Are you familiar with John Clute's concept of the "real decade"? That's what I mean here. An SF story written in, say, the 1940s may say that it's taking place in 1999 AD, or 9999 AD, or 20 Million AD, but it's still really the 1940s. That's what I mean when I say Merry Wives has a contemporary setting, and even more so because, unlike these SF stories, it isn't filled with future trappings. Don't let a label - in this case the label that the characters also appeared in a play nominally [but, in this sense, also not really] set two centuries earlier - fool you.