Editor’s note: Literature / Film Quarterly has kindly allowed us to run an article from their current issue (44:2) on Chimes at Midnight by Benjamin Hilb, a lecturer and advisor in the Department of Theatre at Northwestern University. Hilb previously authored “Contesting Olivier and JFK: The Opposition to Wartime Propaganda in Welles’s Chimes at Midnight,” which appeared last summer in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, issue 17.2 (2015); and “Afro-Hatian-American Ritual Power: Vodou in the Welles-FTP Voodoo Macbeth,” which appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin, issue 32.4 (Winter 2014). Readers seeking additional Literature / Film Quarterly articles will be pleased to learn they are archived up to the last three years and available at JSTOR.org
By BENJAMIN HILB
Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) performs a cinematic collage. It adapts several early modern texts across genres and authors, comprising multiple Shakespeare plays, including histories and a comedy; and comprising a history proper, too, as it integrates Holinshed’s Chronicles as well.[1] The film, moreover, incorporates several narrative modes, which are linked by their shared concern with the past. Indeed, scholars have long observed that Chimes at Midnight positions itself as a sustained meditation on memory and history. Jack J. Jorgens, for instance, states that the film “show[s] the fifteenth century filtered through memory and imagination” (110); and Andrew M. McLean writes that the film “lead[s] the viewer to an understanding of his place in history and of the forces of history as they operate in life” (197). But critics overlook the tension between memory and history in the film. And this reflects a more general oversight in critical treatments of Chimes at Midnight, which have not fully grasped the contests the film stages between and among its various narrative modes and media.
Michael Anderegg recognizes one dimension of the inter-medial tension in the film when he contends that the “governing strategy” of Chimes at Midnight is “the rewriting of Shakespeare’s text, a rewriting that includes an attempted erasure of writing, a critique of rhetoric, indeed an undermining of language itself” (126). Robert H. Bell takes this recognition further, arguing that “Welles’s film [Chimes at Midnight] comprises a critique of language, in ways that resemble the movement beyond language toward spectacle” (20). Anderegg’s focus on the film’s writing is instructive, and Bell astutely suggests that the film “critiques” writing to ultimately privilege its own visual medium. But Bell does not flesh out just how it does so, and neither critic explains the carefully wrought relationships between the film’s multiple writings and narrative modes and media. It is my purpose in this essay to demonstrate how Chimes at Midnight effectively organizes its different narrative modes and media—including memory, history, writing, theater, sound, image, and, more broadly, film—establishing a cinematic hierarchy through various narrative contests that announce themselves at the very outset of the film. In the first section of what follows I will demonstrate how the film presents a logic of containment and displacement to assert its own cinematic predominance among several media, effectively reworking memory, history, writing, and theater in its own moving image.[2] In my second section I will explain how the film stages a sustained inter-medial contest between sound and image by thematizing it through what Dean A. Hoffman astutely explains as the film’s “comprehensive engagement with a matrix of shifting power relations” in Shakespeare’s and Holinshed’s texts (104).[3] I will conclude by expounding Falstaff’s key symbolic role in the film’s inter-medial dynamics.
Welles expressed his investment in the inter-medial aspect of Chimes at Midnight in an interview about the film. When asked by Juan Cobos and Miguel Rubio how he conceives scenes, Welles responds, “Music. Music and poetry. It’s that rather than simply visual” (160). He goes on to suggest that the visual comes out of these media, saying, “With me, the visual is a solution to what the poetical and musical form dictates”; a solution, as I will conceive it here, to the competing demands of the poetical and musical forms or, as I will call them, the written and aural modes of the film (Cobos and Rubio 160). The visual and kinetic image is also a solution to several other medial modes in the film. Resolving and regulating the “dictates” of the written, aural, and theatrical media as well as the memorial and historical narrative modes that make up Chimes at Midnight, the visual, I will argue, is a “solution” to all of them, indeed the filmic solution of all of them, produced by their admixture, and so contains them all. In other words, the moving image in Chimes at Midnight, as the quintessentially cinematic, is framed as an encompassing medium greater than the sum of its constituent media.
Cinematic Assimilation
Chimes at Midnight opens with a well-known, retrospective sequence that frames its narrative as a shared memory. The first line of dialogue, Master Shallow’s familiar “Jesus, the days that we have seen” (31), initiates a mode of remembrance that is reciprocated by Falstaff, who a little later in the scene replies with titular weight, “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Robert Shallow” (32).[4] So when the expressive close-up of these two old cronies gazing nostalgically into the fire dissolves into darkness, closing the sequence, we are left with the distinct sense that now we, too, will see “the days.” For, as Samuel Crowl observes, the opening sequence “create[s] the impression of a flashback. Its effect is to allow us to see that this is Falstaff’s story. We are to witness the glory of his days and to partake in the sorrow of their passing” (41). The film’s narrative is thus introduced as a memorial narrative, but the memorial mode is immediately depicted as a cinematic mode. For when Falstaff and Shallow first sit down in front of the fire, the fireplace and the wall in which it is set look curiously like an illuminated screen. Falstaff’s recall in particular is screened as a scene of seeing suggestive of cinematic viewing: stoically looking into the screen-like fire, he seems to see in it (or on it) “the days that they have seen.”
By reflexively presenting the performance of remembrance as a mode of filmic spectatorship, Chimes at Midnight suggests that memory itself is a kind of cinematic adaptation. The film’s memorial reflexivity insinuates, that is, that remembering, in its imaginary visual and acoustic dimensions, is like watching a film. When Falstaff and Shallow sit by the same screen-like fire and repeat some of their conversation verbatim later in the film, the flashback seeming to have come full circle, the remembering men, now with the addition of Silence, are visually framed by and contained within the luminescent, cinematic wall. The filmic mode thus images its containment of the memorial mode in which the film commences. Chimes at Midnight thereby privileges cinema as a medium of reflective consciousness that exceeds the bounds of that consciousness by incorporating it as cinematic. It appropriates and overtakes memory, initiating a logic of containment and displacement through which the film will repeatedly assert a cinematic hierarchy at the top of which it places its own narrative medium as film.
After the opening scene and the intervening title sequence, Chimes at Midnight proceeds with a voiceover narration: “King Richard II was murdered. Some say at the command of the Duke Henry Bolingbroke. In Pomfret Castle, on February the 14th, 1400” (34). This, it seems, given the film’s flashback framing, will be the past remembered by Falstaff and Shallow in the film’s first scene. But this is a historical narration, one based, as we see in the film’s credits, on Holinshed’s Chronicles. It is as if Chimes at Midnight begins again with a different narrative in a different narrative mode, setting Falstaff and Shallow’s memories in contest with Holinshed’s history, which imposes its own narrative authority. For the history is presented as if it would set the record straight, displacing the subjective memories of Falstaff and Shallow with an “official” account while also containing their personal stories within its broader sweep of events. Unlike the memories of the two old men, which remain vague and are effectively mystified by Falstaff’s deep, silent gaze into the fire, the historical narration begins with a clear statement of undeniable fact: “King Richard II was murdered.” At one point it even invokes “truth,” insisting plainly that the “true heir to the realm,” in spite of Henry Bolingbroke’s reign, “was Edmund Mortimer” (34). Moreover the voiceover, without a visible speaking body to locate and materialize it, is abstract, god-like in its nowhere-yet-everywhere quality and therefore authoritative in its utterance. Memory and history in the film thus exist in tension as both establish foundational modes of accounting for the narrative past, but the succeeding historical mode, in its official abstracted guise, integrates and supplants the memorial mode that comes before.
The screenplay of Chimes at Midnight, as an evolution of a stage-play titled Five Kings that Welles first wrote—not composed but compiled and arranged—in high school, inscribes an additional level of memory and history, and reflects the adaptive logic of the film. After staging the show as his senior project at the renowned Todd School for Boys, Welles rewrote and performed the play two more times and on two different continents over the span of some 25 years before turning it into the screenplay for Chimes at Midnight.[5] So the film is not only an adaptation of at least five Shakespearean source-plays of various genres, but also the intricate adaptation—the writing and rewriting, staging and re-staging—of an “original” dramatic compilation by Welles that underwent changes and additions over the course of many years, reflecting multiple historical and cultural moments, and several different periods in the director’s own life.[6] As a strategic integration of memory and history, then, the film is also a mixed memory of multiple rewritings and performances that culminates, significantly, in a film that has been called Welles’s masterpiece, the last and best product of a long history of page and stage drafts, arguably the best work of Welles’s prolific career. As Anderegg asserts, “Chimes at Midnight has gradually come to be recognized both as one of the most intelligent and imaginative of films adapted from Shakespeare and as one of Orson Welles’s finest achievements, a film at least equal in energy and brilliance to Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons” (125). So, as the latest version of a revisionary project that spanned many years, Chimes at Midnight comprises its theatrical antecedents, but as the best version thereof it excels them in and as film.
The “official” English history in question performs a similar adaptation as inclusion-supersession. By narrating Holinshed’s Chronicles, Welles interpolates Shakespeare’s own source material into his cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare, revealing the Shakespearean “original” to be an adaptation as well.[7] And the Chronicles, the source of the source, despite the apparently singular possessive of “Holinshed’s,” is not only multiply authored, but compiled and adapted from the work of literally hundreds of authors.[8] The further back we trace the film’s history, the more multitudinous it becomes, introducing a plethora of historical narratives doubtless selected from myriad others, themselves likely adapted from still other, older narratives and/or from memories, personal and collective. Yet the narratives selected and revised for publication in and as Holinshed’s Chronicles survive as a once and still in many ways authoritative document of English history, a document that simultaneously contains and displaces its abundant constituents, editing and combining them into a newer, arguably more substantial, in almost all cases more popular, and undeniably monumental narrative of England’s past.
This organizing schema, by which one narrative and/or narrative medium effectively incorporates and replaces another, finds visual representation in a key title credit in Chimes at Midnight, just prior to the Holinshed narration. The eerie closing shot of the title sequence depicts several soldiers standing in strange formation, almost motionless beneath a dismally cloudy sky, many of their fellows hanging dead in the background. And only one credit is superimposed on this image: “Narration based on Holinshed’s Chronicles spoken by Ralph Richardson” (34). Although the writer receives credit—Holinshed, we quickly infer, wrote or rather was principally involved in the writing of the Chronicles on which the narration is based[9]—the credit clearly is intended primarily to recognize Ralph Richardson, the narrative speaker: his name is presented in much larger font than the rest of the words in the credit. Had acknowledging Holinshed been as important as acknowledging Richardson, Holinshed would have received his own credit—“Narration based on Holinshed’s Chronicles” (standing alone)—or his name would have appeared in the same font size as that in which Richardson’s appears. As it is, Richardson’s name comes second, seeming to suggest secondariness, but exhibits prominence with its font size. So what is second and last in the sequence takes precedence and is primary, containing and displacing what comes before. Likewise Richardson’s spoken narrative, more recent than Holinshed’s Chronicles, contains the words of Holinshed’s Chronicles even as it takes their place and prominence. And likewise Holinshed’s history, coming after the remembrances of Falstaff and Shallow, displaces their memorial narrative while also containing them in its more comprehensive historical account. This ordering principle, I contend, constitutes the logic of the film as a confluence of narrative modes and media. The logic might best be described as adaptive progression: what comes last and contains that which came before presents itself as the dominant medium of communication and the historical authority. This also explains why Welles presents the Chronicles in the film, rather than Shakespeare’s plays alone. Shakespeare’s plays, the film affirms, contain yet alter, add to, and supersede the Chronicles in the same way that Welles’s film contains and supersedes Shakespeare and the Chronicles with Welles’s own excisions, alterations, and additions.
In addition to evidencing the progressive logic of Welles’s adaptation, the Holinshed credit, as it lingers on screen and subsequently in our minds, inflects the next image with a significantly graphic impression that transposes Holinshed’s narrative medium, writing, into the cinematic. It does not take a particularly careful viewing of the title sequence to notice that the credit for the narration lingers momentarily into the first shot of the next scene, which initially frames nothing but the sky, and so at first seems to frame nothing at all. Indeed, the opening words of the narration are uttered into a void, a blank picture that prompts disconnection from the audio-visual narrative of the film. As we hear Richardson begin to read pieces of Holinshed’s Chronicles, we see nothing but light on a screen and are consequently pulled out of the picture, made suddenly and acutely aware that we are merely looking at a screen onto which light is being projected. By briefly waking us from the dreamlike effects of cinematic technique, Chimes at Midnight foregrounds the technics of cinema. So, with the voiceover credit lingering in our minds, and along with it the impression of writing evoked by Holinshed, we perceive the voiceover not just as story, and not just as historical narrative, but also as a cinematic mode of inscription, as if the words spoken were thereby written onto the empty screen as they might otherwise be onto a blank page. The technical emphases on pure image as projected light, on pure voice without a bodily referent, and on voiceover as written narration precipitate a sudden intermingling of technical components of the cinema: the acoustic presence of writing pours into the visual vacuity of the screen as so much ink, reminding us of the cinema’s origination as the cinemato-graph. The subsequent images therefore register as a dynamic pictorial form of writing, a kind of luminous transcription of Shakespeare and Holinshed. The dramatic history of and in Chimes at Midnight, in other words, successively appears in so many screened images as a multiplex rewriting in the language of cinema. So, as with memory, Chimes at Midnight reworks writing and history in its own cinematic image, simultaneously, again, containing and displacing them.
The film treats the theatrical mode—perhaps its most prominent medial antecedent as a Shakespearean film—in like fashion. When Falstaff and Hal decide to put on a play extempore in the tavern in Eastcheap, Chimes at Midnight stages theater cinematically. The knight and Prince play the King and Prince, respectively, then switch their roles, playfully remonstrating each other while acclaiming and defending themselves in theatrical guise, sitting on or standing before a makeshift throne—a chair set atop a table. Above the chair is a softly lit window that, like the fireplace in the opening sequence, looks like an illuminated screen, reminding viewers, as the camera takes advantage of its freedom in filming close-ups of the actors and the tavern audience from various angles, that this theater is screened—theater in and of a film. Moreover, the screen-like window appears most prominently in the numerous shots over-the-shoulder of Hal playing himself—or Falstaff playing Hal—looking up at the acting king from an extreme low angle, literally pointing up the mock authority of the make-believe king. In line with and above the king, lambent in the top of the frame, is the screen-like window, expressing the highest authority of cinema—an authority in line with, though even higher than, that of the king himself. Even as it thus encompasses and rules over this theater like its court, it is as if the film—visualized by an image of a cinematic screen—were saying that theater, like this little play, is but a little imitation of its dominant medium.
Visual vs. Aural: The Percy Rebellion
For all its inter-medial competitions and assertions of cinematic jurisdiction, Chimes at Midnight also stages a crucial intra-medial contest between the two primary media of film: sound and image. “The criticism of Chimes,” as Anderegg observes, has duly noted the vexed relationship between the two in Welles’s film, “centering” as critical treatments have “on the uncertain relationship between sound and image” (125). But criticism has seen this uncertain dynamic as a technical “fault” (Anderegg 126). Anderegg insightfully shifts the critical accent on the matter by reading it rather as a “postmodern … deconstruct[ion] of [the film’s] source material,” but he nevertheless misses the way the film thematizes the troubled, indeed antagonistic relationship between its sounds and images, or between what I will call the aural and visual media of the film (126). Chimes at Midnight weaves its sound-image clashes through the power dynamics at stake in the film’s monarchical narrative.
Returning to the opening sequence of the film with careful attention to Falstaff and Shallow’s reminiscent exchange reveals that Chimes at Midnight presents a relationship between the aural and the visual at its outset. It presents two modes of memory as two different modes of sensory recall: Shallow suggests their apparently shared memories are visual—“the days that we have seen”—while Falstaff invokes them as aural—“We have heard the chimes at midnight” (32). Both modes of remembrance, tuned to image and sound, respectively, constitute the film as film, a composition of sight and sound, yet they vie for cinematic prominence throughout. The opening sequence, as stated, culminates in a reflexive presentation of remembering as a scene of seeing suggestive of cinematic viewing rather than listening; and Shallow gets the last word in this scene when at its end he repeats, “Jesus, the days that we have seen” (32). But as he says this, bells chime in the distance. And the chiming, explicitly associated in Falstaff’s phrase with hearing, underscores the aural aspect of the film as they link it, across a fade-to-black, to the title sequence. So even while they are ambient, indeed easy to miss for much of the opening scene, the chimes sound throughout it, suggesting an aural underpinning of the film’s visual images. And yet the visual medium, I will argue, prevails in Chimes nevertheless. Through a series of such technical and referential mini-contests between the aural and the visual, Chimes at Midnight will repeatedly crown the latter champion, the quintessential, indispensable cinematic mode.
I might well say crown as king. For these medial contests, as stated, intercept the story’s primary monarchical conflict: the challenge to Bolingbroke’s kingship made by the Percys. Kingly authority in Chimes at Midnight is figured in visual terms and cinematic images, which, as I will show, repeatedly prevail over rebelliously framed aural assertions and challenges. In the scene introduced by the first Holinshed narration, Henry IV’s court and castle at Windsor are marked by high windows through which sunlight beams down in narrow shafts. Welles strategically mobilizes these beaming rays as spotlights in the beginning of the scene when each of the Percys step into a shaft of light in time with their respective names in the narration: “There came Northumberland, his son Henry Percy, called Hotspur, and Worcester” (35). At Windsor, the Holinshed narration informs, “To prove” that “the true heir to the realm was Edmund Mortimer,” the Percys stepping thusly into the spotlight visually signals their challenge to the King’s authority, which, in turn, is marked by similar but much more pronounced, indeed starkly visible beams of light (35). When he rebuffs so much as the mention of his rival Mortimer, Henry IV sits on high, literally highlighted by the sun’s rays projecting neatly through the window, his crown, to top it off, glinting, indeed glaring authoritatively, directly under the light. And if the arresting rays’ authoritative connotation were not clear enough, it is accentuated, when Worcester approaches the King, by the low-angle from which he, and we, look up at the royal figure. The cynosure of the court and of England, the King asserts his authority in the privileged light of the throne, which, shining down from the heavens on this medieval western ruler, might well be seen symbolically as the light of the Christian God. A visual marker, arguably, of ultimate authority, it also marks the authority of the visual, for its projecting beams look, too, like those of a cinematic projector.
Welles has long been known as a cinematic artist especially interested in the self-reflexivity of his medium. As Kerry Brougher asserts:
For Welles, who had studied magic, the entire film apparatus—theater, projection, light, camera, sound—was something that could be “experienced” within the film’s frame; part of the pleasure of the cinema was the excitement derived by the audience as self-aware observers of filmic pyrotechnics, the highlighting of what had before been primarily invisible. (27)
Brougher, not surprisingly, cites Citizen Kane in particular, analyzing the projection room sequence as self-reflexive cinema par excellence. James Naremore makes the same observation, stating that “the conversation among reporters [in the projection room] is one of the most self-reflexive moments in the film” (144). The most striking and most self-reflexive aspect of the scene, of course, is the lighting, supplied only, it seems, by that which pours down out of the projection booth in vivid filmic beams—much like the light that pours down from upper windows in Henry IV’s court in Chimes at Midnight. So as a medieval analogue of filmic projection, the kingly light of authority in Chimes at Midnight signals, like the projecting light in what is perhaps Citizen Kane’s most self-reflexive scene, the primary and exclusively visual cinematic medium, effectively and rather brilliantly bringing it “within the film’s frame” (Brougher 27). Chimes at Midnight, though set in medieval times, alludes self-reflexively to its modern mode of presentation as film.
But the film, as Falstaff and Shallow suggest in their own cinematic allusions, is not only visual, but aural, too. And in the midst of the King’s visually accentuated authority on the throne, the Percys’ complaint and the King’s reaction to it point up the aural dimension of Chimes at Midnight, and link it with the Percys’ counterclaim to authority on behalf of Edmund Mortimer. Thus when Northumberland pursues his plaint with the first line in the scene after the Holinshed narration, “My Lord—”, the King interrupts with a silencing censure: “Henceforth, let me not hear you speak of Mortimer, or you shall hear in such a kind from me as will displease you” (36). Northumberland immediately tries again, saying, “My good lord, hear me” (36, emphases mine). The defiance of the Percys, who have infringed on Bolingbroke’s reign by defending Mortimer’s royal right, is thus charged with aural supplication and refusal. When moments later in the same scene they consult privately, having been publicly and harshly dismissed by the King, the Percys continue to invoke the aural. Worcester says to Hotspur, “Hear you, cousin, a word” (37). But Hotspur, wanting to be heard himself, responds, “Hark you, uncle, did not King Richard then / Proclaim my brother Edmund Mortimer / Heir to the crown?” (38). Then his father Northumberland chimes in with an answer, “He did, myself did hear it” (38, emphases mine). So those who contest Henry IV’s kingship are associated in the film, through their courtly contestation and confidential conspiring, with the aural dimension, with hearing and sound, which is thereby implicitly positioned against the film’s luminescent visual aspect, which conversely represents even as it is represented by the King.[10]
While the film works from beginning to end to champion the sight and light of cinematic authority, the Percys’ aurally underscored charge is not simply pictured as secondary, but as a legitimate challenge to Henry IV’s visually dominant reign. Established as aurally contesting characters, the Percys, as they plot to dethrone Bolingbroke directly after his refusal to hear them in court, are imaged again, like they are during the Holinshed narration, in menacing relation to the projecting beams of light associated most expressly and authoritatively with the King. As Hotspur rants against Bolingbroke, his father and uncle appear in low-angle amid two stark shafts of light that beam down from the court’s high windows, connoting both their disapproval of Hotspur’s hotheadedness and their authority over him. Indeed, in the preceding shot of Hotspur ranting, he is framed to look smaller, his head appearing to come up only to the hip of his uncle as though he were a child among reproving adults.[11] The image of Worcester and Northumberland effectively looking down on him with the force of the downwardly beaming light bolsters the association between projected light, cinema, and authority even as it endues the elder Percys with that authority. But significantly, Worcester and Northumberland do not stand in the light as the King sits in it. Rather, they stand between and beneath the two prominent rays, reflecting the fact that they are not themselves vying for kingship, but trying to control the power of the king. Figures of manipulation whose “own hands,” as Worcester reminds Bolingbroke, “helped to make [Bolingbroke] so portly,” the Percys now direct their behind-the-scenes power against him (36). Thus Worcester treacherously advises, “You, my lord [Northumberland], / Shall secretly into the bosom creep / Of that same noble prelate well-beloved, / The Archbishop,” and he concludes, “No further go in this / Than I by letter shall direct our course” (41). As soon as Worcester introduces his treasonous designs on the Archbishop, chimes begin sounding in the background, reestablishing the aural sway of the Percys and enlarging it to threaten the throne. For the Percy elders contest the kingship in order to contain it, to remain—outside yet around the light—the acting power behind the figure thereof, which has become, through and as Bolingbroke, too independently powerful.
Hotspur, however, does step into the symbolic light. When he finally finishes his diatribe against Bolingbroke, calling him “this thorn, this canker,” Hotspur is framed in a long shot, and one shaft of light shines down from a centrally framed upper window (38). Hotspur walks through it and remains in line with it for the rest of the scene, suggesting his designs on the throne and his direct rivalry with Prince Hal, Bolingbroke’s heir, whom he invokes in the scene’s closing lines: “And that same sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales … I would have him poisoned with a pot of ale” (41). The rivalry culminates later in the film when, in the Battle at Shrewsbury, Hotspur and Hal engage in individual combat. But in addition to his royal objective, Hotspur’s alignment with the monarchical spotlight also signals that he is being contained and manipulated by his elders, as they, standing near but outside the royal light, would surround, contain, and control the king. This is borne out by Worcester’s flagrant deception of Hotspur just before the Battle at Shrewsbury. Hotspur has taken command of the rebel army, suggesting his legitimate potential for kingship himself, and Worcester deliberately withholds crucial information from him: the King’s offer of grace to avert war and death. Before reporting their conversation with the King to Hotspur, Worcester says to Vernon, a fellow rebel, “Good cousin, let not Harry [Hotspur] know, / In any case, the offer of the King” (139).[12] Evidently Hotspur might well have accepted that offer, but he never hears of it because the Percys work furtively, out of view, cunningly trying to regulate figures of power for their own benefit.
Hotspur’s role as the Percys’ primary military instrument fittingly finds acoustic resonance in a scene, shortly after the Windsor supplication, at his own castle. The scene commences, in fact, with an instrument: a watchman blows his trumpet in close-up. And watchmen keep blowing trumpets throughout the scene, at intervals complementing and interrupting the scene’s primary action. The second time the trumpeters appear, their sounding directly succeeds and punctuates Hotspur’s vehement disparagement of the King, “I say unto you again, you are a shallow, cowardly hind, and you lie!” clearly marking their consonance with his rebellion against Bolinbroke (54). Not insignificantly, the trumpeters appear on several different turrets, suggesting that they surround the castle. Thus the aural medium of sound surrounds and indeed contains and directs Hotspur’s military power as he prepares, in this scene, for war. The trumpets fill Hotspur’s realm and so suffuse the four-minute scene with their instrumental announcements that they begin to seem ridiculous.[13] Their comical aspect is clearly intentional, most obviously when Hotspur, having just come from a bath, accidentally drops his towel. His own “hind” appears naked for a brief moment before an abrupt cut to a shot of the trumpets with their bells flared open in extreme close-up, playfully standing in, as holes, for the holed crack Hotspur briefly reveals. But however humorous, the trumpets nonetheless signal an aural challenge to the visual cinematic medium as they underscore Hotspur’s protest against the King. For it is when Hotspur exclaims of his horse, readied to leave for battle, “That roan shall be my throne!” anticipating military victory against Bolingbroke and his own consequent kingship if that occurs, that the bell-holes of trumpets suddenly fill the screen, threatening to consume the cinematic image as black holes would consume light itself (56). The Percys’ rebellion is thus galvanized by the aural force of instruments that would highjack and dominate the visual medium of film just as their insurrection would conquer the King and take the throne.
But the Percys are eventually overcome, their aurally figured uprising vanquished by a King and Prince associated in Chimes at Midnight with light, visuality, and cinema. Hal (Prince Henry) marks his own symbolic luminosity early in the film with a monologue on his planned self-transformation. Anticipating dramatic self-reform, a renunciation of the bawdy tavern world and an embrasure of the court, Hal says, squinting up at the sky, “Yet herein will I imitate the sun, / Who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world / That, when he please again to be himself, / Being wanted, he may be more wond’red at” (52). The Prince thus links himself to the sun, the primary means of light and sight in medieval England, but his description also and primarily renders him a “beautifully” lit image, recalling the King centered on his throne in and figuratively as the beaming sunlight. Hal goes on, “when they seldom come, they wished for come. // So when this loose behavior I throw off, / And pay the debt I never promised, / My reformation, glittering o’er my fault, / Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off” (52). So princedom, and by extension kingship, is for Hal a strategic way of being seen. Figured as the source of the world’s light, his princeliness is also a cunning mode of self-projection, a visual and deliberately timed self-imaging by means of light that is thus cinematic, reflecting the imagistic concern of cinematography and the temporal significance of editing. And as Hal presents this notion of strategic self-projection, he strategically projects himself in unique fashion: in the middle of the monologue he looks directly into the camera, suddenly capturing our gaze in the cinematic light of his own. The self-reflexive intentionality of this moment is accented by its coming in the context of a film unusual for its total lack of soliloquies and of any other such moments of clear audience address.
Later in the film King Henry, chastising Hal, depicts kingship in similar terms of visual craft. Comparing Hal to his corrupt, now usurped and murdered, predecessor Richard II, the King says:
The skipping King [Richard II], he ambled up and down / With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits, // Mingled his royalty with cap’ring fools, // Grew a companion to the common streets. // So, when he had occasion to be seen, / He was but as the cuckoo is in June, / Heard, not regarded—seen, but with such eyes / As, sick and blunted with community, / Afford no extraordinary gaze, / Such as is bent on sunlike majesty. // And in that very line, Harry, stand’st thou … Not an eye / But is aweary of thy common sight. (110)
Henry IV explicitly renders the authority of extraordinary kings a visual authority associated with sunlight, effectively theorizing his own repeatedly sunlit depiction in the film. At the same time he highlights the inferiority of the aural, with which he associates the king he deposed: Richard, he says, was “Heard, not regarded.” Moreover, when he begins talking of “the skipping king,” we hear bells chiming in the background again, underscoring his criticism of aurality with the film’s titular, aurally symbolic sound. Insofar as Prince Henry and King Henry both characterize strong and right kingship as the calculated production of a captivating series of kingly images “affording extraordinary gaze,” they characterize it as a sort of monarchical cinema—a singular cinema fundamentally opposed to aural commonness and foolishness.
The scene of Henry IV’s sharp criticism of Hal is one of great yet troubled anticipation as Hal looks forward to and indeed asserts his kingly inheritance in the face of his disapproving, doubtful father; and the scene’s lighting works to accentuate its monarchical dynamic. When the King orders his court away to “have some needful conference alone” with the Prince, Hal climbs the stairs leading up to his father’s throne (108). His ascent brings him closer not only to the seat of majesty, but also to the majestic sunlight beaming down from an upper window, presaging his royal position both in that seat and in that light. As the King reprehends Hal, he stands and makes to descend the stairs, but Hal moves to block and counter his father, and they meet in the beaming sunlight before the King passes on, stepping down from the throne as Hal remains in the light. The coordinated movement is key, for it not only presents Hal’s self-assertion as he bravely steps up and intercepts his father’s position, but it also visually depicts the imminent exchange of what both men conceive of as crucially visual, monarchical power. The moment they stand together, face-to-face in the authoritative light of kingship, marks a monarchical transaction figured as a transfer of filmic projection.
The King’s descent anticipates his death, but as he states Hal’s lamentable affinity with Richard II and his own better self-management when he contended for power himself—“as thou art to this hour was Richard then … and even as I was then, is Percy now”—he retakes his position in line with the beaming light, and Hal rushes down the steps and stands outside of it, beside the spotlighted King (111). Hal’s kingship, though anticipated, is as yet uncertain; the King still reigns. But as Hal resolutely asserts, “I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, and in the closing of some glorious day be brave to tell you that I am your son … this in the name of God! I promise here,” the King removes himself from the light again, and Hal steps back into it as the King responds, “On Wednesday next, Harry, you shall set forth. Our hands are full of business, let’s away” (111-12). Then, after bandying in and for the light, they both depart a court flooded with majestic light but suddenly empty of persons, nobody sitting on the throne, the deserted sunlight symbolizing a visual authority in jeopardy, open to whomever would take it with military force. And this jeopardy, consisting in the aural dissent of the Percys, sounds again in chimes as the courtly image dissolves to a shot of the chiming bells themselves. The sounding threatens again, as it does with Hotspur’s trumpeters, to usurp the cinematic image—and the visual narrative of the Lancaster reign—with one of its own.
The aural discord culminates in the Battle at Shrewsbury, in which sounds and images of clashing armies figure the medial clashing of sounds and images. Welles famously stated, “What [he] was planning to do—and did—was to intercut the shots in which the action was contrary, so that every cut seemed to be a blow, a counterblow, a blow received, a blow returned” (Cobos and Rubio 161). This visual effect, synthesized with the vivid sounds of swords clanging, battle-axes crashing, and arrows thwipping, intensifies the scene. The visual and aural come together in and as a battle, producing a sequence considered by many critics to be the film’s greatest achievement, and one of the greatest achievements in film.[14] Although the battle is long and grisly, the victor is clear; for the Lancaster reign prevails, and announces its triumph in medial terms. After Hal kills Hotspur, trumpets sound, seemingly to signal victory, but a Lancaster soldier shouts, “The trumpet sounds retreat. The day is ours!” (176). So the trumpets, predominantly associated with the Percys and their aurally charged rebellion, stand in for them once again, but no longer as a threat to the King’s optical dominance. Rather, the sound is one of defeat that indicates the routing of their revolt. The aural medium is thus reduced to the representation of its own defeat. The Lancaster victory, by contrast, is signaled visually with flags: after the retreat is announced, numerous soldiers hold them proudly behind the victorious King as he says, “Thus ever did rebellion find rebuke” (177). So the ensigns function, quite literally, as visual signs of the King’s dominance.
The Lancaster victory is also marked by containment of the opposition. After the announcement of the Percys’ retreat, we see a group of rebel soldiers surrounded by the King’s army, and the King says, “Ill-spirited Worcester, did we not send grace, / Pardon, and terms of love to all of you? … Bear Worcester to the death. // Other offenders we will pause upon” (177). Then the rebel soldiers are moved along by the Lancaster army, clearly under their control, as the low rumble of a drum signals the rebels’ subdual with a fittingly subdued sound. By “pausing upon” the offenders besides Worcester, the King effectively expresses mastery over them. As the visually dominant King, that is, he contains and controls the aurally resistant rebels, thereby enacting the medial logic of the film. For the film’s visual accent does not do away with or wipe out its aural dimension or its other media—it rather conquers, contains, and controls them, effectively maintaining the optical prominence of cinema.
The status of sound in the film shifts after the Percys’ defeat. Sound still represents a kind of threat to the throne, but not as rebellion. Rather, it comes to stand for the King’s worsening ailment and impending death. The scene after the battle, in fact, plainly marks the King’s decline with music. When he collapses and Prince John asserts the seriousness of his state, saying, “No, no, he cannot long hold out these pangs” (190), the ailing King walks to a window and says, “Let there be no noise, my gentle friends, / Unless some dull and favorable hand / Will whisper music to my weary state” (191). At first requesting silence, which we have come to expect of the usually hushed court, the King invites the aural into courtly prominence with an assuaging tune. A beautifully melancholic melody then plays as Westmoreland and Prince John somberly muse on seasonal change and the King’s nearing death, complementing their somber dialogue on, even as it symbolizes the encroachment of, the King’s imminent passing. The poignant melody plays on as the King delivers his monologue on sleep, in which he fittingly invokes “the sounds of sweetest melody” as agents thereof, agents, that is, of the deeper sleep this monologue portends (192). And the visual elements associated with kingly dominance are absent or, rather, reversed: instead of a high window, the King delivers his monologue at a low window; instead of sunlight shining through, it is moonlight. And as the King speaks in close-up, darkness, rather than light, marks the place of vision itself: a thick line of shadow from one of the window’s bars overlays the King’s eyes through much of his monologue, almost like a blindfold. Indeed, the dark covers the King’s eyes as he asks why sleep will “seal up the ship-boy’s eyes” amid “rude imperious surge,” but not grant rest to his own (192). The aural and the absence or opposite of light and sight—darkness and blindness—thus coalesce to forecast the King’s decease and, along with it, the inexorable resignation of his power.
But the light of the throne is reasserted when the King’s power is passed on to Hal through the actual enactment of the transfer discussed as anticipation above. When Hal thinks his father dead and takes his crown out of the royal bedroom, he then kneels, holding it for his own, doubtless about to don it. And the image suddenly dissolves to one depicting Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence before the screen-like fire. Hal’s fraught advancement to the throne is thus linked to the framing cinematic, memorial story—“the days that [they] have seen,” which, sitting by the fire, Falstaff and Shallow reference again. So Hal’s rule is relinked to cinematic viewing and visuality as we watch his movement into monarchical authority. When the King does die, he is sitting on the throne as Hal kneels before him, both of them awash in the light of an upper window. Hal stands and, in the center of that projecting light, addresses the court, announcing that his blood shall “flow henceforth in formal majesty” (232). Then he turns, takes up the crown for the first time officially, and declares, “Now call we our High Parliament,” not facing the court, but facing the beaming light of the upper window, which we can only imagine, given its brightness and the King’s long night of suffering, is the sunlight of dawn (232). The new King thus inaugurates his authority through the sunlight in which his father reigned, the distinctly cinematic light of sovereignty. However, if that sovereignty is in Chimes at Midnight established as and predicated upon the inter-medial and intra-cinematic dominance of the luminous filmic image, that image of light is not without its own intra-visual contest with darkness, which is most manifest, as I will demonstrate in the following conclusion, in the character of Falstaff.
The Falstaffian Negative
Falstaff is associated in Chimes at Midnight, like the Percys, with the aural dimension of the film. He, after all, invokes the “chimes at midnight” of its title in the film’s opening scene[15]; he is the very embodiment of the musically festive and noisy tavern world; and he, like the ailing King, calls for music when he falls ill and nears his death.[16] It should therefore be no surprise that, according to the King, Falstaff threatens the visually instantiated Lancaster throne. In the view of Henry IV, Falstaff distracts and corrupts his eldest son and heir apparent. Thus, in the scene after Hal and Falstaff act out the King’s harsh reproofs in the “play extempore” discussed above, Hal appears before the King and is, as the hilarious improvisations predict, sternly—and not humorously—lectured. The King asks disapprovingly, “Could such inordinate and low desires, // Such barren pleasures, rude society / Accompany the greatness of thy blood?” (109). The King no doubt has Falstaff in mind in referencing the Prince’s “rude society,” as he does when he alludes directly to the rotund knight, so known for his obesity, later in the film, asserting, “Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds, / And he, the noble image of my youth, / Is overspread with them” (189).
As he suggests the “fat” and “weedy” Falstaff in the latter scene, the King, so often sitting radiantly in the beaming light, is framed by a shaft of darkness. And when in the former scene he disparages Hal’s “rude society” with Falstaff, the left half of the screen is completely black. The conspicuous darkness visually attending the King’s direct and indirect mentions of Falstaff intimate the latter’s primary symbolic dimension in the film. More than he is with the aural, Falstaff is affiliated with shadow, blackness, and darkness, and as such he threatens the symbolic light of the throne.
This shady aspect of his character is introduced early in the film when Hal finds Falstaff sleeping—apparently sleeping in late—upstairs in the Eastcheap tavern. Waking in the midst of Hal’s mischievous soaking—one might say liquidation—of his list of unpaid expenses, Falstaff says, “How now, Hal? What time of day is it, lad?” and the Prince responds, “What the devil hast thou to do with the time of day?” (43-44). Falstaff immediately clarifies the Prince’s implicit point himself: “Indeed you come near me now, Hal; for we that take purses go by the moon” (44). And he more fully expounds his lunar self-assertion later in the same scene when he says, “Hal, when thou art king, let not us that are squires of the night’s body be called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon, men of good government, being governed, as the sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance we steal” (50-51). This nightly, not to say knightly, self-definition is accentuated by Hal’s response: his opposite identification with the sun, as explicated above. “Yet herein will I imitate the sun,” says Hal; and he goes on, “My reformation, glittering o’er my fault, / Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off” (52). Given Falstaff’s contrasting nocturnal self-associations with the moon, he, like or even as Hal’s “fault,” is “the foil to set … off” the Prince’s radiant “reformation.” As a “gentle[man] of the shade,” that is to say, Falstaff is indeed Hal’s shadow, and he is imaged as such: Falstaff and Hal are framed through much of this scene as doubles, foreground and background—Hal in the fore, Falstaff in the back—as if Falstaff’s figure were the shadow of Hal’s, mimicking his outline along the fence behind him as the Prince presents himself in and as the lustrous sun.
Near the end of the film, just after he is publicly and humiliatingly evicted from the court by Hal and presumably just before he dies, Falstaff affirms his self- and cinematic representation as a creature of night and shade in his final scene. The courtly street is pervaded by characters’ shadows looming vivid and large along the walls behind them. And at the end of the scene Falstaff, abandoned by all but a child, his Page, makes to leave and utters his final words in the film: “I shall be sent for soon … (Pauses.) … at night” (247-48).[17] Having made his last and poignant connection to the night and its deep shades, he then exits the street, the scene, and the picture. And as he hobbles slowly away, his shadow drifts, gargantuan, across a stone wall.
Chimes at Midnight, as I have demonstrated, clearly insists upon the prevailing cinematic light of royal authority, the cost of which is made clear through Falstaff’s banishment and death: “The King has killed his heart,” says his friend Peto (251). Yet despite the insistence of Chimes at Midnight upon the enduring luminescence of royal authority, the film nevertheless acknowledges its cinematic dependency upon darkness. Falstaff’s obscure foiling of the Prince renders him the symbolic opposite of cinematic light, which, especially in the monochromatic, beautifully black-and-white Chimes at Midnight, is darkness: the negative of photographic light, or light itself in the photographic negative, an essential constituent of the picture. So Falstaff, though subordinated as darkness, is as integral to the cinematic image as is the light of the King. For that image, as a series of photographic images, depends upon darkness as much as it does upon light. Likewise Hal’s right, bright reign as the sun-like King depends upon Falstaff, the embodiment of cinematic darkness, even as his sunlit cinematic image is threatened by Falstaff’s potentially consuming shadow.
The kingly light of the Lancaster line prevails through him, but the success of Hal’s—Henry V’s—reign seems to depend largely upon, and is effectively inaugurated by, the public banishment of Falstaff. This dependency is subtly, mysteriously, and fascinatingly suggested by Falstaff’s unlikely appearance in court when Hal helps his deathly sickened father up to the throne for the last time. In a strange shot of the court as he does so, Falstaff, in a sudden yet subtle and brief event very easy to miss, passes into the frame, his rotund figure unmistakable, present, apparently, to witness Hal’s imminent ascendance. Yet in the chronology of the film, Falstaff is with Silence and Shallow at the latter’s house, drinking and carrying on; so his appearance at court is improbable if not impossible. It could be argued that his appearance is consequent on a mistake in the editing room, but it is not a mistake. For Falstaff walks into the frame in slow-motion, that is to say in an intentionally manipulated shot. The slowed movement gives his strange appearance a ghostly quality, as if to suggest Falstaff was haunting Hal’s reign. As darkness, as cinematic negativity in a luminously cinematic royal court, I would argue that he is.
The film ends, like it begins, with a telling juxtaposition of memory and history. After Mistress Quickly gives her famous account of Falstaff’s final moments, the Page asks, “Do you not remember, ’a saw a flea once stick upon Bardolph’s nose, and ’a said it was a black soul burnin’ in hellfire?” (253). The beginning of the Page’s question, “Do you not remember,” recalls Shallow’s question in the first scene of the film, “Do you remember, since we lay all night in the Windmill, in Saint George’s Field?” (31). And its subsequent mention of seeing, “’a saw a flea,” links this memory to sight. So when Bardolph replies, “The fuel is gone that maintain’d that fire,” the early scene of memory as cinematic viewing—looking into the screen-like fireplace—is figured forth to frame the succeeding, final voiceover narration from Holinshed’s Chronicles in the film’s self-reflexively cinematic mode (253-54).
The Holinshed narration effectively concludes the film’s narrative plot, and again represents the film’s cinematic reworking of Holinshed’s Chronicles. The voiceover narration, here voiced over an upwardly craning shot of Falstaff’s large and heavy coffin being heaved along, proudly asserts the new King’s right good rule: “So humane withal, he [Henry V] left no offence unpunished nor friendship unrewarded. For conclusion, a majesty was he that both lived and died a pattern in princehood, a lodestar in honor, and famous to the world alway” (254). The written, aural narrative has thus been fully assimilated to the luminous project—or projection—of the Lancaster reign even as the film visually depicts its link to darkness through the coffined body of Hal’s unrewarded yet harshly punished friend. And the image of Falstaff’s coffin has, like his image in the court, been slowed down: the long shot of the long haul is made longer by the conspicuous slow-motion effect. The film thus concludes by revealing the essence of its medium as a sheer moving image. Chimes at Midnight has by now reshaped the narratives and narrative media it comprises, and the film as film ultimately persists beyond them, uncontained yet containing all, visually encompassing, dynamic, kinetic—cinema. After a final fade-out, the director’s credit appears, mid-screen and still, over a looped sequence of soldiers and court officials. Then it moves. Upward. Slowly. Taking on the slow movement of the men pushing Falstaff’s coffin up the hill as the film continues to assimilate different media to its own cinematic motion, ever inspirited by the spectral Falstaffian negative.
Notes
[1] Although the film primarily comprises scenes—liberally mixed, matched, and altered—from Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, it also includes scenes from Henry V, Richard II, and, as stated above, The Merry Wives of Windsor.
[2] I owe this conception of “containment and displacement” to a reader at LFQ, who saw it lingering but not stated in my argument. The reader’s challenging response, more generally, redirected and refined my argument, ultimately rendering it immeasurably better, and I am greatly indebted to him/her.
[3] Although Hoffman takes up a theme similar to my own, he analyzes the “aesthetic” of Chimes at Midnight as “one predicated upon the organization of content within the frame or mise-en-scène,” focusing on “substance and absence within the cinematic frame” without recognizing the key thematic tension between and among the film’s media (88).
[4] All quotations from the film are from Lyons’s printed edition of the screenplay.
[5] Having graduated from the renowned, experimental Todd School for Boys in 1930, Welles went on to stage the play in New York in 1939 and again in Dublin in 1960 (Anderegg 125).
[6] For an excellent, detailed analysis of the relationship between the two stage-plays and the film, see Hapgood, “Chimes at Midnight from Stage to Screen: The Art of Adaptation.”
[7] Shakespeare used numerous sources in writing the Henriad, including Holinshed’s Chronicles, Samuel Daniels’s Civil Wars, and the anonymously authored The Famous Victories of King Henry V.
[8] They are grouped by Oxford scholars into four categories: “principal sources,” “additional sources mentioned in passing,” “anonymous sources mentioned,” and “personal sources used by the compilers.” See “The Making of the Chronicles” in the incredible online resource, The Holinshed Project.
[9] Holinshed was one of the “principal” writers/adapters/compilers, but hardly the sole composer of the numerously authored Chronicles.
[10] These divisions are not exclusive, however predominant. The King, for example, bears a relationship to sound, as I illustrate later in this essay. Likewise the Percys bear a relationship to light, as their stepping into the King’s courtly light suggests. But the overarching medial opposition between the King and the Percys is nevertheless apparent, as I demonstrate.
[11] I owe this point to Jana Muschinski who took my course on Shakespeare and Film.
[12] For a discussion of the visual representation of this deception as military disunity, see my article, “Contesting Olivier and JFK” 170-72.
[13] The Lancaster court, by contrast, is for the most part quiet—often silent—and solemn, with none of the instrumental, musical levity of Hotspur’s castle. While the King’s mounting the throne is later in the film accompanied by trumpets, the instruments are not imaged as they are at Hotspur’s castle, and their salute is brief.
[14] For example Kael, while generally unfavorable toward the film, says of the battle, “[Welles] has directed a sequence, the battle of Shrewsbury, which is unlike anything he has ever done before, indeed unlike any battle ever done on the screen before. It ranks with the best of Griffith, John Ford, Eisenstein, Kurosawa—that is, with the best ever done.” Bogdanovich asserts that it is “realistic … complex … [and] beautiful because of a vividly conveyed sense of grief … Welles’s [battle] is comparable to the war paintings of Goya” (65).
[15] Indeed, the title of the film indicates its aural dimension, arguably setting it under a rubric that would belie the visual dominance for which I have argued. But as a film about Falstaff and his tragic rejection by the King, one might rightly say as a film about Falstaff’s defeat and death as much as it is about the Prince’s triumph, Chimes at Midnight is as much about the aural dimension as it is about the visual. But if the aural is thus underscored throughout the film, it is not thus privileged as the symbolically dominant aspect in the film. One could say that Chimes at Midnight is, on the level of intra-cinematic media, chiefly about the symbolic struggle with and subjugation of the aural. The chimes at midnight, that is, aurally figure their own defeat just as the Percys’ trumpets figure theirs.
[16] When his Page notifies Falstaff in the Eastcheap tavern that “The music is come,” Falstaff responds, “Let ’em play” (208).
[17] Mistress Quickly later recites what she purports to be Falstaff’s last living words, but these are Falstaff’s final self-spoken words in the film.
Works Cited
Anderegg, Michael. Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. Print.
Bell, Robert H. “Rereading Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight.” Southwest Review 89:4 (2004):566-74. Print.
Bogdanovich, Peter. “Period Piece.” New York Magazine 25 Feb. 1974: 65. Print.
Brougher, Kerry. Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996. Print.
Chimes at Midnight. Dir. Orson Welles. Perf. Orson Welles, Keith Baxter, John Gielgud, and Jeanne Moreau. Alpine Productions and Internacional Films, 1965. DVD 2012.
Cobos, Juan, and Miguel Rubio. “Welles and Falstaff: An Interview.” Sight and Sound 35 (Autumn 1966):158-63. Print.
Crowl, Samuel. Shakespeare Observed: Studies in Performance on Stage and Screen. Athens: Ohio UP, 1992. Print.
Ferguson, Russel, Ed. Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors. New York: Monacelli, 1996. Print.
Hapgood, Robert. “Chimes at Midnight from Stage to Screen: The Art of Adaptation.” Shakespeare Survey 39 (1987): 39-52. Print.
Hilb, Benjamin. “Contesting Olivier and JFK: The Opposition to Wartime Propaganda in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17:2 (2015): 164-88. Print.
Hoffman, Dean A. “‘Bypaths and Indirect Crooked Ways’: Mise-en-Scène in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight.” Shakespeare Bulletin 23:1 (2005): 87-112. Print.
The Holinshed Project. “Holinshed’s Sources.” Oxford UP, 2013. Web. 1 Nov. 2012. <http://www.cems. ox.ac.uk/holinshed/chronicles.shtml#two2>.
Jorgens, Jack J. Shakespeare on Film. Lanham: UP of America, 1991. Print.
Kael, Pauline. “Orson Welles: There Ain’t No Way.” The New Republic 24 June 1967. Web. 5 Jan. 2014.
McLean, Andrew M. “Orson Welles and Shakespeare: History and Consciousness in Chimes at Midnight.” Literature/Film Quarterly 11:3 (1983): 197-202. Print.
Naremore, James. “Style and Meaning in Citizen Kane.” Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane: A Casebook. Ed. James Naremore. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 123-60. Print.
Welles, Orson. Chimes at Midnight (screenplay). Ed. Bridget Gellert Lyons. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988. 3-19. Print.
Ⓒ Literature / Film Quarterly | Benjamin Hilb 2016. All rights reserved.
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