During the Second World War, the British state invested in theatre for the first time through two main organizations: the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) and the Entertainments National Services Association (ENSA). Chapter 5 argues that official records and publications linked to CEMA and ENSA tend to stress the ‘apolitical’ currency of Shakespeare – that performances symbolize the pre-war cultural heritage that was under attack in this war against fascism – and favour plays that do not have, in subject matter, direct wartime application, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor. This emphasis exists, however, in tension with the aims of individual production agents associated with CEMA and ENSA, such as Sybil Thorndike and Lewis Casson from the Old Vic. Shakespeare could be, for example, mobilized as explicitly anti-Nazi, socialist, or pacifist, sometimes within the same production. By examining productions that toured to regional towns and industrial cities across Britain and Europe, this chapter draws attention to the community-building impact and soft power of live theatre and breaks down the distinction between ‘apolitical’ and ‘political’ Shakespeare, suggesting that almost any production during this period of total war was a distinctly ‘political’ act.

This chapter explores the dramatic performance of libel. Aggrieved amateur playmakers across England made canny use of costume, props, meter, and other theatrical technologies to disseminate libels. Drawing from the Star Chamber records, the first section surveys the varieties of media and performance genres employed by libelers, including festive games, pageants, songs, and shows; street theater; and professional playing. Examples such as the Wells Shows of 1607, “The Death of the Lord of Kyme” in 1601, and even Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor illustrate the thorough hybridity of libelous performance. The rest of the chapter is devoted to two major case studies: the Kendal Stage Play of 1621 and the university play Club Law (1599–1600). These are prime examples of activist theater: they aimed not just to entertain their audiences but also to mobilize them, defame them, or otherwise incite them to action. Situated in their respective local contexts – the struggle over tenant right in Kendal and town–gown conflict in Cambridge – the surviving traces of these plays document the circulation of communal feelings that made libelous performance such a potent medium for bad publicity.

Editors and critics have struggled to place The Merry Wives of Windsor within the framework of Shakespeare’s chronicle history plays, and it is often said that the Falstaff of Merry Wives is a different character from that of the histories. Merry Wives can be seen as part of a multiverse, of incompatible timelines in which characters are both entirely familiar and somehow altered. In the multiverse of Merry Wives, both public and private histories are apparently erased. While the history plays are burdened by almost pathological remembrance and rumination, the world of Merry Wives shows the advantages of amnesia.