Dr. Caius

The other side of Sir Hugh Evans, our Welsh pastor, is Dr. Caius, our French doctor.  Shakespeare makes more pointed commentary about foreigners with this character and about the utter ridiculousness/futility of the medical practice at the turn of the 17th century.

To catalog all of the ways that Dr. Caius is the butt of the joke would be take too much time and bandwith.  He is foppish but in a far more masculine way than Slender.  He is fiery, quick-tempered, and extremely passionate about the mundane.  He practices his fencing on children.

The actor's struggle becomes to find the point right before it goes over the top. Careful playing on this point will go a long way to make the performance and show extraordinary.



Outsider Status
Shakespeare makes jokes not only about the French in general (mostly about being passionate lovers and ineffectual fighters), but about the distrust of foreigners by the middle class.  Most telling would be the Host's trick on both Caius and Evans by sending them to different locations for their duel.  While this could be seen as the Host protecting them both, a whole collection of the town folk come along to watch and laugh at the two foreigners.

Dr. Caius finds Peter Simple in the closet.

Even Mistress Quickly, his maid, laughs at Caius behind his back.  The title of this journal comes from one of her first lines about him.  Saying that if he comes home, there will be an awful "abusing of God's patience and the King's English".

The biggest joke on him is that he marries a boy at the end of the play and not Anne Page, and he vows his revenge on all of Windsor.  And that would be a great play, and perhaps might have been if Slender hadn't been the breakout character of Merry Wives.

Accent
His accent is clearly spelled out in the dialogue.  There shouldn't be much need for additional work.  However if the accent becomes too exaggerated, then some of the jokes may be lost.  For example, late in the play they are forming a sort of posse to suss out Falstaff, and Caius says, "If there be one or two, I shall make the third."  The line is written to be said:  "If dere be one or two, I shall make-a the turd."  If you start slurring your words together in a stereotypical French accent, then you lose the punch of him making a turd.

Medical Profession
The townsfolk call him Monsieur Mock-Water to his face.  The Host claims that mock-water means valor; it really means urine.  This is a reference to the fact that doctors of the time used urine samples to tell what was wrong with you.  The Caius set needs to have several jars of urine on it.

One of the reasons that the Old West works for me as an American transposition is that the medical practices of those times are now seen as barbaric and ineffectual as the ones of Shakepeare's era.    Leeches, sawing off bones, etc.  A transposition to a 50-60 sitcom doesn't work as well for me because we use some of the same medical practices.  This is why I dismissed that era outright.

I also love the "scientific" mind that is more enthralled with finding a mate than curing the ills of any one.

Costume Notes:

 --3-piece suit (patterned), shirt, bright jabot tie, hat, gloves