Exactly how funny is The Merry Wives of Windsor in the 21st century? With Christopher Luscombe as director, this month’s new production at Shakespeare’s Globe is likely to be very funny indeed. Two summers ago Luscombe had a popular hit at the same theatre with a Comedy of Errors production inspired by the Carry On films. For this fresh attempt to make the more difficult parts of Shakespearean comedy accessible to a modern audience, his reference point is sitcom.

“The Merry Wives of Windsor feels very conversational, very relaxed,” he says. “It seems to me to be written absolutely as people spoke. But I was scared of using the sitcom tag until I read this very authoritative academic article comparing Merry Wives with Fawlty Towers. There are so many connections. John Cleese* must have been familiar with it.”

It is often claimed that The Merry Wives of Windsor came about as a result of a royal request. The queen, having enjoyed Falstaff’s visits to the Boar’s Head tavern in Henry IV part one, wanted to be further entertained by the fat knight, and Shakespeare dutifully bashed out his only play set in contemporary England.

The first question for Luscombe to answer was which version of the play to stage. A Quarto edition was cobbled together by actors in 1604, the more reliable Folio published in 1623. The traditional approach is to work from the Folio, but Luscombe has chosen to marry the two. “There is no version that Shakespeare saw through to publication. You have to do what you feel he would approve of. I feel he’d say ‘whatever works’, particularly in a play like this. It’s no great poetry. All I’m trying to do is make 400-year-old material really funny.”

* Fawlty Towers: a humorous TV series
* John Cleese: the actor playing Mr Fawlty