Welles: "Oxford wrote Shakespeare"

[Le Chiffre]

Yes, Welles played Claudius to Michael Macliamior's Hamlet at the Woodstock Opera House, about 70 miles from Chicago. It's a beautiful little opera house, built in 1889, that was restored for it's 100th anniversary. As part of the festivities they had a four week Welles film fest (partly to promote the then-upcoming documentary CITIZEN WELLES which, like so many other Welles projects, never materialized). I caught the last week where they showed CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, with Beatrice Welles as special guest. I met her after the showing, and as we discussed the film I mentioned the Japanese LD of CHIMES. To my amazement, she had no idea that it existed.

[Tom Reedy]

Are there any videos made from the Japanese or Spanish versions for sale anywhere? I have a video copy made from a print that evidently was put through a sausage grinder. It is unwatchable.

[Jeff Wilson]

Aside from the grey market dealers like the place I got one from (whose name escapes me, but I wouldn't recomend dealing with them), no. You can always trade with people here who have a copy of either one; I have both versions, and others have either/both as well.

[Welles Fan]

Didn't the Japanese LD of Chimes have Japanese subtitles running vertically up the side?

[Jeff Wilson]

Yes, it did. The copy I got that was being sold on the grey market was from that version, and it's not too distracting, but why they didn't do it across the bottom I'll never know.

[LA]

Well, to my knowledge, Japanese is traditionally written top-to-bottom in a vertical column, so, often, Japanese subtitles are written vertically at one side of the screen. Of course there's been some westernisation, and so now it's often left-to-right, but the top-to-bottom arrangement is still used quite often. I think some of it depends on which "alphabet" is being used. It's a complicated thing.

[Jeff Wilson]

It's true that Japanese is often written vertically, but in all of the Japanese DVDs that I have none are formatted in that fashion. All are done across the bottom, as with English. So it seemed odd to see something done that way, as it does hide some of the picture.

[LA]

Ah, I see. Well then, I agree, that is pretty odd.

[Glenn Anders]

Further research suggests that they got that idea from the folowing source: Orson Welles. “I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don’t agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away…” (As quoted in Kenneth Tynan’s Persona Grata (London : Allen Wingate Ltd., 1953).

However, if we search for the context of his remark, as relayed by Tynan, we find this result:

"People have compared [Welles] to Thurber's Eliot Vereker, the explosive
intellectual whose trick it was to throw hard-boiled eggs into electric
fans, and who would loudly toss off aphorisms such as: 'Santayana? He's a
ton of feathers', or: 'When you have said Proust was sick, you have said
everything'. Welles's opinions are equally sweeping, but a trifle more
amiable. 'Negro actors are all untalented', he may assert: 'Paul Robeson was
just Brian Aherne in black-face'. A moment later: 'What's the problem about
*The Cocktail Party?* It's a straight commercial play with a traditional
comic climax that Saki used and Evelyn Waugh used-surprising martyrdom of
well-bred lady in exotic surroundings.' What does he read most? 'You'll
think me pompous, but P.G. Wodehouse. Imagine it! A benign comic artist in
the twentieth century! Nothing about personal irritations, the stuff
Benchley and Dorothy Parker wrote about-simply a perfect, impersonal,
benevolent style.' Shakespeare: 'I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you
don't agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away. . .
.' Welles's conversation has the enlivening sciolism of Ripley's Believe it
or Not. His library of snap judgments is magnificently catalogued."
(98)

And so, Peter, you have a lesson in the perils of scholarship, if you had not already have had many enough!

I leave it to you to trek further into the dank interior of this subject from you outpost in China.

Glenn

[Alfred Willmore]

Glenn,

The Lilly has Welles's copy of Looney. If I remember correctly, he got it in the very early '30's when it was truly considered "looney".

“I think Oxford wrote Shakespeare. If you don't agree, there are some awfully funny coincidences to explain away…” Orson Welles

[Lance Morrison]

The authorship of Shakespeare's works is a subject worthy of F for Fake. I always assumed, based on this film, that Welles truly didn't care who wrote the works.

[Joshua]

Came across this website a few months ago while doing some light research on Shakespeare that lists Welles, along with Whitman, Twain and others who they consider to be "past doubters" of Shakespeare's ability to author the works that are credited to him. A number of interesting theories to be sure.

http://www.doubtaboutwill.org/

[Alan Brody]

I suspect that Welles was a tad inconsistent in his attitudes towards the authorship of Shakespeare

Yes, that would seem to be the case. In the 1974 interview with Richard Meinstras, which focuses almost entirely on Shakespeare, Welles makes no mention at all of someone else having written the plays. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see anything of that sort in the 1967 interview with Tynan for Playboy either, although Welles does talk plenty about Shakespeare. Welles' personal copy of the Looney book would be worth looking at, however, to see if he wrote any notes in it.

Here's a strange but intriguing article that posits Francis Bacon as "Shake-speare". In the Tynan interview, Welles calls Bacon 'the second greatest man in Elizabethan England.':
https://web.archive.org/web/20071113103 ... new_4.html

The members of this Secret Literary Society which centered in Pallas Athena were known as The Knights of the Helmet. They had a ritual created by Francis Bacon and were initiated with an elaborate ceremonial. There was a vow, recitatives, perambulations. The Initiate was capped with the Helmet of Pallas to denote he was henceforth an "Invisible" in the fight for Human Advancement. A large Spear was placed in his hand indicative of a pen for he was to Shake the Spear of Knowledge at the Dragons of Ignorance. He thus became a "Spear-Shaker", and the head of the little band of "Spear-Shakers" was "Shake-Speare" himself, Athena's visible representative on earth.......Francis Bacon.

This little group of law students with a few outsiders like Gabriel Harvey, a Cambridge Professor, the one-time tutor of Francis in Prosody became the brains of the secret movements in the Elizabethan Era which led to the English Renaissance. The prime Fraternity became known ultimately as the Rosicrosse.

Their activities began with an attempt to create a flexible English language, to provide words which Englishmen could express themselves, a literature written in their own tongue to take the place of Latin. To this end the Rosicrosse made translations from many languages and issued text-books dealing with all sorts of subjects. They wrote original works anonymously. They had to create an English reading public and they did so in many ways..... by feigned attacks on each other, stimulating controversy, by stories and plays of educational and moral interest. A great deal of Francis Bacon's financial difficulties in these days, and even later, was due to the fact that he had to pay for the books to be printed, and that he was running the printing and publishing side of his creative efforts at a dead loss. He was actually thrown into prison more than once for borrowed monies, such debts being incurred soley through the expenses of his idealistic "Philanthropia." These Rosicrosse books were signed with the numerical Seal of the Rosicrosse, 157 or /and 287 and often the author's real name by a numerical signature or anagram. In these books Francis Bacon had the opportunity to secrete his personal secrets which he dare not write about openly.

Thus began the Society of the Rosicrosse, and thus the Founder began a series of writings which eventually became the Fourth Part of The Great Instauration. Francis Bacon became an anonymous writer, using many pen-names until he had learned the art of creating personalities by a perfect blending of "FORMS" or human passions. This very word, "Form", Francis Bacon uses in The New Organ of Interpretation for the understanding of all Mental Phenomena and the Thinking Man, thus leading to the creation of the "Actual Types and Models" of Mental and Emotional Passion that were "to be set before the Eyes" as on a Stage by a "Shake-spear."