From the time he moved to London (probably around 1590) to the time he wrote his final play (probably The Two Noble Kinsmen, in 1614), William Shakespeare begged, borrowed, and stole his plots and characters on his way to writing the greatest works of the English language. He plundered from wide and diverse sources including Roman histories, English mythologies, and Italian poems. As he codified these tales, his versions became the definitive and have remained so for the past five centuries; thanks to John Heminges and Henry Condell’s work on the Folio, we now say Baz Luhrmann was adapting William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet rather than Arthur Brooke’s or Matteo Bandello’s.
It seems only right that the playwright who redefined stage drama, and who has become ubiquitous in the present for the words and phrases he invented, begat his own cycle of adaptation that continues to this day. Countless artists from shortly after Shakespeare’s time to the present have turned to these great plays as sources for their own artistic pursuits. If taking inspiration from a great artist, why not take it from one many have proclaimed the greatest?
In one of the most stunning coincidental overlaps in cultural history, Giuseppe Verdi—arguably the most renowned 19th-century Italian opera composer—and Orson Welles—arguably the most renowned director of 20th-century American theater and cinema—each took on three major Shakespeare adaptations during their careers, in exactly the same order: Macbeth, Othello, and finally their own original combinations of the two Henry IV plays and The Merry Wives of Windsor that focus on their shared roguish knight, Falstaff. In Verdi’s Falstaff and Welles’s Chimes at Midnight, the journey through villain, hero, and clown reaches its apotheosis: two titans of the stage pushing their art through the extremes of humanity, arriving at the most human of Shakespeare’s characters.
The comparison is not a neat or perfect one: Verdi’s role as composer, coach, and semi-director (the role did not entirely exist as it is defined now) is similar but not entirely comparable to Welles’s role as actor, director, and film producer. Additionally, both approached Shakespeare to different ends and in entirely different languages; Verdi had the added block of figuring out faithful Italian translations, whereas Welles cut at will, reshaping the original words and revising his own prior adaptations as his theatrical/televisual needs and self-taught scholarship changed. Welles’s association with Shakespeare also went deeper; Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight are merely the productions Welles took to the screen, not the only ones he mounted during his career (for a taste of what is lost to time, Richard Linklater dramatized the production of Welles’s “fascist” 1937 Julius Caesar with the Mercury Theatre in his film Me and Orson Welles). However, the purely theatrical works of Welles—while no doubt landmarks in their own right—are more ephemeral. With Verdi’s three Shakespeare operas firm in the repertoire and Welles’s films accessible to view in some form, the striking parallel emerges. The choices the two creative giants made when approaching the same often-adapted material reveal much about their own (quietly or overtly) revolutionary outlook on life and art, as well as the times in which they worked.
Comparing “original productions” throws up a challenge. Verdi’s first stagings, over which he held great creative control, predate audio and video recording, meaning that opera fans today must rely on his and other eyewitnesses’ accounts of the day. His versions live on through continual reinterpretation by worldwide opera companies and evolving theatrical and vocal traditions, and most people see stagings that incorporate new directors’ and musicians’ creative visions into Verdi’s own. This is no bad thing; his operas are robust enough to withstand additions and interpretive alterations. Welles’s Shakespeare films, on the other hand, are preserved documents—albeit ones that took circuitous paths to full-length and high-quality restorations after decades of neglect, chopping, and rights battles, not to mention the fact that they represent the “final” forms of Welles’s own adaptation processes. Here, his influences and work in the theater led to these end results, however short they may fall of his original vision due to circumstances outside his control. The paths both artists take are as important as the results. However, the imperfections of this comparison allow a journey through time, place, and the pressing factors uniting and dividing both artists’ adaptational approaches. Their edits center this exploration and give their works lives that surpass their original context and the opinions of the first critics—both glowing and disparaging—and invite continual reflection and re-evaluation.
Though he drew inspiration for his operas from a variety of sources, Verdi was a longtime admirer of Shakespeare: in an 1865 letter, he wrote that he had “one of my favorite poets…in my hands from my earliest youth.” He always worked closely with his librettists to ensure the words supported the drama (and, in translating Shakespeare to Italian, stayed as faithful to the English meanings as possible). He was working and composing during immense upheaval across the Italian peninsula, quietly supporting Italian unification while avoiding overt political statements on the subject; his politics were apparent in his art, which often critiqued both authority and society’s moral hypocrisies. His long career also spanned monumental developments in music, stagecraft, and the economics of opera. When he started writing operas, the art form was defined in Italy by the florid bel canto (literally “beautiful singing”) of Donizetti and Rossini that propelled their plots through vocal fireworks. By the time he died, he had seen Wagner popularize the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk (literally, “total work of art”), synthesizing theatrecraft and musicianship into epic experiences, and his compatriots Puccini and Mascagni refine verismo (an uber-gritty hyper-realist school of opera). Verdi was not immune to these influences while carving out his own evolving musical voice, which included revising his older operas to suit his developed skills and changing popular tastes.
Welles, too, was devoted to the Bard, though he took a rigorous revisionist approach to Shakespeare’s words. As Richard France points out in his editorial notes on Welles’s existing theater scripts:
Welles imposed upon himself strict limitations in adapting Caesar, Macbeth, and Five Kings [Welles’s attempt to present Henry IV Part 1 through Richard III in a unified play]; and audiences, while delighting in his handling of these materials, also found their abiding conservatism satisfied with the knowledge that every word of text was, in fact, written by Shakespeare. Welles’s own devotion to his favorite author would not have allowed him to do otherwise. (Such limitations, it should be pointed out, did not extend to the texts of his other W.P.A. and Mercury productions, which he often rewrote at will.)
Welles may have played fast and loose with who said the words on stage and the length and pacing of the film or performance, but the choices were driven by what worked best to capture hearts and minds. Working at the beginning of film, radio, and television entertainment, he knew that his stagings—and most importantly his films, with their potential for the broadest possible viewership—had to get to the essential truth of Shakespeare’s stories in a way that spoke to his audiences.
Both artists were driven by populism: making Shakespeare’s stories accessible and thrilling for mainstream audiences. Both were driven by a critical devotion—to their craft, their audiences, and the dramatic sense of the man who inspired them—allowing them to grasp at the human heart of Shakespeare’s stories and characters while understanding that their mediums invited, even needed, adaptation. Both, by the end of their lives, left their indelible marks on how Macbeth, Othello, and the character of Falstaff are understood today.
The Villain
Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, the last to be written of his four “great tragedies,” has a reputation for being cursed. The timing of its writing and first performance (generally agreed to have been 1606) as well as its subject matter suggest that it was written to please the new monarch, James I of England and Scotland—previously James VI of Scotland. The new King, distantly related to the late Queen Elizabeth I, was obsessed with the idea of witchcraft and witch hunts, and his ascension to the joint throne needed the weight of prophecy.
Both Verdi and Welles were 33 years old when their versions of Macbeth premiered in 1847 and 1948, respectively. They were young men looking to make and remake history. They did not yet have full freedom to do whatever they wanted artistically—Welles, at this point, had more than Verdi—but the buzz generated by their earlier successes made them the bright young talents to watch of their day.
Granted, Verdi would go on to revise his Macbeth substantially—a habit of his as he slowed his operatic output in his later years and went back to polish his earlier works with his expanded skill and knowledge of the operatic theater. Macbeth was a production of his years “in the galleys,” as he wrote in a letter—16 operas in 22 years. On the other hand, Welles’s film was his second major Macbeth;he had famously worked on a stage production previously, in Harlem, leading the Federal Theatre Project and a group of Black performers on a Haitian Revolution-inspired production that came to be known as “Voodoo Macbeth.” His film version returned to the play’s Scottish roots and seems an attempt to preserve the director’s vision within the traditional Shakespearean canon. This time, he starred as well.
In his tenth opera, Verdi brought Shakespeare’s witchcraft and regicide into the realm of the gothic, the favorite mode of the era’s theater and fiction. Verdi’s witches are more than three—in a true capitulation to show business, the Teatro della Pergola in Florence and the Théâtre Lyrique in Paris (where the opera premiered in Italian- and French-language forms, respectively) needed to keep their choruses occupied! That said, in Verdi’s score the many witches are still clearly divided into three groups, each of which speak in first person only, keeping Shakespeare’s symmetry. Verdi did not speak English, but worked from his own translations to keep the Macbeth libretto as faithful to Shakespeare as possible, writing his librettist Francesco Maria Piave back constantly with notes and amendments. He wanted Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, and the witches—the three “characters” he considered essential to the drama—to be ugly inside and out, even turning down star singers he felt looked and sounded too beautiful.
By stripping King Duncan to a non-singing role, sometimes seen in the staging only once before he is murdered, the focus stays with the murderous couple and (to a lesser extent) those who eventually orchestrate their downfall: Banquo (Banco, in the opera) and Macduff. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both get long arias to express their inner wishes. Macbeth remains a thinker as well as a warrior, his doubts and despair balanced with his increasing cruelty and paranoia; Lady Macbeth, who disappears from Shakespeare’s play after Act III aside from the sleepwalking scene, becomes a larger presence in Verdi’s opera, appearing notably after Macbeth goes back to seek the witches’ advice and finds out that he will not be killed by one born of woman. Here, the Macbeths sing to vengeance, “Vendetta”—a strange cry considering they have been the aggressors rather than the wronged throughout, but one that makes psychological sense. After the witches’ first promise, they believe themselves owed their crowns and cannot see the traps they have laid for themselves in this hell of their own making. Verdi uses operatic convention for his own observation and exploration of humanity’s darkness.
Welles’s Macbeth on film returns the play to Scotland and makes the witches quasi-Druids, playing up Christian imagery and Celtic crosses within the castles in contrast to the ancient, arcane rituals outside it. Made on a tight budget, Macbeth was shot on sets that double for several locations to extraordinarily claustrophobic effect. Considering that much of the play unfolds in the Macbeths’ castle, which holds more secrets as each body piles up, it is an effective choice to dramatize the descent into their self-made hell. Light and shadows give depth, texture, and the hint of something unknowable just beyond the real to both interior and exterior scenes, throwing characters into stark relief against rocky outcropping and austere castle walls. With its striking set-bound visuals, it feels like a precursor to Joel Coen’s 2021 The Tragedy of Macbeth, with even greater dramatic momentum.
At the same time, Welles does not neglect the human side of Macbeth. His is one of only a few adaptations to keep the porter scene—often cut because directors worry its humor is out of place. It is indeed out of place—deliberately so. The Macbeths have just fled the scene of their crime with bloody hands, hearing knocking at the gate; now, the drunk porter comes to let Ross and Macduff in. Amidst the storm and the noblemen’s businesslike demeanor, the porter’s bawdy jokes and meandering speech are often seen as a distraction rather than a device to drive tension upwards (and give the Macbeths an excuse not to answer the door themselves—they must still be cleaning the blood off their hands). In Welles’s astute understanding of the play, however, the porter scene adds to the required tension; none of the three men know that a murder has been committed, and the stalling allows the viewer’s dread to grow in its incongruity.
Verdi’s Macbeth ends as Shakespeare’s does, with an operatic twist. Macduff kills Macbeth in battle; the chorus of soldiers and women salute his victory and the new king; and Malcolm promises peace, joy, and justice. It is grand, loud, victorious, and clean. The tyrant is defeated. If a stage director decides to hint at future unrest and a continual witches’ curse, Verdi does not overtly condone this.
Welles is more modern. The ending sees the witches looking at the castle, the celebration having fallen into silence as the screen fades to black. Banquo’s descendants—including James—are not yet on the throne; the threat to Malcolm and to Scotland is ever-present.
The Hero
Othello had its first court performance in 1604, two years before Macbeth. Shakespeare’s play of obsession is likely drawn from Giraldi Cinthio’s 1565 novella Gli Hecatommithi—possibly a later French translation—making the source material relatively current as opposed to early Scottish or English history, which provided the sources for the other plays here. Shakespeare, as usual, did not slavishly adhere to Cinthio’s plot or characters: in the play, Othello kills himself when he learns that he has been misled into believing Desdemona unfaithful (rather than returning to Venice to be killed by her family), and the character of Roderigo appears to be his original creation. What results is another “great” tragedy with a near-unparalleled cast of characters: a fatally flawed hero; an irredeemable villain; a heroine who defies easy categorization as passive victim or active, empowered woman; and a host of minor figures counterbalancing this mighty drama with simpler passions. While the circumstances of creating Macbeth showed certain similarities, Verdi’s and Welles’s journeys diverged dramatically when they took on Othello.
After Macbeth, Verdi did not complete a new Shakespeare project for almost 40 years. The great maestro had the luxury of time, money, and choice after a string of successes in the 1850s made him a household name. Following Macbeth, he had composed some of his most ambitious and crowd-pleasing works for opera houses in Italy and abroad, including but not limited to Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata, Don Carlos (for Paris), and La forza del destino (for Saint Petersburg)—all based on plays by the likes of Schiller and Hugo. He even returned to revise Macbeth in 1865, trimming it to a form that he felt even better suited Shakespeare’s drama, with opera’s fluff stripped away. But as his finances and reputation became secure in his fame and box-office draw, his output slowed accordingly. He only took on projects that he felt passionate about, no longer chasing elusive economic security. After Aida, written for the opening of Cairo’s opera house, he planned to retire. Only Richard Wagner could rival his fame and influence in the operatic world—perhaps a fact still true today. In modern terms, he had made it.
It took the machinations of his publisher Ricordi and the inspiration of Arrigo Boito—a young composer, playwright, and music critic—to coax the great maestro out of semi-retirement. Verdi first viewed Boito as an upstart who valued the burgeoning modernism of German and Austrian opera over Italian traditions, but both men recognized the other’s talent, and they bonded over their shared commitment to stage drama. The composition process was not without its clashes, but without Boito, Otello and Falstaff would likely not exist today.
In contrast to Verdi, Welles’s Othello was made a mere three years after Macbeth rather than 40, in the middle of the director/actor/producer’s necessarily prolific time due to financial woes (more on that later). That said, it was not one of Welles’s commercial endeavors, instead held together by passion, sweat, and on-the-fly filmmaking innovation. When costumes did not come in on time and the tight budget made it impossible to delay shooting, Welles staged Roderigo’s attempted murder of Cassio and Iago’s subsequent murder of Roderigo in a steamy bathhouse—clothes not necessary. Welles was a household name, but he did not have it made.
At the premiere of Otello, Verdi’s role was not unlike Welles’s as supreme artistic force. By this high point of his great career, Verdi had total authority over every part of an operatic production—not only the music but also the costumes, sets, and lighting. As he himself said, “I have complete authority to suspend the rehearsals and prevent the performance, even after the dress rehearsal, if either the execution or the mise-en-scène or anything else in the way the theater is run should not be to my liking.”
Welles, however, seemed more inclined to improvise and press forward rather than see any cancellation. Compromise is in the eye of the beholder. The making of Welles’s Othello is one of the famous filmmaking disasters, though the result shows little of this behind-the-scenes tumult. Like Macbeth, its use of light and shadow are visually striking, the depth of each playing to Iago’s evil and Desdemona’s purity—with the easily swayed Othello lost between them, captured in increasingly obfuscated and polluted light until his final, striking spotlight at the end.
There are three primary yet interlocking points where Verdi and Welles exhibit similar adaptational instincts: the base evil characterization of Iago, the heroic characterization of Othello, and the cleaning up of the play’s famously convoluted opening scene.
The character of Iago has more lines than the title role, but Verdi and Welles’s final versions keep Othello as the protagonist—though Verdi was attracted to Shakespeare’s most convincing and conniving villain, almost calling his opera Jago instead of Otello. Writing to Boito, he explains his change of mind:
[Jago] is (it’s true) the demon who sets everything in motion; but Otello is the one who acts. He loves, is jealous, kills, and kills himself. For my part, it would seem hypocritical not to call it Otello. I prefer it if they say, “He tried to fight a giant and was crushed,” rather than, “He tried to hide behind the title of Jago.” If you are of my opinion, let’s start baptizing it Otello, then.
Iago gets his great Credo in Otello, an aria laying bare his poor view of humanity and belief in a “cruel God.” This is a necessary operatic invention: Garry Wills points out that Shakespearian “asides” are harder to achieve in opera than in Shakespeare’s universally-lit theater. There may be some truth in this, especially as Otello premiered in the post-Wagner age (whether the infamous German composer and impresario actually pioneered dimming the lights in the auditorium is a question for another day, but Otello was premiered under conditions closer to today’s standard theatrical experience than Othello was). There are still asides delivered by Iago/Jago to the audience in Verdi and Boito’s work, but they are less frequent; the Credo, which Verdi called “most beautiful, most powerful, and Shakespearean in every way,” allows Iago/Jago to lay bare his plans and ethos to his audience before returning to his “honest” demeanor in front of his comrades.
Welles’s Iago, working with Shakespeare’s language, is Micheál Mac Liammóir, one of the founders of the Gate Theatre in Dublin with whom Welles spent crucial months training at the tender age of 18, and whose artistic practices he emulated throughout his career. Giving the role to such a key collaborator seems an acknowledgement of the actor and theater-maker’s influence upon the American titan. As in opera, Iago faces challenges on film in convincing other characters of his honesty, and the audience of his duplicitous intention—namely, he cannot address the audience directly. Welles gets around this by introducing some narration (more on that later) to fill the audience in on characters’ relationships and intentions. While perhaps inelegant, it leaves Mac Liammóir’s Iago free to connive with full viewer buy-in.
In his documentary Filming Othello (1978), Welles speaks at length about the poetry of Shakespeare’s language, notably the poetry of the language he gives to Othello. Like Verdi, Welles insists that—despite the disparity in speaking lines—Othello is the heart and soul of the action. Iago’s sentences are vulgar and common by comparison. His plain speaking can be construed as honesty, but he cannot make a hostile crowd believe in the truth of his love for a woman above his station.
The opening of Shakespeare’s play is deliberately disorientating, placing the audience and three characters on a dark Venetian street where action is clearly underway, but where it is not immediately clear who the characters are, how they are related, and why they’re thrown into consternation by Othello and Desdemona’s marriage.
Verdi and Welles both streamline the confusion of this opening and introduce Othello as the clear hero of the piece, albeit in different ways. In Shakespeare, he comes across as unshakeable from the start, merely instructing Brabantio’s men, “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.” He is unbothered by threats and clearly and calmly states his love for Desdemona, keeping the crowd from a fever pitch until Desdemona arrives to swear her own love and satisfy her father’s anger. Verdi and Welles are faithful to the essence of this introduction, and this scene is echoed in both versions albeit after different introductions to the title character.
In modern operatic performance, the role of Otello is often performed by a heldentenor—a “heroic” high male voice—due to the volume and stamina required for the role’s high-lying lines and need to sing over a large late-Romantic orchestra. However, Verdi did not specify this, and many early Otellos were what might be considered lyric or lyric-spinto tenors today. Regardless of modern performance practice, it is clear that Verdi intended a hero’s introduction for Otello, one that marks the character as architect of the unfolding drama.
Verdi achieves this by opening Otello in battle, as the Venetian forces led by Otello defeat the Turkish army in the midst of a storm. His score includes an organ, played with all stops open (maximum volume). Otello’s voice then emerges over or out from the continuous roar of the storm (it is not hard to see why bigger, heroic voices have made this role theirs over the past century). When he is confronted by Brabantio, the audience knows he is loved, respected, feared, and wholly deserving of all honors. The contrast between this and his pitiable ending, with its echoes of his first lyric love duet, sung alone, could not be more marked.
Welles, by contrast, opens his Othello with the funeral procession of Othello and Desdemona, and a man—presumably, and soon revealed to be, Iago—being hoisted outside the city walls in a gibbet. When it cuts back to the opening of the play, a new narration covers the events leading to the wedding of Othello and Desdemona; Welles keeps his fundamental fidelity to Shakespeare, but he knows that the freedom of a location shoot and the expectations of film audiences require different narrative techniques than did the early modern theater. Othello and Desdemona are then shown in a far happier light, the only figures in a grand Venetian cathedral save the officiating priest. Only when others invade this idyll and set off machinations beyond the couple’s control does tragedy inevitably ensue. When Othello is introduced, his end is no secret and his downfall inevitable.
Welles returned to Othello at the very end of his career with Filming Othello, where he narrates his aims, creative workarounds, and ultimate shortcomings with great generosity of spirit. The end of the film shows Welles fielding audience questions after a screening of Othello.
If you have a master plan for what you’re going to do, exactly where the camera is going to be, exactly what the scene is supposed to state, if you are locked into that you are depriving yourself of the divine accidents of movie-making, because everywhere there are beautiful accidents. The actor says something in a different way than you ever dreamed it could be said… there’s a smell in the air, there’s a look that changes the whole resonance of what you expected.
He then admits that not all accidents are so divine: “There are the true accidents, and my definition of a film director is the man who presides over accidents—[pause, the audience applauds]—but doesn’t make them,” he finishes with a laugh.
While Welles adds more words to camera to close the documentary, his final words at the Q&A session perhaps best sum up his career of continual striving: “With all my heart, I wish that I wasn’t looking back on Othello, but looking forward to it. That Othello would be one hell of a picture.”
A Lear Interlude
No other play in Shakespeare’s output approaches the bleak nihilism of his King Lear. The great Polish critic Jan Kott said that “King Lear gives one the impression of a high mountain that everyone admires, yet no one particularly wishes to climb.” The great British theater director Peter Brook described King Lear as a “mountain whose summit has never been reached.” Most likely directly preceding Macbeth in Shakespeare’s output, its body count is one of his highest, and any sense of order restored by its tragic denouement is almost laughably inadequate in the face of the destruction wrought. Not even Edgar defeating his bastard brother Edmund in the final duel and restoring some order puts right the agonizing deaths of Lear, his three daughters, and the Duke of Gloucester. Set in ancient Britain, its legends are divorced from any tangible history, and the play is all the more powerful and unsettling for it.
King Lear has an odd place in both Verdi and Welles’s outputs—almost continually on the edge, but never a Shakespeare play they put their full stamp on despite their desire to scale its heights.
Verdi wished his entire life to write a King Lear opera. He commissioned librettist Salvadore Cammarano to write a libretto in early 1850, three years after Macbeth premiered. He showed the same exactitude and attention to detail as he had in Macbeth when writing to his librettist early in the process:
At first sight, Lear is so tremendous, so intricate, that it would seem impossible to make an opera of it. However, after examining it closely, it seems to me that the difficulties, great as they are, are not insuperable. You know, we need not turn Lear into the sort of drama that has been customary up to now. We must treat it in a completely new way, without any regard for convention.
He lays out his main characters (Lear, Cordelia, Edgar, Edmund, and the Fool) and his secondary ones (Goneril, Regan, Kent, Gloucester), and suggests that the work be cut to eight or nine scenes—scaling down Shakespeare, but still expansive considering that many operas’ stories are told in four scenes or fewer.
Unfortunately, Cammarano died suddenly in 1852, and Verdi handed the work to Antonio Somma, his librettist on their current project Un ballo in maschera. What remains of this three-year process is found in letters from Verdi laying out his reservations with Somma’s adaptational choices and suggesting his own dramatic improvements. But Un ballo in maschera ran into trouble with the censors in Naples and then Rome, and Lear fell by the wayside indefinitely as Verdi and Somma struggled to amend their finished project in a way that could be staged.
Verdi never forgot about Lear. In 1896, he offered the libretto to Pietro Mascagni, the young composer of Cavalleria rusticana. Mascagni turned back to the great maestro and asked him why he did not set it to music. As Mascagni then recalled, “Softly and slowly he replied ‘the scene in which King Lear finds himself on the heath scared me.’” The mountain remained insurmountable.
Welles had left the United States for Europe in the late 1940s, owing an enormous sum to the IRS after a series of artistic gambles that did not pay off; he returned to the States in the middle of his tax exile to star in a made-for-TV adaptation of King Lear in 1953, directed by none other than Peter Brook, who scaled the mountain down to primetime size. This was a heavily cut version, excising the characters of Edgar and Edmund entirely, to neatly fit an hour-long television slot. Due to the aforementioned tax issues, Welles was guarded by IRS agents on set and in his hotel room, prohibited from making any purchases whilst filming, and obligated to send his entire salary minus expenses to pay off his enormous tax bill. He then returned to England, coming back to Hollywood in 1956 to take on more lucrative roles.
Welles’s performance towers over his co-stars’; despite merely being in his late 30s, his gravitas and intelligence of speech create a commanding Lear whose early lucidity contrasts shockingly, and poignantly, with his loss of respect, sanity, and dignity. His portrayal makes the King’s attempts to command—even when he has lost everything—palpable. This restraint and inner turmoil perfectly suit the television medium, but the format and Brook’s cuts are not grand enough for Welles’s creation.
Welles aimed to direct his own film version based on his subsequent 1956 New York stage production, working on a screen treatment in the months before his death in 1985, but it never came to be—almost certainly because of his financial woes and string of box-office bombs. Ultimately, this was another mountain whose summit remained out of reach.
The Clown
While Shakespeare’s plays have transcended the time and place they were written for, few of his characters have found lives beyond their plots. Hamlet always vacillates, then kills his uncle. Romeo and Juliet fall in love and die. Macbeth stalks his dagger, and Othello spies on his wife.
The exception may be Falstaff, the roguish “fat knight” that Shakespeare created to accompany Prince Hal. He first appears in Henry IV Part 1 and subsequently in Henry IV Part 2, where he takes over a greater percentage of the plot than in the first installment—almost 70% of the scenes rather than roughly 50%. His presence—or absence—is so felt in Henry V that his offstage death is lovingly narrated at length by Mistress Quickly, one of the few from Hal’s wayward days who appears in the court-focused drama. Then, as popular myth would have it, Queen Elizabeth asked for a play showing “Sir John in love,” and Shakespeare resurrected Falstaff for one final jaunt in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Even if many Shakespeare scholars consider this work and characterization an inferior, deflated, defanged version, it is hard to deny the delights of another outing for a man with such an unshakeable, unwavering belief in his own self and myth.
Falstaff may be Shakespeare’s most modern role: flawed as an understatement, lecherous and mendacious, lovable in the extreme. In his larger-than-life physicality and demeanor, he represents the unabashed freedom many adore and fear in themselves and others. In his singularity, he becomes a mirror reflecting whatever the audience, performer, or adaptor sees—or wants to see—in the world.
In his book Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, author Michael A. Anderegg explores at length the 19th-century perception of Shakespeare’s plays as both “high” and “low” culture at once—a perception that extended to their greatest interpreters and was taken forward, into the 20th century, by Orson Welles in his largely self-taught approach and popular appearances on stage, screen, and radio. Welles, moreover, famously never turned down a job that paid—possibly due to the enormous debts he owed the IRS for most of his working life, though an admirable artistic ethos in itself. These included advertisements, such as for Paul Masson wine from 1978 to 1981. The wine is no longer made, the family having sold the business, but Welles’s work is still visible thanks to dedicated YouTube archivists. On one YouTube upload, a comment from user @bigvalvader4341 reads, “This clip defines the hair’s breadth that exists between comedy and tragedy.”
This hair’s breadth is the crux of Chimes at Midnight, Welles’s 1966 film based on his stage work that evolved from Five Kings—an almost unstageable adaptation of Henry IV Part 1 through Richard III—to a stage version of Chimes at Midnight that was critically panned. The film is an unqualified masterpiece, keeping the necessarily political framing of the Henry IV plays and early Henry V while centering the corpulent knight’s misdemeanors and dreams. Welles incorporates narration from Holinshed’s 16th-century chronicle of England (just before Shakespeare’s own writing) to smooth over the rough edges of compressing many decades and three plays into one film.
While some have considered Chimes at Midnight inferior in ambition to Five Kings, Welles—acting and directing, Falstaffian in stature at the age of 50—smartly moves the knight to the narrative center. Five Kings, for instance, does not include the scenes at the end of Henry IV Part 1 where Hal believes his old friend dead in battle. Hal mourns his old mentor briefly before Falstaff reveals himself to merely have been playing possum and dragging the corpse of Henry Percy (“Hotspur”), whom the Prince killed, across the field to claim his own victory. This is included in Chimes at Midnight, shot on gloriously chaotic location. The result gives Falstaff the chance to relive former glories, and Hal the chance to mourn a man he thought dead, making the ultimate betrayal even worse.
The scenes where Welles is able to portray Falstaff’s vivacity, undimmed in the face of insurmountable reality, are transcendent. After grandly blustering through a barrage of lies about the men who robbed him of his own stolen goods—in reality, just Hal and his friend Poins, not several dozen bandits—his eyes crinkle as the truth is revealed: “By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye.” Soon after, he and Hal role play as the Prince and King, swapping roles midway through. As Hal, Falstaff defends his own honor with confidence and no fear of consequences even as Hal (like his father, the King) lays them out plainly. He declares his vices, age, and size with pride, zest, and love of life—no trace of embarrassment or apology. When he says, “Banish fat Jack, banish all the world,” we believe it.
But is it an act? Welles’s performance sits between the instinctive and the manufactured. Perhaps he is nothing more than the “villainous abominable misleader of youth” Hal describes him as. But there is a pathos in this attempt to wield influence and finagle his way to free roast dinners and sack. Limited power remains to him. The twinkle in earlier scenes makes the grief behind “I am old”—uttered half to his paramour Doll Tearsheet, half to himself—all the more heartbreaking.
According to Welles, “The relationship between Falstaff and the prince is no longer the simple one that one finds in Shakespeare. It is a foretelling, a preparation for the tragic ending.” The ending of Henry IV Part 2, which proves the climatic scene of Chimes at Midnight, is among Shakespeare’s most heartbreaking, and the seeds for Prince Hal’s rejection of Falstaff are sown from their first jocular interactions. Hal warns his old friend that the grave gapes three times wider for him than for other men, and the film ends with Mistress Quickly’s narration from Henry V and a large coffin on its way to final rest. It still seems too small for such a force of vitality.
If Welles sees the entire world and universal march towards death in Falstaff, Verdi allows the fat knight—and by extension, himself and his audiences—one last caper. When writing Otello, Boito convinced Verdi to make a later return to comedy—something he had not done since the earliest days of his career. “There is only one way to end better than with Otello,” the librettist wrote to the composer, “and that is to end victoriously with Falstaff.” Boito was correct: Verdi’s triumphant return to comedy after decades of operatic tragedy proved a grand ending to a storied career. The pair largely follow the plot of The Merry Wives of Windsor, though they incorporate the famous “honor” speech from Henry IV Part 1 in the first scene, as the morally ambiguous Falstaff swears that money is his only need and aim. As Verdi wrote:
My Falstaff is not merely the hero of The Merry Wives of Windsor, who is simply a buffoon, and allows himself to be tricked by the women, but also the Falstaff of the two parts of Henry IV. Boito has written the libretto in accordance.
The pair also looked not at old English history and nostalgic moods, as many other composers who approach the Henriad and Falstaff have, but to their own Italian roots: the mischief of Giovanni Florentino’s Il Pecorone (which Shakespeare may have drawn from for his Merry Wives plot), Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, and 18th– and 19th-century opera buffa. Falstaff is an elemental human force, not belonging only to English ideas and modes.
Musically, Falstaff and Otello bear the hallmarks of Verdi’s late career, acknowledging developments in the music, artistry, and dramatic conventions of opera. Set pieces, be they arias or choruses, became secondary to music-as-drama that seamlessly keeps the story moving forward; it is easier to perform excerpts from Macbeth in concert than it is Otello or Falstaff, and many music scholars consider Falstaff Verdi’s only true through-composed opera, as no list of numbers is printed in the score. In this sparkling comedy, Joseph Kerman points out how Verdi lovingly subverts operatic conventions:
In Falstaff Verdi nearly completed his campaign against the aria, the most venerable symbol of opera’s formality and artificiality. The title character is given no aria, only a diminutive canzonetta (which has proved susceptible, however, to encores); Ford gets a dramatic monologue; Mistress Quickly, a brief, free solo number; and Nannetta in her disguise as the Queen of Fairies, a song with chorus. Only Fenton, the tenor, gets an actual aria, a gift-offering to the opera audience, and also a wry acknowledgment that his voice then as now is the one irrevocably marked operatic. As to artifice, Fenton’s aria is set to a sonnet. And lest these little jokes, among so many in Falstaff, seem too esoteric, Fenton is made to relinquish the end of his aria to Nannetta, and when he tries to recoup by singing along with her, the two of them are unceremoniously cut short by Alice, the operatic (or, rather, anti-operatic) Mistress Ford.
While Falstaff has many solo moments to pontificate, including the “honor” aria, he is not stuck in old operatic modes while the younger, wilier characters outwit him. He is given the honor of being a man of his times and the driver of his own story, a fond, fallible, morally neutral mirror of human nature.
Like The Merry Wives of Windsor, Verdi’s opera ends with Falstaff outsmarted and unveiled for the rapscallion he is. According to Gary Wills, this final scene sees Falstaff “in effect … buried and raised again to life. Deflation will become a form of sublimation.” Even though everyone knows he is a fraud and scoundrel, no one can turn against him. He remains beloved by the audience and characters alike, as all share a banquet celebrating the weddings of Anne (Nanetta) Page and Fenton. And while admitting he has been defeated, Falstaff remains defiantly aware of his own value to the last note.
Ogni sorta di gente dozzinale
Mi beffa e se ne gloria;
Pur, senza me, costor con tanta boria
Non avrebbero un briciol di sale.
Son io che vi fa scaltri.
L’arguzia mia crea l’arguzia degli altri.
All sorts of cheap people
Mock me and boast of it;
Even though, without me, these people with such arrogance
Would not have a crumb of salt.
I’m the one who makes you clever.
My wit creates the wit of others.
Falstaff celebrates the irrepressibility of life; no matter how many knocks Falstaff takes, his vibrancy and vivacity remain undimmed for all time. Chimes at Midnight celebrates carrying on in the face of the inevitability of death and the eventual blow that one cannot come back from. Despite this seeming contradiction, a similar obsession with mortality emerges when the two works are taken together: what one does to establish a legacy, versus how one approaches handing over that legacy to an afterlife no one can control. It is hard to find a more complete picture of the fullness of life than these two works combined.
Verdi would live another eight years after Falstaff’s 1893 premiere, dying in the first year of the 20th century but writing no more operas—indeed, no more major compositions aside from his Te Deum. Chimes at Midnight was Welles’s last full non-documentary theatrical film released before his death. He spent his last years battling financiers and his love of drink while sharing his wisdom and frank observations of film’s industry and new talents. It feels fitting that both ended their careers with Shakespeare’s most chameleonic trickster, a clown and tragedian who encapsulates all the world.
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