Our next production will be Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor to be performed in Cirencester next summer as an open-air production from Wednesday 28 to Saturday 31 July 2027 at the Royal Agricultural University.
About The Merry Wives of Windsor
The Merry Wives of Windsor focuses on the antics of the profligate and impecunious Sir John Falstaff who seeks to seduce both the wealthy Mistress Meg Ford and Mistress Alice Page simultaneously in an attempt to solve his financial crisis and to fund his excessive drinking habit.
This hilarious Shakespearian masterpiece proves that women are not so easily duped by the aristocracy. Alice Ford also resolved to teach her rather jealous husband a lesson he will never forget while her daughter Anne, herself a much-sought-after wealthy heiress, ingeniously asserts her right to choose a husband for herself.
The work was first performed in 1602 in the reign of Elizabeth I who was so intrigued by the character of Falstaff, who had previously appeared in Henry IV and Henry V, that she requested Shakespeare to write a play in which Sir John falls in love. The Merry Wives of Windsor was the bard’s compromise for fulfilling the monarch’s request yet expressing his own comedic genius.