himself "gentleman," even though in 1602 Ralph Brooke, York Herald, "prepared charges against Dethick and [William] Camden for having improperly