Summary
At the Garter Inn, Falstaff agrees to see Mistress Ford again. Everyone prepares for the evening. Page tells Anne to wear green so that Slender can find her in the crowd, but Mistress Page tells her to wear white so Caius can find her. That evening, Falstaff goes to Herne's oak tree dressed as Horne with large horns on his head. He thinks out loud about the history of men seducing women in animal disguises, referring to the Greek gods. When Mistress Page and Mistress Ford appear, he is delighted to see them. When they hear a noise, however, the two women run away.
The goblins and fairies appear, along with the fairy queen (Mistress Quickly). They taunt Falstaff, who has fallen to the ground, and decide after burning him with their flames that he is corrupt. The children dressed as fairies and goblins circle Falstaff and pinch him.
Meanwhile, Caius leaves with a boy dressed in green and Slender runs off with a boy dressed in white. Anne and Fenton run away together. Soon all the children leave and Falstaff attempts to escape. He is met by Page, Ford, and their wives. They reveal the truth to Falstaff, and Ford tells Falstaff that he was Brooke all along and that he plans to take Falstaff's horses in exchange for the money he paid him as Brooke. Evans encourages Falstaff to transform and to serve God instead of his own desires. Falstaff realizes he has been made a fool of, and consents to be taken back to Windsor to pay back his debts.
Page invites everyone, including Falstaff, to Anne's wedding celebration that evening. Both Caius and Slender arrive, disgruntled to discover that they each married a boy. Soon Anne and Fenton arrive and reveal that they are married. Mistress Page and Page are initially upset by the news, but Fenton explains to them that he and Anne are truly in love. They accept Fenton into their family. Falstaff is pleased that he was not the only one embarrassed that evening, and he jokes with Ford that Brooke will get to seduce Mistress Ford after all.
Analysis
The ending of the play features the final humiliation of Falstaff, which is also a type of moral reckoning. When Falstaff is deceived into thinking that he is being punished for his corrupt behavior, he cowers in the face of the (fake) fairies, goblins, and Fairy Queen. For early modern audiences, this would have been an entirely new version of the Falstaff that inspired the play. No longer a boastful knight bent on interfering in the lives of the English middle class for his own entertainment, Falstaff becomes figuratively "tamed" by the same middle-class people whose way of life he threatens to upend. Critics often point to this transformation of Falstaff as one of the central reasons why The Merry Wives of Windsor was relatively unsuccessful as a performance (indeed, one of the only people to ever praise the play at the time it was being performed was Queen Elizabeth I). As audiences had grown fond of the Falstaff who accompanied Prince Hal in his schemes of the Henriad, his penitential state at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor was likely unsettling: the ending of the play not only transforms a relatively one-dimensional character into a more complex version of the original, but also suggests a disappointing lack of continuity between Shakespeare's histories and his comedies, even when they purport to be connected.
What is notable about the conclusion of The Merry Wives of Windsor is that the play does not end with the public humiliation of Falstaff. On the contrary, plenty of other characters are embarrassed in this final act, including Caius and Slender for their mistaken marriages and the Pages for their lack of knowledge about Anne's marriage to Fenton. In fact, over the course of the play, few characters emerge free of public humiliation at all. It is perhaps this shared sense of humiliation that leads to the surprisingly convivial conclusion in which Page invites Falstaff to Anne's marriage celebration and Falstaff and Ford jest about Ford's disguise as Brooke. Of course, The Merry Wives of Windsor is a comedy, so a happy ending is expected. But the play goes one step further to reinstate the same sense of camaraderie that existed at the beginning of the play, before Falstaff set his plan in motion. As such, the play's conclusion advocates for Falstaff's redemption while simultaneously returning stability to a mostly middle-class Windsor after significant aristocratic disruption.
