[Transcriber’s Note: These texts of _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ are from Volume I of the nine-volume 1863 Cambridge edition of Shakespeare. The Preface (e-text 23041) and the other plays from this volume are each available as separate e-texts. General Notes are in their original location at the end of the play. Text-critical notes are grouped at the end of each Scene. All line numbers are from the original text; line breaks in dialogue--including prose passages--are unchanged. Brackets are also unchanged; to avoid ambiguity, footnotes and linenotes are given without added brackets. In the notes, numerals printed as subscripts are shown inline as F1, F2, Q1.... Texts cited in the Notes are listed at the end of the e-text.] THE WORKS of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Edited by WILLIAM GEORGE CLARK, M.A. Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, and Public Orator in the University of Cambridge; and JOHN GLOVER, M.A. Librarian Of Trinity College, Cambridge. _VOLUME I._ Cambridge and London: MACMILLAN AND CO. 1863. THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR. Besides the copies of the _Merry Wives of Windsor_ appearing in the folios and modern editions, a quarto, Q3, has been collated in these Notes, of which the following is the title: The | Merry Wives | of Windsor. | with the humours of Sir _John Falstaffe_, | as also, The swaggering Vaine of Ancient | _Pistoll_, and Corporall _Nym_. |WRITTEN BY _William Shake-speare_. | Newly corrected. | LONDON: | printed by _T. H._ for _R. Meighen_ and are to be sold | at his Shop, next to the Middle-Temple Gate, and in | S. _Dunstan’s_ Church-yard in _Fleet Street_. | 1630. Q1 and Q2 are editions of an early sketch of the same play. The variations between the text of these quartos and the received text are so great that collation cannot be attempted. The text printed at the end of the play is taken _literatim_ from Q1, the edition of 1602, of which a copy is preserved among Capell’s SHAKESPEARIANA, and this text is collated _verbatim_ with Q2, the second quarto printed in 1619. Q1 was reprinted in 1842 for the Shakespeare Society by Mr J. O. Halliwell. This text, which differs in one or two places from Capell’s Q1, has also been collated. Q2 is given among TWENTY OF THE PLAYS OF SHAKESPEARE, edited by Steevens. Their titles are as follows: