Even on a chilly autumn night in a subterranean theater, the Shakespeare’s Globe production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” breathes the air of springtime. This sparkling show, which runs through Sunday at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University, brims with a joy in pranks and japes and silly jokes that suggests the devilish feeling that possesses people on the first bright, balmy day after a long winter.

The effervescence in this London-born production, directed by Christopher Luscombe, has been coaxed from a play that on the page seems as flat as tap water. Though it inspired a wonderful opera (Verdi’s “Falstaff”), “Merry Wives” has never been a favorite of scholars, many of whom see it as the closest Shakespeare came to hack work. Harold Bloom went so far as to call it the one play Shakespeare wrote that “he himself seems to hold in contempt.”

Prosaic is a word that often occurs in descriptions of “Merry Wives,” not only because it has the highest ratio of prose to poetry of any play in the canon, but also because of its mechanical plot, which centers on the systematic humiliation of a fat old man. It doesn’t help that this man is called Falstaff, who has the girth and appetites of the character of the same name from the “Henry IV” plays, but little of his radiant spirit.

Perhaps precisely because it seems to ask so little of actors and audiences, “Merry Wives” continues to be performed frequently. And Mr. Luscombe’s interpretation, which I first saw two years ago in London, has been a runaway hit for the Globe.