This is the story of the greatest Shakespearean play
that Shakespeare probably never intended to write.
[music]
Shallow: Jesus, the days that we have seen! Ha, Sir John, said I well?
Falstaff: We have heard the chimes at midnight.
Kyle: We are lucky enough to live in a time where a new, definitive version of Chimes at Midnight is available,
one of Orson Welles' great films nearly lost to bad distributors,
one of the many films he made in his long, self-imposed European exile.
Chimes at Midnight is actually based on three of Shakespeare's plays,
five if you count a few lines from Richard the Second and The Merry Wives of Windsor,
with a sixth source in Holinshed's Chronicles,
which were Shakespeare's main source of history.
The cycle of plays, known collectively as the Henriad,
had been condensed before in the BBC television series An Age of Kings
and is currently being adapted by BBC Two in The Hollow Crown.
But Chimes at Midnight is a unique condensation of that cycle.
Orson Welles made a great movie,
but I don't want to talk about that.
I could talk about his blocking, how he uses movement in each scene wonderfully,
choreographing his camera moves to maximize the energy of each scene,
cutting from the physical motion of the actors in one shot
to the motion of the camera in the next,
making the more popular, higher-budget Laurence Olivier Shakespeare adaptations
seem staid, tame, and stagey.
But I don't want to talk about that.
I could talk about his cinematography,
how even in the still scenes his use of lighting brings us back centuries
or how he shoots his own body to have Falstaff fill most of the frame.
But I don't want to talk about that.
I could talk about how great the battle scene is.
Welles successfully hides the low budget of the movie,
using fast montage to turn a hundred extras into thousands.
I could point out how Kenneth Branagh borrowed from it when he staged his battle in Henry V,
and more recently, how the last season of Game of Thrones nabbed its style.
But I don't want to talk about that.
No, what I really want to talk about is the central character.
Jack Falstaff.
Hal: That villainous, abominable, misleader of youth.
"Falstaff!"
Kyle: He is the ultimate lord of misrule, as charming as he is pathetic,
a liar, a coward, a glutton, but deeply intelligent and proudly unapologetic.
Just as Hamlet embodies all of humanity's self-loathing,
Falstaff is humanity's self-loving.
Falstaff: Sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff!
Orson Welles once said that Falstaff represented Merrie Olde England,
the idyllic past inevitably swept away by the forces of modernity.
Falstaff: Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.
Kyle: Now the play Henry IV is really about Henry V.
The young prince on his road to becoming a great leader.
He's a young man caught between two fathers.
Keith Baxter, who played Hal in this film, once explained that Henry IV,
the stern patriarch with blood on his hands,
is the man Hal reveres but cannot love.
Henry: Thou hast lost thy princely privilege with vile participation.
Kyle: But Falstaff, the jolly criminal, is the man he loves but can't revere.
Falstaff: My king! By Jove!
I speak to thee, my heart.
Hal: I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
Kyle: Now, Sir John Falstaff is a character from a history play.
But unlike Harry or Henry or Hotspur, he is not historical.
There was a Sir John Fastolfe,
a veteran of Agincourt who, by all accounts, served honorably,
but he is nothing like Falstaff.
His closer analogue was a man named Sir John Oldcastle,
who led a heretic group before being defeated by King Henry V.
And supposedly, in early drafts of the script, the character was named Oldcastle,
up until the real Oldcastle's family protested and demanded that it be changed.
But his true origin is in another history play,
the anonymously written Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth,
where the character is called Jockey.
The play was written sometime during the 1580s and, well,
Shakespeare rebooted it as a multi-part, gritty franchise property.
The Henry V theatrical universe, if you will.
Yeah, the more things change...
But the man most responsible for popularizing the character wasn't Will Shakespeare but Will Kempe.
This is the only contemporary image of him we have,
so we know he was athletic, far from the fat and lazy Falstaff,
but that fitness and concomitant dancing skill made him into Elizabethan England's greatest clown.
He not only danced, but he was a brilliant improviser,
bawdy and profane and all the things that a great comedian should be.
Now, there's a lot of scholarly dispute about who played who in Shakespeare's plays—
some people have suggested that John Heminges or Thomas Pope played Falstaff, and Kempe never did—
but the account I'm going from is James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
and he credits Kempe with the role.
So if you have an issue with anything I'm saying, take it up with him.
Great book, by the way.
Now, the Folio edition of Henry IV Part Two has an epilogue, spoken by a dancer.
This is actually two epilogues smashed into one by early editors.
The first epilogue was spoken by Falstaff
and that was the one they used to end performances at the curtain.
"If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat,
our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it,
and make you merry with fair Katharine of France;
where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a' be killed with your hard opinions."
So, he was setting up a sequel that would end with Henry V's marriage to Katharine of France,
and he promises that Sir John will be in the play, in some form or another.
But in the Christmas season of 1598,
Henry IV Part Two was performed at Whitechapel with Elizabeth I in attendance.
For that performance, a different epilogue was used.
A dancer, possibly Shakespeare himself, walked out and said with humility,
"First my fear; then my courtesy; last my speech.
My fear is, your displeasure; my courtesy, my duty; and my speech, to beg your pardons."
He goes on to talk about how he was recently in a 'displeasing play,'
he promises that he's working on a better one,
and then he ends with a prayer for the queen.
♪ Guess who he didn't mention! ♪
So, yeah, William Kempe left the company that year.
No one knows exactly why,
but a lot of people have pointed to a scene in Hamlet that might give us a clue.
Shakespeare started working on Hamlet within that year
and in it he included a scene where Hamlet gives advice to a bunch of actors.
And a lot of people agree that in this scene,
Shakespeare was doing what we might now refer to as...'subtweeting'?
Well, two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.
Hal: Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.
Kyle: Yeah, I just said that.
As for the character of Falstaff, Shakepeare killed him offstage.
No, no, no, it was more dignified than that.
Boy: Falstaff is dead.
Nym: The king has killed his heart.
Bardolph: Would I were with him, wheresome'er he is, either in heaven or in hell.
Hostess: Nay, sure, he's not in hell: he's in Arthur's bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur's bosom.
Kyle: Kempe's departure created an accidental tragedy,
giving Shakespeare's funniest character one of his most dire endings.
A fat, brilliant rogue bursting with creativity and joviality
betrayed by powerful men, left to die in relative obscurity.
And now, Orson Welles.
Welles had been fascinated with Falstaff since he was a teenager,
and he even tried to stage a similar cycle in the late 30s, which he called Five Kings.
The production failed; he used a rotating stage to quickly transfer between scenes.
Ultimately, he couldn't get the same pace from theater that he would eventually find in film.
Like, he could never do this on stage.
Hotspur: But that I think his father loves him not and would be glad he met with some mischance—
I would have him poisoned with a pot of ale.
Kyle: And Welles, throughout his life, was Falstaff.
He angered the powerful in his youth, he surrounded himself with the greats,
he was a liar and a cheat, and obviously he was a glutton and, well, food for the food god.
But most importantly, he was proud of all of these.
He lived through this joie de vivre that propelled him through his whole life
and built this romantic idea of Orson Welles.
The greatest story ever told was that of his own life.
It's particularly interesting considering the rest of his career.
Welles often played the villain, the great man whose ambitions crushed those beneath him.
With that body and that voice,
he exuded the uncaring authority of a dictator, which served him well as an actor.
He excelled at playing the men who looked down on the world.
"Look down there."
"Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?"
"If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped,
would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money,
or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare, free of income tax."
"Free of income tax!"
But in truth, Welles likely saw himself as one of those dots.
And with this passion project, audiences finally got to see Welles as he saw himself.
Falstaff: 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 Diana's foresters, 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.
Hal: I know you all, and will a while uphold the unyoked humor of your idleness.
Kyle: On the stage, this was a soliloquy.
But Welles makes sure that when Hal announces his eventual betrayal, Falstaff hears it.
Hal: 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.
Kyle: So when Hal finally does become king, it's not so much of a backstabbing as a promise fulfilled.
Hal: We will, according to your strength and qualities, give you advancement.
Be it your charge, my lord, to see perform'd the tenour of our word.
Kyle: Look at his face.
He knows Hal's game.
He knows exactly why he's being cast aside
and this admiration nearly overpowers his pain.
So many have praised him as a director, but as an actor Welles is underrated.
It's a perfect marriage of actor and character
and only Welles could have told the story like he did.
And the result is the best Falstaff in history.
Falstaff: I shall be sent for soon...
...at night.
And before you get mad at me for posting this after summer's over,
technically the last day of summer was September the twenty-first,
which....has...already...come...and gone...
fffffffffffffffff--