The “Lost” Scenes fromThe Merry Wives of Windsor: Robertson Davies’s Shakespearean Hoax

Abstract

This article introduces a hitherto unpublished dramatic script by Robertson Davies: a set of scenes interpolated into the Stratford Festival’s 1956 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Although these pseudo-Elizabethan additions were first performed as an elaborate prank on Stratford audience members and theatre critics, this article argues that Davies’s work represents a major unacknowledged contribution to the performance history of Merry Wives. Working in collaboration with director Michael Langham, Davies drew on the hypotheses of early twentieth-century textual editors to reconstruct a more narratively “complete” version of the play. In its integration of scholarship and playwriting, Davies’s script not only anticipated later scholarly reconstructions of plays such as Pericles and Cardenio, but it also remains a significant untapped resource for theatre directors today.