Michael Anderegg
Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture
NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 231 11229 7
216pp
$16.50 US (PB)

Uploaded 16 April 1999

Long before Shakespeare in Love became the most commercially successful depiction of the bard and his work on screen, there were directors in love with Shakespeare. Loving Will, as opposed to flirting with him, demands commitment–at least three films worth. Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zefferelli, and Kenneth Branagh have all, in different ways, proved worthy suitors. The most cinematically daring, and least successful at the box office, has been Welles. His Macbeth  (1948), Othello  (1952), and Chimes at Midnight (1967) should, according to Michael Anderegg in this compelling analysis, be regarded as important films.

Shakespeare is a name that figures in virtually every artistic medium to which Welles contributed. Before he did his infamous War of the Worlds radioplay in 1938, he broadcast versions of Macbeth, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. The first part of the book considers this output, but we feel all too briefly, since it is through the medium of radio that Welles’s efforts to popularize Shakespeare reached their widest audience. Anderegg is more than thorough when dealing with Orson’s efforts to bring the Bard to Broadway, although he does not examine the production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – not Shakespeare to be sure, but close – which Welles’s co-producer, John Houseman has argued was their finest theatrical project.

Minor quibbles. Besides a superb assessment of the films, the book provides useful and new information about Welles’s pedagogical projects:  Everybody’s Shakespeare – later to be known as the Mercury Shakespeare – which he first co-wrote at 18 with Roger Hill; and the accompanying Mercury text records, done in the late 1930s. Together or separately, these sources were a boon to educators. The author also extends the non-filmic part of his analysis to a look at Welles’s efforts to do the Bard justice on television.

A central tenet of the book is that Welles was an artist who, perhaps more than any other, bridged two cultures – the high and the popular. Anderegg likens Welles’s direction of the notorious all-black Voodoo Macbeth, staged under the auspices of the Federal Theater Project in 1936, to a P. T. Barnum spectacle that edifies. When Welles took centre-stage as an actor, it was as an “epic performer” in large roles – audience grabbers – to which he was suited by size and temperament. As the author shows, a major part of this acting persona was honed during the pre-Citizen Kane Shakespeare performances. We might add that Welles’s situation with respect to radio was somewhat different. Orson preferred acting in that medium to any other. It bequeath him more range, neutralizing the powerful physical presence he exuded on stage – he played a convincing Hamlet for the CBS Columbia workshop in 1936, a role he would never in theatre or film.

In assessing Welles’s Shakespeare films, Anderegg provides a useful history of their initial reception – less than stellar in the UK and America. They were frequently compared to the Olivier’s trilogy, of Henry V  (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1955) and found wanting. Reaction in the UK is perhaps understandable, while in America it seems that critics just could not accept someone from their own Midwest with a penchant for innovation, making important films from such sacred texts. Not surprisingly, as the author shows, continental Europe felt otherwise, especially regarding Othello. The complex history of that film, which extends to the present, is carefully mapped with an eye to what was gained and (especially) lost in its 1992 restoration.

Prior to Othello, Welles had directed Macbeth. This was Shakespeare on a budget, made for Republic Pictures using some of the same sets on which Gene Autry and Roy Rogers crooned. Although some have found the project laughable, the author clearly shows how Welles courageously hoped this film would reach an audience unaccustomed to viewing high art onscreen. Perhaps the most ambitious of the Welles films is Chimes at Midnight. In its attempt to cut and paste from several of the plays, it is heir to Orson’s ill-fated 1938 stage venture, Five Kings . Chimes is discussed in relationship to its theatrical precursor and as a post-modern text, which both reconstructs and “deconstructs” its sources.

The final chapter focuses specifically on something that is mentioned throughout: Welles as performer. It is the most extensive and perceptive commentary in this area that we are familiar with.

Although much has been written about Welles of late – biographies, film criticisms, and several assessments of his work in theatre, this book fills a valuable and hitherto unoccupied niche. The timing is especially apropos, given the plethora of Shakespeare films released during the 1990s. Anderegg does, however, assume a basic familiarity with aspects of Welles’s life on the part of readers. Anyone curious enough to have already perused one of the biographies will be more than rewarded should they select this book as sequel.

Blair Davis and Paul Heyer