'I am made an ass': Falstaff and the Scatology of Windsor's Polity

This project begins with a familiar linguistic question: did early modern English locution allow for a pun between the words ass and arse? The OED says no; it points to an 1860 text as the first recorded instance of the pun, and it provides no etymological connection between the words.1 A number of critics of early English literature, drama in particular, sense a pun nonetheless. For example, Gail Kern Paster, discerning a comic "scatological imperative" in A Midsummer Night's Dream footnotes the OED's claim that a "pun on bottom /ass ... is not present in Elizabethan locution," yet she proceeds to argue for a "somatic troping on Bottom's name" by tracing the logic of purgation that structures the ass-headed Bottom's love affair with Titania.2 Likewise, in her essay on Shakespeare's use of the ass motif in Midsummer and The Comedy of Errors, Deborah Baker Wyrick allows the pun as a consequence of Renaissance pronunciation; for her, as for Paster, the pun is purely homonymie.3 Perhaps the most emphatic assertion of the pun's presence in Shakespeare belongs to Frankie Rubenstein, who boldly proclaims in her Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance, "Shakespeare never used 'arse'; like his contemporaries, he used 'ass' to pun on the ass that gets beaten with a stick and the arse that gets thumped sexually, the ass that bears a burden and the arse that bears or carries in intercourse."4 Annabel Patterson agrees with Rubinstein's assessment, and she reads the translated Bottom as "a political allegory of status inversion and corporal punishment."5 Finally, Mario DiGangi argues that the pun can be heard outside Shakespearean contexts in the homoerotic relation of masters to asses in seventeenth-century city comedies.6 Taking a cue from this critical consensus that early modern English locution did at least allow for a homonymie pun between ass and arse, I suggest that the pun reverberates within larger networks of wordplay that contribute to Falstaff 's comic transformation into an ass at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor. In comic terms, the ass is the butt of the joke: the object of humiliation whose etymological roots lie in the use of butt (from the Old French) to refer to a target or a hunter's mark.7 The word butt is itself absent from The