Print as pdf<\/a><\/span><\/p>\nShakespearean films were so underappreciated at their release as Orson Welles\u2019s Chimes at Midnight<\/em>.1 <\/sup>Compared to Laurence Olivier\u2019s morale boosting 1944 version of Henry V,<\/em> Orson Welles\u2019s adaptation has never reached a wide audience, partly because of its long history of being in copyright limbo.2<\/sup>\u00a0 Since the film\u2019s debut, a critical tendency has been to read it as a lament for \u201cMerrie England.\u201d\u00a0 In an interview, Welles claimed: \u201cIt is more than Falstaff who is dying.\u00a0 It\u2019s the old England, dying and betrayed\u201d (qtd. in Hoffman 88).\u00a0 Keith Baxter, the actor who plays Prince Hal, expressed the sentiment that Hal was the principal character: Welles \u201calways saw it as a triangle basically, a love story of a Prince lost between two father figures.\u00a0 Who is the boy going to choose?\u201d (qtd. in Lyons 268).\u00a0 Samuel Crowl later modified these differing assessments by adding his own interpretation of Falstaff as the central character: \u201cit is Falstaff\u2019s winter which dominates the texture of the film, not Hal\u2019s summer of self-realization\u201d (\u201cThe Long Good-bye\u201d 373).\u00a0 Michael Anderegg concurs with the assessment of Falstaff as the central figure when he historicizes the film by noting the film\u2019s \u201cconflict between rhetoric and history\u201d on the one hand and \u201cthe immediacy of a prelinguistic, prelapsarian, timeless physical world, on the other\u201d (126).\u00a0 By placing the focus on Falstaff and cutting a great deal of text, Welles, Anderegg argues, deconstructs Shakespeare\u2019s world by moving \u201caway from history and toward satire\u201d (127).<\/span><\/p>\nTo continue the critical conversation advocating for Falstaff\u2019s centrality in the film, I turn to a historical lens by re-examining the historiography shaping readings of the history plays in the middle of the century, namely E.M.W Tillyard\u2019s book Shakespeare\u2019s History Plays<\/em> and Laurence Olivier\u2019s 1944 film Henry V<\/em>, which came out of the same cultural moment as Tillyard\u2019s study, World War II.\u00a0 Although Welles\u2019s film predates the Vietnam conflict, the two World Wars themselves deflated the mystique of war with the rise of greater military technology.\u00a0 It is an understood premise among modernist studies that the cheapening of human life by trench warfare influenced texts and ideas like T.S. Eliot\u2019s The Waste Land <\/em>and Sigmund Freud\u2019s death drive.<\/span><\/p>\nWelles exemplifies a similar intellectual tendency by centering his film on Falstaff\u2019s domineering personality.\u00a0 Falstaff\u2019s dominant presence contrasts with Welles\u2019s barren, bleak mise-en-scenes to frame him as a comic truth teller in an uncaring world.\u00a0 Welles frames the truth of Falstaff\u2019s speeches, such as his catechism on honour, by placing the character within bleak landscapes and intense war sequences to question Tillyard\u2019s notion of Shakespeare\u2019s vision of an epic and progressive history of England brought forth by the great deeds of Henry V.\u00a0 While no evidence exists that Welles read Tillyard, he was critical of the nature of Olivier\u2019s clean handling of Henry\u2019s character as an idealistic king along with his valor in war.\u00a0 Welles\u2019s film directly contrasts with Olivier because of Falstaff, who, unlike Olivier\u2019s inspiring Hal, suggests that great men do not shape history as much as the victors who write it.\u00a0 By leaving a broken Falstaff alone in a waste land after his rejection by Henry V, Welles removes the positive ideology of Tillyard and Olivier to accent that history is merely the enforced ideology of those who maintain political power.<\/span><\/p>\nE.M.W. Tillyard\u2019s Shakespeare\u2019s History Plays<\/em> shaped readings from an entire generation of scholars.\u00a0 In his comparative study of Olivier and Tillyard, Michael Manheim argues that one did not necessarily reflect the other but both people interpreted Shakespeare out of the same cultural moment, with the \u201cimpetus being the desire for order, system, hierarchy, strong leadership, and the demonstrated superiority of Anglo-Saxon values in the Europe of World War II\u201d (179).\u00a0 Tillyard saw the second tetralogy as an epic, nationalistic history in a time of great patriotism following the English defeat of the Spanish Armada: \u201cIt was correct to make your country\u2019s history the theme of your epic; and by achieving an epic in your own tongue you glorified that tongue and hence the land where it was spoken\u201d (242).\u00a0 In a progressive sense of history, Tillyard saw England advancing from the last absolute medieval king in Richard II to the descriptions of Hal in the Henry IV <\/em>plays that recall \u201cthe art of the high Renaissance with fused colours and subtle transitions\u201d (257).\u00a0 Tillyard extends his argument further when he suggests that even the early Hal was the \u201cabstract Renaissance conception of the perfect ruler\u201d (277), and concludes that the \u201cpicture of England would fittingly be connected with the typical English monarch\u201d (299).<\/span><\/p>\nTillyard\u2019s book invites a near Whig reading of history as a linear path towards a greater good.\u00a0 The audience should sympathize with Hal\u2019s rejection of Falstaff, for example, because Hal is the ideal king and Falstaff only acts as a Lord of Misrule in the midst of Hal\u2019s bildungsroman.\u00a0 This progressive Shakespearean historiography made sense for an England fighting a battle against fascism as it looked back to its literature in an attempt to define itself.\u00a0 If one accepts the New Historicist premise that literature is a product of its time and place, then literary criticism and historiography can be viewed from the same frame.\u00a0 Welles\u2019s film, like a landmark book, thus provided a paradigm shift from the optimistic view of Tillyard as part of its own unique reflection on Shakespeare following the destruction of World War II and the first decade of the Cold Wars.<\/span><\/p>\nLaurence Olivier\u2019s Henry V<\/em> recalls the progressive history from E.M.W. Tillyard with its idealistic war sequences and its impeccable protagonist.\u00a0 Although Olivier adapts Henry V <\/em>rather than the two Henry IV<\/em> plays as Welles mainly does, the films invite contrast in how they portray a sense of history through their mise-en-scene choices.\u00a0 Olivier\u2019s film, produced in bright Technicolor, begins with a storybook title page followed by a sky shot covering an immense model of the Early Modern London metropolis.\u00a0 The viewer witnesses green fields and blue waters; London is full of life, and the bright colors suggest that this film will be an epic story from a distant past.\u00a0 Olivier\u2019s Technicolor, Samuel Crowl argues, exemplifies a:<\/span><\/p>\n\u2026bright, bold celebration of Shakespeare and the living legacy of his Elizabethan theater.\u00a0 He solved the problem of creating a film environment appropriate for Shakespeare\u2019s language, proudly rhetorical and trumpet-like in Henry V<\/em>, by beginning his film in a re-creation of the Globe Theater, then moving out of the Globe, for the scenes set in France, into a highly stylized landscape of painted sets based on an illuminated medieval storybook, Les Tr\u00e8s Riches Heures,<\/em> and ultimately ending up in a real landscape (Powerscourt in Ireland) for the Battle of Agincourt, where the language of film eclipses Shakespeare\u2019s. (23)<\/span><\/p>\nCrowl\u2019s discussion of mise-en-scene focuses on the importance of transferring the poetry of Shakespeare\u2019s verse into film, a problem unique to Olivier in 1944 especially in transferring Shakespeare from the stage.<\/span><\/p>\nTo extend Crowl\u2019s discussion on the film\u2019s choices, Olivier\u2019s usage of bright colors and trumpet-like sounds also echoes the epic history of Tillyard.\u00a0 The film features two primary mise-en-scenes, the medieval past with the painted sets to the sprawling overhead shot of Shakespeare\u2019s London.\u00a0 These primary mise-en-scenes reflect the themes from Tillyard\u2019s work of the progression of England as it advanced from Richard II to Henry V.\u00a0 The soundtrack in the opening shot of Shakespeare\u2019s London also features an epic feel as it emphasizes that this London represents an epoch of human history, a Golden Age for the English.\u00a0 While the film\u2019s medieval settings are also extraordinary, the opening shot suggests a progressive history akin to Tillyard\u2019s views that Henry V was the model king to lead England to prosperity.\u00a0 For a war film in 1944, this progressive history showcasing London in the Renaissance allowed Olivier to accent the importance of English values, especially against fascism.\u00a0 Franco Zeffirelli described his own reaction to the film based on nationality: \u201c\u2018[Olivier] was the flag bearer of so many things we did not have.\u00a0 I\u2019d been educated and brought up in a fascist country.\u00a0 He was the emblematic personality of a great free democracy\u2019\u201d (qtd in Davies 171).\u00a0 From the opening shots, the film thus echoes an epic, progressive history brought forth by Shakespeare about England and its great ruler Henry V to invoke a sense of English exceptionalism and nationalism.<\/span><\/p>\nIn addition to the epic portrait of London, Olivier also delivers a heroic vision of war that suggests history is made by the valor of great men.\u00a0 Olivier rides a white horse, symbolizing Henry V\u2019s purity of purpose, while the French ride black horses, and the respective knights on both sides charge at one another and joust over a bright green field.\u00a0 Henry motivates his troops as they fight, and troops on both sides engage in combat like aristocratic knights, culminating in the climactic duel between Olivier\u2019s Henry and the Constable of France.\u00a0 As aforementioned, skeptical critics, including Welles, had much to say on Olivier\u2019s idealistic handling of war; Welles quipped that Olivier\u2019s people ride \u201c\u2018out of the castle and suddenly they are on a golf course somewhere charging each other\u2019\u201d (qtd in Mason 199).\u00a0 This witty remark against the cleanliness of Olivier\u2019s battle sequence suggests that Olivier\u2019s film must be taken as a product of its time and place.\u00a0 Olivier represents battle as clean and noble to motivate the English in their war effort.\u00a0 Olivier also removes the darker side of Henry, the one who in Shakespeare\u2019s text threatens that English soldiers will \u201c[d]efile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters, \/ Your fathers taken by the silver beards, \/And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls\u201d (H5<\/em> 3.3.35-37), because that side of Henry\u2019s character would not have been appropriate in a World War II propaganda film.\u00a0 While Olivier\u2019s film still leaves hints of ambiguity in the text about Henry\u2019s character,3 <\/sup>he nonetheless removes the most significant passages in order to glorify Henry as the ideal great figure who through his will defeated the enemy and with it created a strong English nation.<\/span><\/p>\nOrson Welles\u2019s 1965 film Chimes at Midnight<\/em> has a much darker tone compared to Olivier\u2019s 1944 film.\u00a0 Compressing the second tetralogy into one picture lasting about two hours, Welles centers his film on the end of Falstaff\u2019s life, from the beginning shot where he laments of bygone days with Robert Shallow that \u201cWe have heard the Chimes at Midnight, Master Robert Shallow\u201d to concluding with his death .\u00a0 The film\u2019s opening long shot of Falstaff and Shallow walking across a barren, seasonal landscape thus suggests that the film centers on \u201cFalstaff\u2019s winter which dominates the texture of the film, not Hal\u2019s summer of self-realization\u201d (Crowl 372).\u00a0 I wish to build on this point by examining Falstaff from the perspective of historiography.\u00a0 By placing his critical emphasis on Falstaff, Welles thus shifts the film\u2019s critical focus away from Olivier\u2019s conceptualization of history as a struggle achieved by individual valor and instead centers it on the seasons of Falstaff\u2019s vitality and death.\u00a0 This shift of emphasis from the summer of Falstaff\u2019s content toward the winter of his rejection also lends itself toward a cyclical view of history, for Hal\u2019s immersion within the tavern world, his locus amoenus<\/em>, and friendship with Falstaff is only illusory; power and order must be restored and Falstaff must be punished in order to restore the chronicle history as a convenient fiction over the suppressed truth of the cyclical view.<\/span><\/p>\nThe opening scene has been frequently discussed because by beginning the drama near the end of 2 Henry IV<\/em> with Falstaff and Shallow\u2019s speech, Welles locates his drama\u2019s tone within the pessimistic world of 2 Henry IV <\/em>rather than within 1 Henry IV.<\/em>\u00a0 In the text, the two friends reminisce about old times, but afterwards, Falstaff soliloquizes that \u201cIf the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him: let time shape, and there an end\u201d (2H4<\/em> 3.2.325-27).\u00a0 Although Welles does not include this dialogue in his first scene, Falstaff\u2019s proto Social-Darwinism in exploiting Shallow in the text suggests a more pessimistic view of history which locates power based on crass individualism and selfishness rather than heroism; therefore, if the viewer knows about the text before seeing the film, that viewer will examine the film\u2019s opening from a more critical perspective and immediately notice a darker tone than that radiating from Olivier\u2019s grandiose opening.\u00a0 Welles cuts this dialogue to illustrate Falstaff\u2019s and Shallow\u2019s version of history that they share together, a tale obviously embellished by Shallow as suggested by Falstaff\u2019s sardonic facial expression.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter Falstaff and Shallow lament the olden days, the opening credits roll, and the camera takes a long shot showing armies traveling over a vast desert waste land, and in one shot, the camera surveys soldiers standing with dead corpses hanging behind them while the film\u2019s festive, adventurous score plays.\u00a0 The contrast between the score and the effects of war recalls the epic music at the start of Olivier\u2019s film, which accents the great history of England being presented with the shot of the London landscape.\u00a0 The score\u2019s lighthearted feel in juxtaposition with the images of death instantly suggests that war is not as romantic as it appears.\u00a0 It also suggests that among conflicts between great men like Henry V, the common soldier gets left behind in the aftermath of war.\u00a0 The opening credits do not feature the great men like Hal or Hotspur but rather the common soldiers who are alone in a barren world of violence.<\/span><\/p>\nThe lifeless mise-en-scene in the opening shot repeats itself in three crucial moments in the film: the opening, the battle of Shrewsbury, and the concluding scene following Falstaff\u2019s death.\u00a0 Although the tavern and the castle have been noted as creating a dual landscape in the film (Crowl 373), Welles also gives the viewer a third landscape\u2014a broad shot of the wasteland ravaged by war, which in turn deflates the heroic history of Olivier\u2019s colorful presentation of London.\u00a0 Andrew McClean acknowledges this analysis of the landscape by noting: \u201c[Welles] provides a cultural commentary on the helplessness of modern man to combat, change, or alter the inevitable sweep of history\u201d (198).\u00a0 Welles\u2019s fragmented image of brutality within the midst of a vast desert thus begins with Falstaff in the midst of a literal wasteland.\u00a0 By beginning the film with Falstaff and Shallow\u2019s discussion about days long past just before Henry IV\u2019s death, Welles locates the film in the middle of Falstaff\u2019s metaphorical winter, and by showing bleak images of death in the opening credits, he prepares the viewer for Hal\u2019s rejection of Falstaff.<\/span><\/p>\nThe barren mise-en-scene recalls T.S. Eliot\u2019s high modernist text The Waste Land.<\/em>\u00a0 While no evidence exists that Welles read the poem, Eliot\u2019s text does recall the sense of disconnect and lament following the catastrophe of World War I.\u00a0 The opening credits in particular recall the opening of Eliot\u2019s second stanza:<\/span><\/p>\nWhat are the roots that clutch, what branches grow<\/span>
\n Out of this stony rubbish?\u00a0 Son of man,<\/span>
\n You cannot say, or guess, for you know only<\/span>
\n A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,<\/span>
\n And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,<\/span>
\n And the dry stone no sound of water. (I.19-24)<\/span><\/p>\nThe opening long shot shows Falstaff and Shallow walking in the middle of a bleak, snowy landscape as a large dead tree towers over them.\u00a0 Then with the opening credits the viewer gets a desert waste land that subsumes the people traveling within it as the camera also focuses on the hanged corpses.\u00a0 These images are nothing but broken when compared to the epic score playing behind it.\u00a0 By beginning the film with Falstaff and Shallow\u2019s discussion about days long past and right before Henry IV\u2019s death at the castle, Welles thus locates the film in Falstaff\u2019s personal metaphorical winter, and by showing bleak images of death in the opening credits, he prepares the viewer for the \u201cshadow at evening rising to meet you\u201d (I.30)\u2014in this case, the Machiavellian shadow of Hal rising to reject Falstaff and the history he plans to create upon taking power.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter the opening sequence, the wasteland appears midway through the film at Shrewsbury.\u00a0 Unlike Olivier\u2019s heroic depiction of war, Welles delivers a shocking five-minute sequence full of fragmented images accenting its horror.\u00a0 Both before and during this scene, the camera focuses on Falstaff.\u00a0 Giving his catechism on honour right before the battle just as in Shakespeare\u2019s text, Falstaff prepares the viewer for the absurdity of war.\u00a0 Falstaff reduces traditional medieval ideals of honour to absurdity in the text; he notes that honor is merely \u201ca word\u201d or \u201cair\u201d and concludes his speech by noting that \u201cHonour is a mere scutcheon.\u00a0 And so ends my catechism\u201d (1H4 <\/em>5.1.133-34, 135, 139-40).\u00a0 Depending on which interpretation an adaptation takes, Falstaff\u2019s catechism can be interpreted as mere cowardice on Falstaff\u2019s part, or, as in this case, comic wisdom.\u00a0 This adaptation has Falstaff delivering his catechism to Hal rather than as soliloquy before the infamous battle at Shrewsbury.\u00a0 Despite Falstaff\u2019s best efforts to educate Hal, the older man cannot alter the course of history.\u00a0 Randy Rasmussen explains the truth of Falstaff\u2019s sentiments:<\/span><\/p>\nHe [Falstaff] believes what he says, at least on this occasion.\u00a0 And the fact that Hal has no glib retort suggests that Falstaff\u2019s little arrow finds its target.\u00a0 But a direct cut to the next scene makes it clear that mobilization for war continues unabated.\u00a0 Words could not save peace. (244)<\/span><\/p>\nThrough words, Welles\u2019s Falstaff reduces the concept of honour and the purpose of war as portrayed in Olivier\u2019s film, and Tillyard\u2019s historiography, to meaninglessness.\u00a0 The former, heroic depiction of war is thus only full of words, color, air, and romance.\u00a0 By portraying this speech right before the intense war sequence, Welles, through Falstaff, suggests the hopelessness of modern man to change the outcome of history.\u00a0 Despite Falstaff\u2019s best efforts to force Hal into realizing the absurdity of their situation, war continues unabated. However, by reducing fictitious notions of Great Man theories of historiography to mere social categories, Welles\u2019s Falstaff at least deconstructs this notion by reducing history to a primitive power struggle disguised by empty concepts like \u201chonour.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nWhen the battle begins, two sides stand at opposite poles of the barren fields and survey one another with an ominous fog looming over them, a sharp contrast to Olivier\u2019s storybook battlefield.\u00a0 As the troops charge at one another, the adventurous score plays while Falstaff takes refuge behind a dead tree.\u00a0 At once, the score stops as the troops collide; Rasmussen describes the subsequent action as follows:<\/span><\/p>\nThe moment blows are exchanged and men start to die, the music changes from heroic to apocalyptic.\u00a0 Brutal hammer blows of sound meld with eerie, melancholy, other-worldly vocalizations by a women\u2019s chorus.\u00a0 They could be the abstracted lamentations of the wives, mothers, and daughters of the men being slaughtered.\u00a0 This is a battle far removed from anything envisioned by the men who instigated, pontificated about, and hope to profit by it. (245)<\/span><\/p>\nAt once, Welles turns Olivier\u2019s heroic notion of warfare upside down, and Falstaff\u2019s catechism against war and honor suddenly strikes true.\u00a0 Welles\u2019s war sequence does not feature a gentlemanly code of warfare; instead, it depicts the horror of war by immersing the viewer within a lengthy narrative of the brutality of man.\u00a0 So many men fill the scene that the viewer feels a sense of claustrophobia, and with the fragmented editing, the sequence loses track of whether the combatants are loyalists or rebels.<\/span><\/p>\nThrough the rapid editing and the oppressive atmosphere, Welles depicts a modern, fragmented view of warfare in the wake of England completing two World Wars.\u00a0 The claustrophobic setting in a wasteland may remind viewers of the useless brutality of trench warfare from the First World War and the subsequent readings by Freud as exhibiting man\u2019s inner death drive, that drive lurking within our subconscious minds that is a \u201cresidual <\/strong>of a pre-organic, chaotic past\u201d which \u201cattempts to undo the organic whole\u201d (Faulkner 154).\u00a0 Honour does not exist on this battlefield, just a conglomeration of corpses.\u00a0 In particular, Welles\u2019s camera exemplifies this Freudian idea by examining \u201cthe entwined legs, but not the faces, of killer and victim, forming a grotesque parody of lovers. Which is not inappropriate considering the sexual passion that Hotspur diverted into his enthusiasm for war\u201d (Rasmussen 246).\u00a0 Freud arrived at his conclusions following the catastrophe of World War I in not only witnessing widespread death but also in handling his own patients and their dreams.\u00a0 Compared to the clean warfare in Olivier, Welles delivers a nightmarish sequence of deaths with rapid editing to disconnect common men from the history they attempt to define.\u00a0 Welles\u2019s soldiers lose their identity not only in a drive toward their death but also because they must fight for the causes of leaders in power.\u00a0 The war sequence thus accents a modern disconnect between life and death, free will and determinism, and personal identity within a larger government.<\/span><\/p>\nBy deflating the romanticism of violence through fragmented images of warfare along with the Freudian nature of man\u2019s death instinct over a vast desert wasteland, Welles shocks the viewer over five minutes of relentless bloodshed, and his vision also suggests that because of Falstaff, the viewer should reject the Great Man view of history as identity itself is lost among the violence. Samuel Crowl argues of Welles\u2019s camera work that the viewer should sympathize with Falstaff as he \u201cscurries in and out of harm\u2019s way looking like a giant armadillo in his ill-fitting armor\u201d (\u201cThe Long Good-Bye\u201d 378).\u00a0 Falstaff understands war better than anyone else, and the camera\u2019s trajectory lends credence to his interpretation.\u00a0 Although Falstaff\u2019s words deconstruct heroic notions of history, the camera\u2019s survey of the depravity of war confirms the validity of his words, allowing them to hold greater worth over the viewer\u2019s imagination.\u00a0 His catechism is thus not reduced to being just \u201cmere air\u201d and foolery; instead, it is a depressing truth about the nature of war and the shaping of history by interested parties.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter this unique war sequence, Welles depicts the climactic event of 1 Henry IV<\/em>, the inevitable confrontation between Hal and Hotspur.\u00a0 Unlike Olivier\u2019s chivalric duel with the Constable in his Henry V<\/em>, Hal and Hotspur engage in heavy and awkward sword fighting.\u00a0 \u201cBoth men,\u201d Crowl describes, \u201care exhausted, their swords as heavy to their arms as a boxer\u2019s fists become in the fifteenth round of a title fight, and Hal outlasts his spirited rival because he has husbanded his energies more resourcefully than Hotspur\u201d (378).\u00a0 Hotspur, the representation of medieval codes of honour, dies to be replaced by Hal, the historical victor, whose thunder Falstaff steals by momentarily taking credit for killing Hotspur in front of King Henry.\u00a0 By shifting this battle after the main war sequence, Welles suggests that the victors write history.\u00a0 Hotspur loses in this primal rite of destruction, leaving Hal to write the chronicle history and to proclaim his valour for endless ages.\u00a0 Falstaff parodies this chronicling tendency by taking credit for defeating Hotspur in front of the King, who leers at Hal angrily.\u00a0 In the text, when Hal claims the kill, Falstaff proclaims, \u201cDidst thou?\u00a0 Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying!,\u201d yet Hal takes Falstaff\u2019s proclamations light-heartedly, arguing that \u201cFor my part, if a lie may do thee grace \/ I\u2019ll gild it with the happiest terms I have\u201d (1H4 <\/em>5.4. 145-6, 157-58).\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s Hal suggests that history is something which he controls; he can construct Falstaff\u2019s image just as he paints his own.\u00a0 Welles\u2019s Falstaff, however, parodies this idea by stealing credit for murdering Hotspur in front of the King rather than Prince John.<\/span><\/p>\nAfter his honour is questioned by Falstaff, Hal leaves Falstaff alone in the wasteland of war to soliloquize about sack.\u00a0 Falstaff, Crowl describes, is thus \u201cleft to search for an audience and a reaction in an empty landscape\u201d (Crowl \u201cThe Long Good-Bye\u201d 379).\u00a0 Upon parodying the notion of power, Falstaff\u2019s being left alone in the vast wasteland suggests that his friendship with Hal has degenerated.\u00a0 The \u201cMerrie Old England\u201d which Falstaff personifies has lost its pragmatic purpose in this new world order.\u00a0 Considering Falstaff is left alone, and considering that Hal exemplifies a degree of Machiavellianism that he doesn\u2019t exude in the text by leaving Falstaff when his claim to fame is thwarted, Welles implies that history has been written by the victors; although Hal kills Hotspur, words alone cannot prove it after the camera\u2019s presentation of fragmented images of war and depravity that could not even differentiate between rebels and loyalists.\u00a0 With this lack of available evidence, the victor thus writes history, yet through Falstaff\u2019s parody of this historical view, Hal cannot locate his claim to this truth because Falstaff has reduced the notion of truth itself to a mere societal distinction.<\/span><\/p>\nThe film\u2019s barren mise-en-scene comes to full circle with the opening shot following Falstaff\u2019s funeral procession.\u00a0 After being rejected by Hal for the final time once he gains the throne, Falstaff loses his will to live.\u00a0 Bardolph, Mistress Quickly, and others lament and speak of their memories, their own chimes at midnight, as Falstaff still hovers over their discussion with his massive coffin in the small tavern, and the viewer still sees the castle in the background.\u00a0 In a remarkable shot, as Falstaff\u2019s coffin is being pushed into the distance, the camera withdraws from the action, accenting the barren wasteland between the tavern and the castle, a landscape devoid of life in which even the trees are dead.\u00a0 Despite the girth of Falstaff\u2019s coffin, nature subsumes it as the shot grows wider.\u00a0 In an ironic twist, the narrator reads a passage from Raphael Holinshed\u2019s Chronicles:<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/em>This Henry was a captain of such prudence and such policy that he never enterprised anything before it forecast the main chances that it might happen.\u00a0 So humane withal, he left no offense unpunished nor friendship unrewarded.\u00a0 For conclusion, a majesty was he that both lived and died a pattern in princehood, a lodestar in honour, and famous to the world alway. (qtd in Lyons 254)<\/span><\/p>\nThe irony of this ending shot is astounding.\u00a0 After Falstaff dominates the film and deflates the consequences of a progressive and Great Man history with his catechisms, the viewer witnesses a scene in which the tavern world is silenced.\u00a0 After Welles\u2019s last speech to Master Shallow, an almost Gestapo-like police force drags away Doll Tearsheet and other tavern members.\u00a0 Henry V now assumes power from his father, and he redefines his unwieldy character by preparing to fight France and crushing his old friends.\u00a0 The victor defines history. Although Falstaff emphasizes the relativity of history with the way he constructs it, power has been restored anew.\u00a0 Henry V gains power and keeps it through political manipulation, not through the sense of his own valor or honesty as Holinshed\u2019s Tudor history suggests.\u00a0 Welles thus places this chronicle history into the final moment to satirize previous idealistic historiographical notions.\u00a0 Falstaff has already proven that his culture constructs history fictitiously; therefore, the conclusion implies that history continues based on conveniently constructed truths from those in power that happens to make a good story.\u00a0 Prince Hal must reject Falstaff not because he is the ideal king as Tillyard suggested but because Falstaff, unlike any other character, understands the fine veneer shaping the legacy of Hal and the nature of history.<\/span><\/p>\nChimes at Midnight<\/em> revises Tillyard\u2019s wartime interpretation of the second tetralogy as an epic, progressive history of England leading up to the ideal king in Henry V; at the same time, the film interrogates Olivier\u2019s similar take on not only Henry V\u2019s shaping of history but also the idealistic portrait painted by his landscapes and his war sequences.\u00a0 Welles\u2019s Falstaff dominates most every scene he is involved in and his speeches strike a chord against the film’s barren mise-en-scene and presentation of the depravity of war.\u00a0 This Falstaff deflates notions of honour made prominent in Olivier\u2019s film and suggests that, in the shaping of history, the common soldiers are subsumed by war, played out on a barren wasteland that disconnects the common men from the ideals for which they fight.\u00a0 Falstaff realizes that individual valor does not shape history, only conveniently constructed truths, and thus parodies it, but Henry V crushes him, knowing that Falstaff realizes too much and has no place within the history he attempts to write.\u00a0 By choosing to have Falstaff buried in the midst of a desolate wasteland while reminding the viewer of the \u201cestablished\u201d chronicle history, Welles forces the viewer to acknowledge especially after the destruction of two World Wars that history is merely another ideology to control power for those who write it.<\/span><\/p>\nNotes<\/span><\/p>\n1. Bosley Crowther, the New York Times<\/em> critic, delivered a particularly harsh, initial judgment when he quipped that \u201cMr. Welles has always wanted to play Falstaff.\u00a0 Now he\u2019s had his chance.\u00a0 Those who are interested may see him at the Little Carnegie\u201d (qtd in Lyons 290).\u00a0 Penelope Cruz likewise gave a negative review when she called it \u201ca film which seems to turn its back on brilliance\u201d (296).<\/span><\/p>\n2. The film had been in copyright limbo for many years due to court battles over distribution rights following Welles selling his rights away to James Bond producer Harry Saltzman, except in Spain, where the rights belonged to Emiliano Piedra.\u00a0 As recently as 2005, the film was pulled at a film festival due to copyright claims; however, Piedra\u2019s widow, Dolores, recently authorized a DVD re-release.\u00a0 A limited quantity of DVDs were available up until May 2012, when an all-regions DVD was re-released that retails for around $20.\u00a0 See MacNab for more information.<\/span><\/p>\n3. On this issue, Michael Manheim argues that Olivier left many of the political stratagems of Henry ambiguous, including the way Henry uses Christianity to further his ends by praying before battle along with the political sophistication Olivier shows as he woos Katherine.<\/span><\/p>\nWorks Cited<\/span><\/p>\nAnderegg, Michael. Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture<\/em>.\u00a0New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print.<\/span><\/p>\nCrowl, Samuel.\u00a0 \u201cThe Long Good-Bye: Welles and Falstaff.\u201d\u00a0 Shakespeare Quarterly<\/em> 31.3 (1980): 369-80.\u00a0 JSTOR<\/em>. Web. 20 Dec. 2012.<\/span><\/p>\n—.\u00a0 Shakespeare and Film:\u00a0 A Norton Guide.<\/em>\u00a0 New York: Norton, 2008.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nCrowther, Bosley.\u00a0 Rev. of Falstaff: Chimes at Midnight, <\/em>dir. <\/em>Orson Welles.<\/em>\u00a0 New York Times <\/em>20 Mar 1967.\u00a0 Rpt. in Chimes at Midnight.\u00a0 <\/em>Ed. Bridget Gellert Lyons.\u00a0 New York: Rutgers UP, 1988.\u00a0 289-290.\u00a0 <\/em>Print.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\nDavies, Anthony.\u00a0 \u201cThe Shakespeare Films of Laurence Olivier.\u201d\u00a0 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film.<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. Russell Jackson.\u00a0 2nd<\/sup> ed.\u00a0 New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.\u00a0 167-186. Print.<\/span><\/p>\nEliot, T.S.\u00a0 The Waste Land.<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. Michael North.\u00a0 New York: Norton, 2001.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nFaulkner, Joanne.\u00a0 \u201cFreud\u2019s Concept of the Death Drive and its Relation to the Superego.\u201d\u00a0 Minerva\u2014An Internet Journal of Philosophy <\/em>9 (2005): 153-176.\u00a0 Academic Search Complete<\/em>. <\/em>Web.\u00a0 9 March 2011.<\/span><\/p>\nHoffman, Dean.\u00a0 \u201c\u2018Bypaths and Indirect Crooked Ways\u2019: Mise-En-Scene in Orson Welles\u2019s Chimes at Midnight.<\/em>\u201d\u00a0 Shakespeare Bulletin<\/em> 23.1 (2005): 87-112.\u00a0 MLA International Bibliography.<\/em>\u00a0 Web.\u00a0 25 February 2011.<\/span><\/p>\nLyons, Bridget Gellert, ed.\u00a0 Chimes at Midnight.<\/em>\u00a0 Orson Welles dir.\u00a0 New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nManheim, Michael.\u00a0 \u201cOlivier\u2019s Henry V<\/em> and the Elizabethan World Picture.\u201d\u00a0 Literature\/Film Quarterly <\/em>11.3 (1984): 179-84.\u00a0 MLA International Database.<\/em>\u00a0 Web.\u00a0 10 August 2012.<\/span><\/p>\nMason, Pamela.\u00a0 \u201cOrson Welles and Filmed Shakespeare.\u201d\u00a0 The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film.<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. Russell Jackson.\u00a0 2nd<\/sup> ed.\u00a0 New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.\u00a0 187-203. Print.<\/span><\/p>\nMcClean, Andrew.\u00a0 \u201cOrson Welles and Shakespeare: History and Consciousness in Chimes at Midnight<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 Literature Film Quarterly <\/em>11.3 (1983): 197-202.\u00a0 Academic Search Complete.\u00a0 <\/em>Web.\u00a0 25 February 2011.<\/span><\/p>\nMacNab, Geoffrey.\u00a0 \u201cOrson Welles\u2019s Rarely Seen Masterpiece is Restored and Re-Released.\u201d\u00a0 The Independent.<\/em>\u00a0 14 July 2011.\u00a0 Web.\u00a0 26 Dec. 2012.<\/span><\/p>\nOlivier, Laurence, dir.\u00a0 The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fifth with his Battel Fought at Agincourt in France.<\/em>\u00a0 1944.\u00a0 Irvington, NY:\u00a0 Criterion, 2004.\u00a0 DVD.<\/span><\/p>\nRasmussen, Randy.\u00a0 Orson Welles: Six Films Analyzed, Scene by Scene.<\/em>\u00a0 London: McFarland, 2006.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nShakespeare, William.\u00a0 King Henry IV Part 1.<\/em>\u00a0 1597.\u00a0 Ed. David Scott Kastan.\u00a0 3rd<\/sup> Ser. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2003.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n—.\u00a0 King Henry IV Part 2.<\/em>\u00a0 1598.\u00a0 Ed. A.R. Humphreys.\u00a0 2nd<\/sup> ser. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1981.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n—. King Henry V.<\/em>\u00a0 Ed. T.W. Craik.\u00a0 1599.\u00a0 3rd<\/sup> Ser. London: Arden Shakespeare, 1995.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nTillyard, E.M.W.\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s History Plays.<\/em>\u00a0 1944.\u00a0 London: Chatto & Windus, 1962.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\nWelles, Orson, dir.\u00a0 Chimes at Midnight.<\/em>\u00a0 1965.\u00a0 Baker City: Nostalgia\u00a0Family Video, 2008.\u00a0 DVD.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeffrey Yeager,\u00a0West Virginia University\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":51,"menu_order":9,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-733","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=733"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1962,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/733\/revisions\/1962"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}