““Wives may be merry and yet honest too.” This statement from Mistress Page in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (4.2.100) is often read as thematically summative, asserting the propriety of the wives who are suspect because they use their merriness to manipulate interpersonal relations in the fictionalized community of Windsor. Unlike other plays by Shakespeare, this one announces a governing emotive in its title, and it suggests that the characters of the wives are types, and their positive emotion—merriness, or mirth—defines their condition as wives as well as their belonging to Windsor (their “Windsorness,” if you will). Drawing upon the insights of contemporary affect theory, and in particular the work of Sara Ahmed on the cultural politics of emotion, I explore merriness as a constitutive emotion in this Renaissance play. I then connect the historical vision of communal merriness that the play offers to contemporary imaginings of community that are shaping Western subjects through more modern positive emotives in the discourses surrounding “wellbeing.” “Merriness” survives mainly in everyday modern English usage only in the festive exhortations to have a “Merry Christmas,” or “Eat, Drink and Be Merry!” “Wellbeing,” however, which was first used in English right before Shakespeare’s lifetime (1561 in Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s The Courtier, according to the OED), has become the most prominent emotional construct shaping the health of communities and the individuals within them in a number of Western cultures of the present. Comparing “merriness” to “wellbeing” offers a way of framing present conditions and modes of sociality, and it reveals how bodies are defined in relation to other bodies through a politics of positive affective terms.”

Cora Fox is associate professor of English and interim director of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University, where she has led an initiative to develop research capacity in health humanities since 2013. She is the author of Ovid and the Politics of Emotion in Elizabethan England (Palgrave, 2009) and co-edited, with Barbara Weiden Boyd, the MLA Approaches to Teaching the Works of Ovid and the Ovidian Tradition (2010). Her current work focuses on the histories of positive emotions and well-being, as well as the role of fictional and cultural narratives in shaping emotion. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled Emotive Intertextuality: Reading Happiness Through Shakespeare.

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