Rediscovering Orson Welles

Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture. By Michael Anderegg. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Pp. 213. $42.50 hb; $16.50 pb.

One of the most heartening developments in the study of individual filmmakers (as Orson Welles preferred to call them) over the past decade has been the emergence of an international community of Orson Welles scholars dedicated to serious inquiry into the full trajectory and many dimensions of a career that lasted nearly sixty years and bridged four continents.[1] The synthetic yield of this scholarship—epitomized by some of the premises and research tacks adopted by Michael Anderegg in his new book—has been threefold. First, it has posthumously refurbished Welles's public image in a manner that refutes his trite reduction to a spendthrift, flamboyant, and unpredictable genius who shocked the multitudes with his 1938 Halloween "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast and his controversial film Citizen Kane (1941). Recent, more carefully researched accounts of Welles-at-work have pointed to his erudition, versatility, humanism, and perseverance as an artist and activist; his particular skill and inspiration as an orchestrator of talent and collaborator, as well as maverick auteur; his passion for improvisation; and his propensity for recycling script ideas and strategies from previous projects, both completed and unfinished, in an effort to understand the creative process linking his works.[2]

Second, in making a critical and historical reassessment of Welles's oeuvre and its periodic disruptions, this scholarship has ventured through and beyond the expressionist/realist, romantic/modernist, vanguard/industrial dichotomies so frequently applied to his films, to consider the complex relationship between different phases of his work and broader sociopolitical, technical, and stylistic formations in the twentieth century. Here the assumption is that Welles's projects are necessarily differentiated not only according to the various media in which he worked (radio, theater, film), but by the specific historical and cultural circumstances in which they were produced. The "high" points and "low" points that have customarily been invoked to configure his ski-slope shaped career have become subject to reevaluation as a result.

At the same time, a new recognition of the transhistorical and poly-philosophical currents within his work (Welles was a creature of the Enlightenment and the Renaissance, as well as FDR's New Deal) has brought into relief the nature of Welles's ambivalence toward modernity, and his ongoing concern with the great responsibilities and difficulties (financial, discursive, logistical) associated with using audiovisual media simultaneously as a form of personal expression and social communication. This concern was only intensified by his cosmopolitan approach to projects undertaken in disparate settings, from Harlem, Acapulco, and Belfast to Fortaleza, Madrid, and Hollywood. Moreover, the shared assumption that, to quote Anderegg, "the gaps, omissions, and quirks of Welles's texts call for some kind of answering intelligence" has led to an identification of the plural, rather than singular factors behind Welles's customary difficulty in securing support from producers and the press. Paradoxically, this has all had the effect of removing Welles from the pedestal and the historical master control panel, of seeing the extent to which, his individual flaws and talents notwithstanding, he faced, together with other nonconformist yet commercially viable filmmakers, a host of external constraints and pressures, not the least of which were the vertical integration of the Hollywood studio system and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Third, the added attention to the less visible—and often underestimated—portions of Welles's output has permitted a more intricate analysis of its intertextual dimensions, and thus, a less fractured understanding of its ideological and aesthetic turns. These turns have been described by some as a progressively conservative streak and an abandonment of a rigorously modernist aesthetic in favor of postmodernism. (In the opinion of this reviewer, it is perhaps preferable to speak of Welles's reluctance to accept any single belief as dogma—although he remained very much committed to human and civil rights—and of his gradual distancing from formal channels of political expression to focus on the film essay as a forum of debate, than of any fundamental change of heart.)[3]

Michael Anderegg's most recent contribution to this scholarship, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, productively extends its boundaries in an elucidation of Welles's multifaceted, lifelong creative relationship to William Shakespeare, who for Welles was mentor, muse, and coauthor, in spirit. Contrary to what might be expected, this is the first English-language attempt at a comprehensive historical appraisal of Welles's engagement with Shakespeare, covering the full stretch of its development from his training at the Todd School for Boys in Chicago and at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in the thirties, to his self-reflective, independently produced essay film, Filming Othello (1978).

The book is divided into eight chapters and an epilogue, with six chapters focused on a particular adaptation or set of adaptations by Welles, sandwiched in between two synthetic chapters. Chapter 1 sets the stage by examining the cultural politics of both Shakespeare and Welles as controversial commodities and historical figures in the postwar United States, taking into account the full range of venues in which they have been encountered, from off-Broadway to radio, to television and film screen; Chapter 8 considers Welles's career as an actor and the dramatic uses of his public persona, with an emphasis on recurring techniques that reflect Welles's agency within the text and its effects on the viewer. The remaining chapters are organized according to a prismatic logic, privileging the key dimensions of Welles's representations of the Bard ("Shakespeare as event," "Shakespeare in the provinces," "Shakespeare as Welles," Welles as performer, Welles as narrator, Welles as director), while loosely following the chronological progression of Welles's adaptations from theater and radio in the thirties, to film in the postwar period. This framework not only permits Anderegg to retrieve a dynamic Shakespearean intertext embedded within Welles's oeuvre by pursuing his treatment of specific works—such as Julius Caesar, Macbeth, and the "Henriad"—across various media at different points in his career; but it helps bring into focus projects that have often been overlooked, such as King Lear (stage, 1956, unshot film, 1983), Five Kings (1939), and Filming Othello. Anderegg is thus able to supply the missing ligaments for what otherwise might appear disjointed, owing to the temporal discontinuities and stylistic changes between these works; and he wisely dispenses with hierarchies of historical value based on commercial or critical success or on those Shakespearean plays that have been most produced in the U.S.

Other English-language references to Welles's renderings of Shakespeare, especially in cinematic form, abound; yet most are meager in their depth and scope of interpretation, except when treating individual texts in isolation.[4] Most notably, one seldom finds a willingness to tackle the reciprocal implications of the repeated encounter of Welles's cosmovision, stage conceptions, and performative and audiovisual styles with Shakespeare's tragedies: the Wellesian context is either eclipsed by the Shakespearean elements (and corresponding criteria of evaluation), or the hypotextual status of Shakespeare's works is merely presumed, and critical emphasis is placed on Welles's adaptations as faits accomplis, which are then situated with respect to the broader Wellesian intertext.

By contrast, Anderegg's historiographic rigor and his evident familiarity with the range of production and critical literature pertaining to each personage help him to approach the Welles-Shakespeare nexus squarely and from the inside out, regardless of the artistic medium or source play he addresses. He makes detailed textual comparisons at various junctures between Shakespeare's "original" plays and Welles's evolving efforts at adaptation, and he highlights the general points of resonance between Shakespeare and Welles as socially-engaged artists: both were interested in the ambiguous machinations of evil and power and in the interface between the social and the personal; both have been subject to censorship of one form or another and have been treated with lukewarm enthusiasm by Hollywood producers.

Following Welles's emphasis on the realization of the spectacle, rather than on the verbal interpretation of Shakespeare's texts, Anderegg focuses his textual analysis of the films on their plastic features: the architecture of the sets; Welles's choreography of actors' bodies within them; the shaping of the viewer's intellectual and emotional involvement through performance style and editing. Anderegg's critical method, which tends mainly in the direction of cognitive analysis and New Criticism, is placed directly in the service of his historical line of argumentation, which, sympathetic to Welles without being overly partisan, proceeds unfettered by the old debates over authorship or cheap psychoanalytical forays into Welles's childhood. Yet, as Anderegg clearly states in his introduction, his purpose is less to effect a revisionist analysis of Welles's adaptations than to develop a cultural history of the manner in which Shakespearean works have been produced and received in twentieth century United States, especially as interpreted by Orson Welles. The two tasks wind up being closely related, for through this history we are able to obtain a different grasp of the frictions and critical misunderstandings surrounding Welles's Shakespearean project, and a closer look at that project's discursive and ideological complexity.

Among the heuristic tools Anderegg deploys in this enterprise are (1) a genealogical mapping of the sea changes occurring in the profession—namely, the stagecraft and performance styles associated with Shakespearean plays at the turn of the century, and in the general symbolic cultural value of Shakespeare in the U.S. public sphere (its peculiar status as a form of what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls "symbolic capital")[5]; and (2) a thorough metacritical review of the contemporary reception of Welles's Shakespearean productions, being careful to compare it with the reception of his Euro-American counterparts—most notably Laurence Olivier, whose film versions of Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948), and Richard III (1956) can be said to have cast a deleterious shadow over Welles's own stagings of Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and King Lear (1956).

According to Anderegg, Welles's Shakespeare seems to thrive on the alchemy of different theatrical traditions. For example, he notes the resemblance between many of Welles's performances and the gutsy, powerhouse style of U.S. Shakespearean actors of previous generations, such as Edwin Booth and John Barrymore; and he aligns Welles's approach to set design and staging with the modern efforts of William Poel, Harley Granville-Barker, and Edward Gordon Craig (and transmitted most probably by way of Welles's experience at Dublin's Gate Theatre) to break Shakespearean staging loose from its Victorian trappings, so as to use the set as an additional means of dramatic expression, rather than as a scenic backdrop or accessory to pageantry. (When one considers the stage design of the Mercury Theatre's Julius Caesar (1937) and the mises-en-scènes of Macbeth and Othello, especially as Anderegg describes them, Welles appears to have fallen most under the influence of Gordon Craig, whose attention to lighting as an active, expressive component within a mise-en-scène that contributes to the play's performance as a "total work of art" must have held a special appeal for Welles.) Other aspects of Welles's cinematic adaptations, such as their rough appearance (or "poverty effect," to use Anderegg's term) stemming from improvised sets, lack of synchronization between sound and image, and an editing style that does not always follow the principles of aesthetic and dramatic continuity, are plausibly linked to Brechtian principles of construction and delivery (such as reflexivity and the "making strange" of artistic representation) and to a postmodern sensibility.

Yet Anderegg also notes how, unlike the contemporary Shakespearean efforts of Laurence Olivier, Kenneth Branagh, and Franco Zeffirelli, Welles's film adaptations did not receive official government endorsement, nor were they produced at studios willing to provide large budgets and wield their promotional clout. This comparative lack of institutional support—and consequently, visibility—for Welles's Shakespearean films is symptomatic in turn, Anderegg suggests, of the degree to which, by midcentury, Shakespeare had been relegated to the rarified, well-guarded realm of elite culture in Britain and the U.S. This posed particular problems for Welles, whose unique mixture of vanguardism with an effort to reinstate Shakespeare as a form of popular culture won him urban popularity and notoriety in the progressive theatrical climate of the thirties, yet in later practice fell short of qualifying as national symbolic capital (there was even a question of which national anthem should accompany the granting of Othello's Golden Palm at Cannes). Nor would his Shakespearean projects bear any investment appeal for mainstream Hollywood, which by the forties—as Anderegg explains and as Vincente Minnelli's hit musical, The Band Wagon (1953) aptly implies—was shelving Shakespeare and other sources that seemed too bookish, rather than folk or popular urban in profile.

In the realm of contemporary criticism, Welles had to navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of the stigmas attached to his postwar misfortunes on Broadway and in Hollywood (whereby, ironically, his approach would not be taken seriously as "legitimate" Shakespeare); and an Anglo-American premium placed on faithfulness to Shakespeare's "original" texts, with Laurence Olivier serving as the paradigmatic instance, in the light of which Welles's modifications in order to maintain cinematic values and contemporary historical relevance were often deemed disrespectful and lacking in mimetic orientation. Without suppressing the voices of these critics—Anderegg is consistently synoptic and even-handed in his exposition—he skillfully turns the tables, first by repeatedly resituating Welles's eclecticism and inventiveness, especially in his films, in the context of what he calls a "countertradition of Shakespeare," a liminal mode of production found at the edges of the "circle," but not outside of it. He also reminds us that the tensions between experimentation and popular appeal, between "highbrow" and "lowbrow" (already present in stagings of Shakespeare, even in nineteenth century Britain), did not necessarily impede the commercialization of Welles's projects, albeit outside of Hollywood.

More fundamentally, Anderegg points to the mootness of adhering to a Shakespearean "original," when the precise origins of the texts are often uncertain, owing to the multiple versions in circulation, not to mention the controversies over the Bard's biographical identity. Throughout the book, he cogently argues that Welles's unorthodox departures from the source texts do not preclude the achievement of internal consistency in each work along aesthetic and thematic lines, nor a lack of respect and sympathy for Shakespeare's creative and social concerns. As Welles himself once quipped: "I don't believe in an essential reverence for the original material—it's simply part of the collaboration."[6]

Two chapters deserve particular mention for the manner in which they assist the book's revaluation and contextualization of Welles's Shakespearean project: Chapter 3, "'Cashing in on the Classics';" and the last chapter, "Welles as Performer." In Chapter 3, we are introduced to Welles's interest in popular pedagogy, and to the linkages between his theatrical and radio stagings of Shakespeare in a careful reading of Everybody's Shakespeare (one of the few places where Welles expressed his critical reflections in written, published form)[7] and its audio complement, the Mercury Text Records, which featured readings of Shakespeare's plays by Welles and his Mercury actors. In Chapter 8, Anderegg carefully dissects and compares Welles's performances in film and television programs, most of which have been obscured by Welles's better-known films. Anderegg explores Welles's strategies as both "character" actor and "guest star," and he notes the Brechtian bent of these strategies, which encouraged a more active role for the spectator and carved spaces where Welles could recuperate a modicum of control, especially in situations offering few creative possibilities.

While Anderegg is very insightful and right on target in his close analysis of the circumstances surrounding Welles's adaptations and his techniques, he goes somewhat astray in setting up the broader historical framework in which he describes the shifting parameters of popular and elite culture in U.S. society. Specifically, he makes the strategic error of waiting until the "Epilogue" to recognize the need to revise cultural historian Lawrence Levine's thesis that Shakespearean theater lost its vitality as a form of popular entertainment at the turn-of-the-century (a thesis that Anderegg tries to apply to his analysis of Welles's critical reception), as well as the importance of developing working definitions of "popular" and "mass" culture so as to avoid possible confusion between the two. The latter is especially significant given Welles's sustained preoccupation with preserving the profile of the popular within the ambit of mass media, beginning with radio, by creating a sense of intimacy and dialogue between performer, author, and spectator (which Anderegg cites as a criterion for the popular). This impulse can be said to account for a great deal of stylistic hybridity in Welles's work.

Yet it is also quite possible that the shift in Shakespeare's status from popular to elite in the twentieth century was more uneven than what either Anderegg or Levine describe, and here Anderegg's own distinction between "Shakespeare in the provinces" and the Shakespeare of the metropole is especially relevant. My own maternal grandparents were Shakespearean actors in the upper Middle West in a repertory format known as Chautauqua well into the 1920s, and there is further evidence that, even though Shakespeare may have been reined in by that time in the cultural centers of the East Coast in emulation of the contemporary British paradigm, his popularity in the precise sense Anderegg describes lingered on in the "provinces," making any clean historical break more imaginary than factual. It is also quite plausible that in developing his didactic editions of Shakespeare with Roger Hill, Welles was counting on this sustained provincial interest.

Rather, it seems that the break Anderegg is referring to would have been brought about paradoxically by the national diffusion in the thirties of the very mass medium with which Welles worked—radio, with television providing the coup de grace in the fifties, whereby—among many other social consequences—the distance and differentiations in cultural practice between the "provinces" and urban "metropoles" were largely collapsed. Hence, Welles's great ambivalence toward the mass media and the process of modernization of which they were a part, and his utopian search for a marriage of residual, regional forms of expression with the power of modern technology. This gradual and delayed break within the nation at large would also help to explain some of the discontinuities in the public and critical reception of Welles's film, as opposed to theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare's tragedies.

For the most part, in the few additional places that Anderegg errs strategically it is on the side of caution, which he appears to exercise in order to avoid both duplication with existing Welles scholarship, and speculation without proper evidence. This poses special limitations in the realm of the racial politics both addressed within, and surrounding Welles's first staging of Macbeth (known as the "Voodoo" Macbeth) for the Federal Theatre Project in 1935, and in the film Othello, where he casts himself in blackface in the title role. Anderegg cites critical objections to both works that have been made on the grounds of racial stereotyping, yet does not respond to them beyond offering alternative readings. This is somewhat disappointing in view of the information available on Welles's early commitment to racial equality and the overwhelmingly positive reception of the first Macbeth within the African-American community. Indeed, Errol Hill mentions in his excellent history of black participation in, and productions of, Shakespeare that Houseman's and Welles's "Voodoo" Macbeth inspired the Los Angeles Negro Unit of the Federal Theatre Project to stage its own version in 1937; while the emphasis on racial representation within the FTP as a whole brought accusations of political subversiveness from the House Un-American Activities Committee.[8] Indeed, Welles's attention to the racial themes in Shakespeare are vitally linked to his interest and commitment in the Du Boisian project of actively engaging African-Americans in interpretations of the "classics" so as to empower them (Du Bois even invokes Shakespeare in his description of this project)[9], an interest that would be borne out in Welles's plans for the unfinished semi-documentary It's All True.

In sidestepping the connections between Welles's stagings of Shakespeare and his domestic political activity in the thirties and forties, Anderegg also severely limits his exploration of political allegory as a strategy shared by Welles and Shakespeare, and as part and parcel of Welles's modernization of Shakespeare's plays. While he duly recognizes the explicit allusions to European fascism in the Mercury production of Julius Caesar and refers to the "postholocaust" ambience of the later versions of Macbeth, he contrasts Welles's Shakespearean films with the theatrical productions by stressing the element within them of "self-expression that results in a radicalization of style, in a singular, uncompromising personal cinematic practice." This is unfortunate, because allegory is not only "one way" of reading Welles's adaptations, but appears to have been recognized by Welles as a constitutive component of Shakespearean drama. As the poet John Keats once wrote, "Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it." Welles's inclusion of excerpts from the Holinshed chronicles (Shakespeare's source text) in his staging of Macbeth not only asks the spectator to consider the boundary between historical narrative and its dramatization, but provides the resonant ground upon which to build his own historical allegory on the connections between excessive political power and genocide. Jonathan Rosenbaum has also noted allegorical references to the McCarthy era in Othello, as well as in Touch of Evil (1958).

In a study less original and meticulously researched than Anderegg's, these shortcomings might be seen to interfere with the remaining substance of the book. Thankfully, they do not, and instead present areas to be researched by Welles scholars in the future. Anderegg is far too modest when he says that he does not offer new readings of Welles's Shakespearean works and when he compares his study with the geological extraction of a "core sample for closer study." Instead, he provides an eloquent illustration of how, when Welles scholarship is at its best, it avoids the biographical and panoramic in favor of a particular theme or angle of investigation and, in the course of pursuing that angle, brings a fresh understanding to the Wellesian tapestry as a whole. Tersely written, meticulously researched, and scrupulously cross-referenced, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture is a signficant resource for the current study and teaching of Orson Welles, and it provides us with the reassurance that the cultural debate over Welles and Shakespeare will continue productively into the twenty-first century.

notes

1. Active members of this community include Michael Anderegg, Peter Bogdanovich, Heloisa Buarque de Holanda, Simon Callow, Juan Cobos, Michael Denning, Bernard Eisenschitz, Leonardo García Tsao, Ciro Giorgini, Anthony Guneratne, Bill Krohn, Joseph McBride, James Naremore, Andrea Nouryeh, Esteve Riambau, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Rogério Sganzerla, William G. Simon, Robert Stam, Aleksandra Jovicevic Tatomirovic, François Thomas, and Bart Whaley. One always risks making important omissions in composing such lists; my apologies and solidarity to those fellow Wellesiasts whom I've neglected to mention.

The cataloguing of Welles's oeuvre is continually being updated with new discoveries, but fairly reliable inventories and chronologies are provided in William G. Simon, ed. "Special Issue on Orson Welles," Persistence of Vision 7 (1989); James Howard, The Complete Films of Orson Welles (New York: Citadel, 1991); Esteve Riambau, Orson Welles: Una España Inmortal, vol. I (Valencia: Filmoteca Generalitat Valenciana/Madrid: Filmoteca Española, Ministerio de Cultura, 1992); and Orson Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, This Is Orson Welles, ed. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).

2. See James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 261-276; my own "Orson Welles's Transcultural Cinema: An Historical/Textual Reconstruction of the Suspended Film, 'It's All True', 1941-1993," Ph.D. dissertation (New York University, 1997), 721-730, and 742-753; and Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, 20, 98-100, 125 and passim, for specific references to recycling in Welles's oeuvre.

3. See Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Orson Welles's Essay Films and Documentary Fictions: A Two-Part Speculation," in Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 171-183. Most critics familiar with Welles's career agree that the conservatism was never strong enough to undermine Welles's progressive liberal stance; for the ideological tensions and moral aspects of Welles's work at different junctures, see James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles, especially 111-145; and Anderegg, Orson Welles, Shakespeare, 88-89. Anderegg appears to defend an unflinching liberal view of Welles; see Anderegg, ibid., 167.

4. Existing secondary sources on Welles's Shakespearean adaptations in English include André Bazin, Orson Welles: A Critical View, trans. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); John Collick, Shakespeare, Cinema, and Society (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989); Anthony Davies, Filming Shakespeare's Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996); Charles W. Eckert, ed. Focus on Shakespearean Films (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972); Richard France, "Introduction," in Richard France, ed. Orson Welles on Shakespeare: The WPA and Mercury Theatre Playscripts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990); Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Jack Jorgens, Shakespeare on Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1977); Bridget Gilbert Lyons, "The Shakespearean Camera of Orson Welles," in Bridget Gilbert Lyons, ed., Chimes At Midnight, Orson Welles, Director (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Joseph McBride, Orson Welles, revised ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996); James Naremore, The Magic World of Orson Welles; and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Placing Movies; additional book anthologies and journal articles are cited by Anderegg in his excellent bibliography.

5. According to Bourdieu, "symbolic capital" refers to the collectively recognized means, such as the possession or conferral of an object, title, or position—in this case, the ability to produce and perform Shakespeare—of differentiating between groups and practices in any given society. See Pierre Bourdieu, "The Forms of Capital," trans. Richard Nice, in John G. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 241-258. As Anderegg points out, Shakespearean adaptations have hardly been stable or straightforward as a form of symbolic capital in American society.

6. From "The Orson Welles Story," Part II, "Arena," BBC, 21 May 1982, as quoted in Luke McKernan, "The Real Thing at Last," in Luke McKernan and Olwen Terris, eds., Walking Shadows: Shakespeare in the National Film and Television Archive (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 1.

7. The book was published for the purpose of aiding the instruction of Shakespeare in U.S. schools in the thirties; Roger Hill and Orson Welles, eds. Everybody's Shakespeare: Three Plays (Woodstock, IL: Todd Press, 1934).

8. Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable, 112 and 119, respectively.

9. See the commentary by Rita Dove in Peter Erickson, "Rita Dove's Shakespeares," in Marianne Novy, ed., Transforming Shakespeare: Contemporary Women's Re-Visions in Literature and Performance (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999), 94. The passage appears in Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk.