‘She-Mercury’: Broadening Female Neighbourly Networks in The Merry Wives of Windsor

Recent critical attention to The Merry Wives of Windsor has emphasised the feminist impulse of the play, stressing the way it celebrates female gossip networks. Important as they are, those studies, however, privilege the gossip network between the two prosperous, middling-sorts wives of the title, in the process marginalising the many working women the play depicts as members of a wider female neighbourly network and occluding the crucial roles they play in the success of the wives' plots. When critics do attempt to attend to a wider female network, they often link the wives to the (off-stage) queen, thus further isolating them from their immediate neighbourly interactions. This article redresses this imbalance by showing that female neighbourly networks in the play, as they were in early modern culture, are much broader and socially diverse than has hitherto been acknowledged. Challenging dominant critical readings of Mistress Quickly as a garrulous, busybody, and drawing on the findings of social historians' recent research into the lived experiences of early modern female servants, I argue that she is positioned in the play as a social actor, an active participant in her neighbourhood, an ingenious manipulator, and a significant member of the local female networks.