The Merry Wives of Windsor has long been compared to a great babel of languages. The play contains a smattering of Spanish, Italian and Dutch and even a whole scene dedicated to the mistranslation of Latin. A large part of the play’s humour also heavily relies on the foreign accents of two characters: the French Doctor Caius and the Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans. Focusing on and the significance and impact of such linguistic comedy, this article examines the issue of the problematic rendering of Shakespeare’s ‘favorite’ (predominant) accents into French through the analysis and comparison of a number of translations and stagings of The Merry Wives of Windsor.