See also individual entries for Henry IV, Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor

Chimes at Midnight, by Orson Welles (1965), draws plot elements and characters from a number of different plays by Shakespeare, including both parts of Henry IV and brief parts of Henry V and Richard II, and even some aspects of The Merry Wives of Windsor. See the relevant plot summaries for those plays. The discussions below treat Welles’s film in its own right; occasionally aspects of Chimes are dealt with in the separate discussions of the history plays mentioned above.

This film—conceived, directed, featuring, and partly written by Orson Welles—starred Welles as Falstaff; Keith Baxter as Prince Hal; John Gielgud as King Henry IV; Margaret Rutherford as Mistress Quickly; Fernando Rey as the Earl of Worcester; and Norman Rodway as Hotspur.

In an essay published in 1969, Joseph McBride called Chimes at Midnight “Welles’s masterpiece” (14); compared and contrasted it with the much earlier Citizen Kane; and wrote that in the later film “Welles has merged his own viewpoint and that of his hero into a direct communication of emotion.” He found the style of Chimes more subdued than that of Kane but praised Chimes‘s “battle sequence” as “one of the greatest achievements in action direction in the history of the cinema,” saying it is “constructed in a highly rhetorical pattern, almost as tightly as a fugue, but it presents itself to the audience not as an artistic demonstration but as an overwhelming physical experience” (14–15).

Roger Manvell, in his pioneering 1971 book Shakespeare and the Film (64–71), noted Welles’s tendency here to shoot “from a low angle,” often to stress contrasts in power between “the King—an aloof, isolated figure, his throne set high on a great rostrum, in contrast to the restless, gyrating nobility” but also to emphasize the size of “Falstaff’s vast belly.” He commented that Welles also often used “shafts of strong sunlight,” particularly indoors, to create “natural, static pools of light in and out of which the characters are deployed.” In general, Manvell paid careful attention to camera placements and movements, often used to highlight Hotspur’s emotions and activity (66). He called this film one of Welles’s “finest” and also “one of the most successful screen adaptations from Shakespeare so far made” while commending Welles in general as a director of Shakespeare for film (70).

Jack J. Jorgens, in another pioneering book—1977’s Shakespeare on Film (106–21, 133-35)—mentioned Welles’s use of “distant sounds punctuated with silence, subdued lighting” and “spare interiors and landscapes,” saying that these “show the fifteenth century filtered through memory and imagination.” Jorgens suggested that the film’s “bursts of wit, playfulness, and good fellowship seem superficially ineffective,” adding that they “are not so much dramatizations as evocations, remembrances of things past.” Noting how the production’s humor (110) was combined with a generally “somber tone,” Jorgens suggested that despite “Welles’s sympathy for Falstaff and everything he stands for,” Welles (who played Falstaff) “is not a great comic actor or director. He cuts or races past good comic moments and then tries to milk laughs from unfunny situations,” adding that “one feels Welles straining to be funny or trying to patch together things shot months apart, with painful results. His marvelous sense of timing in static scenes of lyricism or somberness, or in frenetic, fragmented action scenes, fails him in moments of comedy in ways that quick cuts or fluid camera movements cannot disguise” (111). Calling Chimes “the most personal of Shakespeare films,” Jorgens suggested that Welles, a filmmaker who often struggled to succeed, may have seen “too much of himself in Falstaff,” so that the “story of a fat, aging jester exiled from his audience and no longer able to triumph over impossible obstacles with wit and torrential imagination might well seem tragic” rather than funny, especially when exploring Falstaff’s “simultaneous betrayal and self-destruction.” Although Hollywood had rejected Welles much as Hal and the court reject Falstaff, Welles, according to Jorgens, presents his Falstaff as sometimes “far from amusing.” He is sometimes Machiavellian, sometimes crass, sometimes “cynical,” and sometimes greedy. Sometimes, in fact, he is less likable than Prince Hal (112). Jorgens thought the film fell into two halves, divided by the battle at Shrewsbury. Prior to the battle, life for Hal is idyllic and full of fun, and both Hotspur and Falstaff are presented as appealing figures—Hotspur because of his “energy and spontaneity” and Falstaff “because of his affection for Hal, his wit, and his love of play” (112). Eventually, though, darker aspects of all three characters are revealed: Falstaff can seem selfish, Hotspur can seem foolish and “suicidal,” and Hal more and more reflects the traits of his “cunning, imperious father.” Thus, “[a]fter the battle, England becomes a land of sterility, disease, and death,” with all the major characters seeming defeated in one way or another (112–13). Jorgens concluded that although “Welles’s big scenes are usually great ones, … the excellence of Chimes also lies in fine subdued moments,” as in “the nostalgic scenes with Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence” (119). Concerning the film as a whole, he wrote that “next to [its] virtues, its flaws seem slight” (121).

Andrew M. McLean, in a 1983 essay titled “Orson Welles and Shakespeare: History and Consciousness in Chimes at Midnight,” proposed to demonstrate “how two segments of the film—the introductory shots of Falstaff and Justice Shallow in conversation and subsequent battlefield sequences—capture as well as anything the essence of the Shakespearean tetralogy.” He wrote that the “correspondence, so dear to the Elizabethan imagination, between private and public worlds, is summed up in these images of disintegration in such a way as to lead the viewer to an understanding of his place in history and of the forces of history as they operate in life. Altogether they sum up what Welles himself has called ‘the death of Merrie England’” (197).

In his 1988 book Filming Shakespeare’s Plays (119–42), Anthony Davies called Welles’s Chimes at Midnight and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet “the two films which most successfully fuse the elements of theatre and cinema in the field of Shakespearean film. Some adaptations have more powerful moments and some are technically more polished, but these two films,” he thought, “sustain an equipoise in their spatial strategies which makes them organic cinema, while still allowing the actor to shape delivery and to establish character” (119). He argued that Welles’s focus in Chimes on “sustained character and spatial interrelationships” set this film apart from his earlier Shakespearean adaptations (121), suggesting that Welles’s “desire to concentrate in closeup on faces invokes a visual idiom more appropriate for television than for cinema” and that this and other traits prefigured the work of later directors of Shakespeare for film (122). Davies thought that in Chimes Welles “seems to have intended the visual elements merely to remain a backdrop, something secondary, thus disrupting the organic reciprocity between actor and decor, and deflecting cinema back towards theatre” (122), although later he argued that “Welles’s major achievement in Chimes at Midnight is his balance of the power of character with the power of place,” as in his cold, stony depiction both of the king’s palace and of the king himself (125). In contrast, scenes of the Tavern are “dominated by wood” of various kinds, so that the two locations symbolize the differences between the places where the king and Falstaff respectively preside (126). Davies wrote that “Welles achieves a superb effect in his spatial strategy by making the house of Justice Shallow, in the substance of its structure, the meeting point of wood and stone” (127). Throughout his discussion, Davies was especially concerned with the ways spaces are designed and employed, as when he noted that in this film “there is a progression of ceremony … where groups of individuals have to stand before a figure of authority” (128) and the ways “the interior of Warkworth Castle is both a projection of its occupant and an integrated component within the film’s whole spatial strategy,” anticipating in its appearance the “character of Hotspur. Unlike the interiors of Henry’s palace and the tavern, however, which concentrate on associating the King and Falstaff with major single affinitive elements, the interior of Warkworth,” Davies thought, “sets up an arresting incongruity in its dissonance of military and domestic assertions” (131). Landscapes, he argued, were also often symbolically used, especially in the ways they contrasted with interiors (133), and he called the powerful battle scene, in the fields near Shrewsbury, “a hideous and ferocious onslaught,” one that, “in its sustained realism is quite unlike any battle in any other Shakespearean film” (134), adding that only when Hal and Hotspur meet in battle are specific personalities emphasized (136). Davies suggested that by blending elements from a number of different plays—including “the two parts of Henry IV together with pieces from Henry V, Richard II and The Merry Wives of Windsor”—Welles creates his own “organically durable structure which knits together correspondences and presents its dimensions through polarities which do not arise within the structure of the individual plays” (138). He saw “a cyclic pattern to the shifts of pace in the film” as well as in “the transitions between interior and exterior locations” (139), which contribute to the film’s “considerable cinematic variety” (140).

Discussing Chimes in his 1991 book Still in Movement: Shakespeare on Screen (22–25, 38–44), Lorne Buchman explored the effectiveness of particular scenes, including one in which Falstaff’s vulnerability and age are emphasized while another stresses Hal’s “youth and strong presence” after he becomes king. Low camera angles highlight Hal’s “majesty,” new maturity, and new role as restorer of the kingdom, but at the same time Welles helps us feel Falstaff’s pain at being rejected by his former close friend. According to Buchman, Welles “creates a deadlock and not a privileging of one side or the other. In one sense, the film allows us to participate in a very private exchange between these two men” while also emphasizing larger, more important matters involving the health of the kingdom as a whole (25). Like Davies in 1988, Buchman discussed the visual and symbolic differences between the tavern and the court, but Buchman also saw “a certain affinity between them.” He noted that “shots at court are static and controlled, emphasizing the stature of the King and the rather rigid, businesslike, ‘everyday’ world of Henry’s castle,” with its “high ceilings and concrete walls” implying “confinement” and the pin-point “shafts of light … add[ing] to the sense of a stark and alienated political world.” Even Henry seems confined in this castle, and “low-angle shots” stress his “loneliness and isolation.” In contrast, the tavern scenes highlight “energy and celebration” as well as vitality and “festive motion” (39). But these two contrasting places resemble each other in that both are “cut off from the outside and, as such, are protective and sheltered environments.” Sunlight is mostly absent in both places, and Falstaff presides at the tavern as Henry does at court (39).

According to Buchman, it is the battle that eventually reveals “the profoundest reality of the Chimes world outside” the court and tavern—a “world of destruction, of death; a battleground for civil strife, a field in which honor is a value without precise definition or understanding” and a world of “loss, suffering, and the incomprehensibility of conflict among the nobility.” Welles’s skill at depicting violence, bloodshed, and death help contrast this world with both of the environments earlier depicted; the battlefield is the place where “all aspects” of those two earlier worlds meet and clash (40). Buchman described how “Welles shoots close-ups of the fall of each man and makes immediate every stab, every punch, every horse’s tumble. We are made to listen to the groans and shrieks of the fallen soldiers and, simultaneously, to the barbaric cries of attack around them.” This war “is not an abstract event viewed from a single point of view”; instead, “the audience find themselves in the center of the event, sharing the perspective of the terrified soldiers” (41). The contrasts-yet-similarities of the tavern and court resemble the complexities and ambiguities of Falstaff himself. Although “we delight in Hal’s wit and his sense of play … and long to see him in Falstaff’s company, we also remember the atmosphere of disease and malaise of this [tavern] world, which Welles accentuates in the latter half of the film, as well as the tyranny of civil strife.” Therefore, “in this production, Hal is the only hope” (111).

Scott McMillan, in his 1991 volume on Henry the Fourth, Part One for the Shakespeare in Performance series (88–99), discussed such matters as how Welles adapted Shakespeare’s text; the difficulty of understanding some of the speaking, especially by Welles (but not by Gielgud); and Welles’s emphasis on Hal’s repeated small rejections of Falstaff throughout the film, which foreshadow his later, major rejection. He noted Welles’s refusal to depict Hotspur as representing chivalry; suggested that the film’s ostensible lament for Merrie England is actually a lament for Falstaff, who is vulnerable to the Prince from the beginning and who is ripe for rejection. Welles considered this “the greatest conception of a good man, the most completely good man, in all drama.” Stressing the film’s wintry landscapes (shot in Spain), McMillan wrote that this version’s “brilliance is always evident” and is visible in such details as the lighting (93). He suggested that the “gradual increase of appreciation for Chimes at Midnight” partly reflects admiration for its emphasis on images, not simply words. Early reactions to it called it “exasperating and primitive,” but McMillan asserts that “the generation whose values were formed in the late 1960s and the 1970s, when language itself was placed under sceptical and paradoxical questioning, was prepared to see this film in a new way and to understand that one of its effects was to challenge the usual technique in Shakespeare films,” such as ones starring and directed by Laurence Olivier (94). Noting Welles’s emphasis on Falstaff, on symbolic locations, and on symbolic movements, McMillan paraphrased an interview in which Welles “spoke of making an external world to accord with the inner perception of such a character as Falstaff” and in which he also stressed the importance of visual images (96), as in the battle scene, which McMillan calls “nearly ten minutes of sheer visual warfare. No word of Shakespeare is spoken,” although many disturbing sounds are heard (97). McMillan offered many quotations from the shooting script, often explaining movements and shots while also discussing relations between characters (especially Henry, Hal, and Falstaff)—relations implied visually as well as suggested by speech, even though occasionally the images can be amateurishly obvious, as when Hal, after the battle ends, “lets his tankard drop to the ground before heading off after his father” (99).

Another book from 1991, Ace Pilkington’s Screening Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V (130ff, 142ff), praised Welles’s use of dubbing and editing and an effective soundtrack (131) and discussed such topics as the film’s genesis and development (132); the similarities and differences between the shooting script and film (133ff); previous critics’ reactions to it (133ff and throughout); and its uses of soliloquies (134). Pilkington explored how relations between Hal and Falstaff foreshadow the film’s conclusion (135); how it uses sound to underscore visual and textual meanings (135ff); and the complexity of the characters’ relationships (136ff). He described Welles’s personal investments in the film (138ff); its complex, balanced presentation of Falstaff (139ff); its willingness to depict much of Falstaff’s misconduct (140); and how it achieves artistic unity (142ff). Other topics included its similarities to Welles’s Citizen Kane (144ff); Shallow’s role (145–46); similarities between Falstaff and Henry IV (146); and Falstaff’s mortality (147). Pilkington commented on links between the worlds of Gad’s Hill, the tavern, and the battlefield (148ff); the use of images to temporarily freeze time (149–50); and the complex presentation of Hal’s rejection of Falstaff (154). He thought that Welles’s “restructuring of Shakespeare’s material raises some interesting critical questions,” arguing that the “careful links he builds suggest that the counterfeit deaths of both Falstaff and Henry IV are symbolically real. In Henry IV’s case,” Pilkington thought that “the interval between his two deaths is exceedingly brief,” but since Welles has moved the king’s weakness back to the battle of Shrewsbury, he has, in effect, made most of the material in 2 Henry IV a deathwatch. The film also suggests that it is not merely Falstaff and the king who arc old and loaded with diseases but “the world they inhabit as well” (149). He concluded that it “is a part of the large achievement of the film and of Welles as director that he has not allowed his lament for the passing of Falstaff’s age to become a condemnation of the one that follows it. Like the Shakespearean texts he mined for material, Welles’s work is a matter of oppositions and of balances” (155).

Assessing the film in his 1992 book Shakespeare Observed (38–50), Samuel Crowl discussed such matters as “Falstaff’s role and meaning” in the “second tetralogy” (35); how Welles uses a “pattern of diminishing Falstaff to underscore other values” (38); the film’s “excellent contemporary contribution to our understanding of Falstaff” (38); and how Welles captures “Hal’s emergence from the two fathers [Henry and Falstaff, and particularly the latter] who threaten to submerge his own unique identity either through guilty rule or gilded license” (39). He saw the opening shot as suggesting that “it is Falstaff’s winter which dominates the texture of the film, not Hal’s summer of self-realization”; conceded that Welles’s view of Falstaff is sentimental but said it was not excessively so (41); and commented on the tavern’s associations with “the energy of festive motion” (42). He argued, however, that “the significant movement, repeated three times in the film, is Hal’s progress through the tavern atmosphere, trailed by a cajoling Falstaff, out into its courtyard” (42). He said the film’s emphasis on farewells is “repeated in a minor, but wildly comic, key in the Gad’s Hill robbery scene—one of the film’s beautiful visual moments” (43) and observed that Falstaff is alert to “the sham hollowness of political rhetoric,” can “see through and comically explode the pieties of power,” but cannot see through “his own pupil, Hal—the most powerfully shrewd character in the play” (44). Crowl considered Welles’s blood battle at Shrewsbury a deliberate counterpoint to the stirring battle at Agincourt in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (46), calling Welles’s battle “stunning in its horror” and saying that “the camera clearly sympathizes with Falstaff’s comic cowardice” (47). In another example of comparison and contrast, Crowl suggested that the final, crucial rejection scene visually echoes but reverses “the pattern established in Hal’s earlier farewells at the Boar Head. If earlier it was Hal who had to push his way through the tavern crowd … now it is Falstaff who has to fight his way through an imposing congregation of soldiers, armed with long pikes, to confront his son-king” (48). As Falstaff exits this scene, as if down a tunnel, he is steadily diminished in size, so that “this is the last shot we have of this vast physical presence moving away from the audience he had courted and entertained, swallowed by the shadows” (49). Crowl concluded that from “our first view of Falstaff working his way through a wintry landscape, to the horrors of the combat at Shrewsbury, to the titanic coffin making its way to the Grave, Welles’s images all contribute to the creation of a world enriched by Falstaff’s presence and diminished by his loss” (50).

Michael A. Anderegg’s 1999 book Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture (128–41) said Chimes at Midnight had “gradually come to be recognized both as one of the most intelligent and imaginative” Shakespeare films and as one of Welles’s best movies—a “film at least equal in energy and brilliance to Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons,” even if he admitted that it was not entirely flawless. He noted that faults had been found in its “soundtrack” and in the sometimes “uncertain relationship between sound and image: the recording is technically faulty, Shakespeare’s words are frequently unintelligible”—especially when coming from Falstaff. There are problems with synchronization, and “a number of the minor actors have been dubbed by Welles himself—all signs [of] inadequate financing” (125). Critics had also singled out problems with “continuity” as well as a “general inattention to detail, especially in the casting and playing of the secondary roles.” Like Falstaff himself, Anderegg suggested, Chimes is “attractive, vibrant, large, and complex, but, withal, so deeply flawed as to negate many of its virtues.” He considered it a modern and sometimes postmodern take on a premodern world (126).

Anderegg emphasized Welles’s “rewriting of Shakespeare’s text” in a way that erases writing, critiques rhetoric, and undermines language itself. He argued that Welles, like Shakespeare, was suspicious of words but that Welles “centers squarely on a conflict between rhetoric and history, on the one hand, and the immediacy of a prelinguistic, prelapsarian, timeless physical world, on the other,” with Falstaff the crucial figure in this conflict (126). By emphasizing Falstaff more than Hal, Welles emphasizes satire and in doing so deconstructs many tidy thematic oppositions, including “court/tavern, honor/dishonor, Hotspur/Falstaff, Henry IV/Falstaff, time/timelessness, word/being, [and] serious/nonserious,” making it harder than one might have assumed to see these items as solidly contrasting. Hal must constantly choose between these apparent opposites, and characters in the film are sometime just as difficult to pin down as the themes, and Anderegg explores the often-irresolvable complexities of the film, its ideas, and its people (128–29), especially Falstaff himself, whose darker aspects are highlighted, whom Welles himself found less and less amusing the better he got to know him. Anderegg thought that Welles emphasized the often unappealing, even fraudulent, aspects of Falstaff’s personality (129), seeing him as always an actor, especially when dealing with Hal (131), and an actor, moreover, played by a talented actor aware of all kinds of actors’ tricks in a film that is full of tricks and complexities of its own (131). Thus, Anderegg comments that a “simple reverse shot, for example, may involve illogical changes in time and/or space. These and other stylistic idiosyncrasies” help complicate our experience of the film as “Welles generates a constant tension between what we see and what we hear, a tension that points to the ambiguous status of language in its relation to action” (131). Similar complexities are apparent in the ways soliloquies are often delivered, as when characters soliloquize with their backs to the camera or when they seem to be soliloquizing and then we discover that they are in fact addressing others (131).

Like other critics, Anderegg found Welles’s battle at Shrewsbury especially fascinating and effective, calling it a piece of history that is, in the film, “stripped of all rhetoric, denuded of language, and at the same time supremely eloquent” (131). Arguing that it “both imitates and ironizes” the battle at Agincourt in Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V, Anderegg thought it echoed a battle in Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and influenced the later battle depicted by Kenneth Branagh in his own 1989 Henry V (131–32). Describing how—and how effectively—Welles shot the battle (using a “mosaic of varied shots, some photographed with a handheld camera, some filmed with wide-angle lenses, some in slow motion, some speeded up, some shots static and others that employ swish pans or other kinds of rapid movement,” not to mention a vivid soundtrack), Anderegg saw the battle as an assault on any naïve assumptions about medieval chivalry (132). Continuing his penetrating analysis of the film, Anderegg contrasted the wordy but insecure King Henry with the worldly, fleshy but sometimes unattractive John Falstaff (133), who in some ways seems less appealing than the “poignant” Prince Hal (134–35). Emphasizing Falstaff’s huge body (135), Welles, according to Anderegg, refuses in this way and others to idealize the Middle Ages, thus implying that Chimes at Midnight cannot be easily interpreted in any simple ways (137). Yet Anderegg’s discussion is surely one of the best things ever written about this film.

Kathy M. Howlett, in her book from 2000 titled Framing Shakespeare on Film (151–56), mainly examined Gus Van Sant’s recent movie My Own Private Idaho as a response to Welles’s Chimes, even stating that any “audience ignorant of Shakespeare’s Henriad has difficulty following” the newer film. She also suggested that the “sophisticated demands that Welles’s Chimes at Midnight makes upon the viewing audience may, in fact, account for its neglect by mass audiences” (151), concluding that the “‘aristocrat’ in Welles espoused the values of ‘high culture’ and repudiated the values of the marketplace.” As an “isolated artist,” he reacted “against a system that reduces art to formula and repetition. This attitude,” Howlett thought, “is reflected in Welles’s conception of Falstaff and his tavern, in which historical and socioeconomic realities are all but eliminated, and replaced with psychological and sexual issues” (156).

Daniel Rosenthal’s Shakespeare on Screen, also from 2000, argued (36–39) that in Chimes “Falstaff’s wit is still in fine shape, but there is something pathetic about his devotion to Keith Baxter’s calculating Hal, so that the great comic set pieces of Henry IV, Part 1—the robbery of the pilgrims (wondrously filmed in a wintry, sunlit wood) and mock trial of Falstaff—are heavy with foreboding.” Rosenthal thought that Baxter “scarcely disguises his character’s contempt for Falstaff” (38), but he also suggested that when “Hal ascends the English throne [it] seems the coldest, loneliest place on earth.” Observing that “Welles contrasts the wide, low angles of the Boar’s Head with the forbidding height of Henry’s throne room (Spain’s Soria Cathedral),” and noting that “Gielgud, his breath condensing in the chilly air, invests [his] verse with majesty and the simple pain of a father who has lost touch with his wastrel son,” Rosenthal concluded that Falstaff’s “absurd cowardice” at Shrewsbury “ renders even more horrifying the battlefield terrors suffered by braver men rather than undermining them” (38). Their admirable courage, in other words, is emphasized by his craven fear.

Discussing Chimes in 2000 in his book Shakespeare in the Movies (74–78), Douglas Brode noted that Welles modified Shakespeare’s plots, making Falstaff his film’s main character, and intended to “portray Falstaff as the clown as tragic hero rather than as humorous relief and a foil to the Henrys” (75). Describing the filming during the 1960s, Brode thought the movie fit that era, with its emphasis on a conflict between generations and Falstaff as “an aged hippie guru, part Timothy Leary (‘sack’ substituting for LSD) and part merry prankster Ken Kesey, while the tavern itself is depicted as a virtual commune, an Elizabethan Alice’s Restaurant” and grim battle scenes relevant to the controversial Vietnam war (75). Brode observed how John Gielgud’s “noticeably thin build” contrasted with “Welles’s fat Falstaff,” thus emphasizing difference “in physique as well as philosophy.” Brode ended by stressing how Hal, like his father, comes to realize how “Uneasy is the head that wears a crown” (77). Meanwhile, Stephen Buhler’s 2002 book mainly discussed the ways Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film of Henry V echoed both Olivier’s 1944 film and Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (106–11), especially in Branagh’s depiction of battle scenes.

In an essay published in 2005 titled “‘Bypaths and Indirect Crooked Ways’: Mise-En-Scène in Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight,” Dean A. Hoffman mainly discussed how much Welles did with minimal sets and settings: “Welles’s cinematic space is … delimited by largely uncluttered landscapes that become representational. His primary location for much of the film encompasses little more than the distant castle and a street containing the tavern with a stretch of bare land dividing them—a stark and resonant demarcation,” according to Hoffman, “of the choice between revelry and statecraft open to the characters. And the setting of the film’s centerpiece, the battle of Shrewsbury, is established by mastershots that feature a barren and windswept plain whose scope is vastly disproportionate to the characters who populate it” (89).

Commenting in passing on Chimes in his 2008 Norton Guide (132–25, 106–8, 159–60), Samuel Crowl noted that Welles’s effort is very highly regarded by critics, some of whom consider it the best of all Shakespeare films (32). Praising it himself, Crowl admired its excellent use of landscapes and symbolic psychology (33), especially in the tavern scenes (33–34); its superb battle of Shrewsbury episode (34); the ways it emphasizes how war affects actual soldiers (35); and the ways it exemplifies Welles’s talents as an editor (106–8). Crowl suggested that Welles’s stress on “horror rather than heroics” reflected the influence of Jan Kott’s grim book Shakespeare Our Contemporary, a work of criticism especially popular in the 1960s (159). Also in 2008, Anthony Guneratne, in his book Shakespeare, Film Studies, and the Visual Cultures of Modernity (196–200), wrote that Chimes exhibits a “melancholy, twilight character”; is “arguably the most consistently well-acted and self-revelatory of Welles’s Shakespeare films” (196); and exhibits a “heightened awareness of the passage of time and of history’s malleability” (197). Guneratne also discussed the influence various nations had had on the work, especially Franco’s Spain, where it was filmed (198–200).

In his 2008 book on Henry IV: Parts I and II for the Shakespeare Handbooks series, James N. Loehlin (186–92) called Chimes “one of the greatest of Shakespeare films and one of Welles’s major achievements after leaving Hollywood” (186), saying it “was in one sense … simply a long prologue to [Falstaff’s] rejection” (187). Loehlin felt that “Welles plainly identified with Falstaff: both were men of enormous talents and appetites who found themselves rejected by those they had once entertained, who could no longer make their way in a world dominated by values alien to them. Welles’s portrait of Falstaff,” according to Loehlin, “doesn’t wholly eliminate the character’s corrupt and venial side, but emphasizes his great love for life, for pleasure, and for the prince who will break his heart” (187). Describing Gielgud as “a formidable Henry IV,” often “shot from low angles,” Loehlin said his “frigid demeanor matches the [wintry] setting; his frosty breath is often visible against the dark stone walls of [his] castle” (188). On the other hand, Loehlin considered Norman Rodway’s Hotspur, although occasionally displaying “a few moments of courage and nobility late in the film,” little more than “a buffoon” (188). Calling the Gad’s Hill robbery “one of the film’s most visually striking episodes” (189), Loehlin noted that in “conflating the two plays [the first and second parts of Henry IV], Welles cut the second rebellion; accordingly, much material from Part II precedes the battle of Shrewsbury” (189). He concluded by calling attention to the way the coronation shown at the end of the film follows a pattern already established showing “fencelike image[s] of massed vertical elements,” as in the trees at Gad’s Hill and the spears at Shrewsbury, remarking that these kinds of images contrast effectively with images of the rotund Fallstaff (191).

Commenting briefly on Chimes in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (18–21), Peter Cochran noted how low the budget was; said that each take had to be perfect, or at least good enough (18); wrote that Welles’s talents as a character actor were perfect for playing Falstaff (19); praised this film’s cast; noted that the Gaultree Forest scene is cut; admired the cinematography; and extolled the grim reality of the battle (19). Cochran noted the size and excess of everything in the film, including the tavern, which he considered also too tidy (but said this is all unimportant). He commented on the rapid pace (20); observed that Welles tinkers with the rejection scene; suggested that this Hal was never really Falstaff’s friend (21); said that several actors seem to be impersonating John Gielgud; and reported that Welles rejected soliloquies. Cochran considered the rejection scene the high point of the film and in fact the high point of filmed Shakespeare in general (21).

Examining Welles’s Shakespeare films in a 2013 volume titled Welles, Kozintsev, Kurosawa, Zeffirelli (volume 17 in the Great Shakespeareans series), Marguerite H. Rippy (34–41), compared and contrasted Chimes with Welles’s earlier Shakespeare films, saying that it “exhibits Welles’ hallmark layered visual style, use of angled shots, deep focus, and thematic juxtapositions of individuals against crowds and epic landscapes to create an overall sense of expressionist externalization of internal emotional states” (35). She suggested that the black and white photography creates both “gritty realism” and mournfulness, contrasting its use in Chimes with its literally darker use in Welles’s Othello but also contrasting it with “Olivier’s colourful, jingoistic depiction of warfare in Henry V” (37). Rippy argued that Welles’s film “undermines … war as an honourable pursuit,” showing it as vicious and muddy and full of hanging bodies (38). She noted the film’s emphasis on “theatricality,” “self-performance,” and “self-construction,” as when Hal constructs a new image of himself by publicly rejecting Falstaff, a figure often shot from below to stress his physical size and (at least for much of the film) his prominent importance (39). Even soliloquies are often filmed as performances rather than expressions of private thoughts, and Rippy even saw Chimes as a “critique of the power (and burden) of performance rather than a critique of Welles’ relationship with the Hollywood studio system” (41). Meanwhile, commenting on Chimes in passing in his 2014 book Shakespeare and the English-Speaking Cinema, Russell Jackson noted how it contrasts the “chilly” court with the “warm” tavern with its “large central space” surrounded by “nooks and crannies” (26).

In 2016, Peter E. S. Babiak, in his book Shakespeare Films: A Re-evaluation (65–67), wrote that Chimes begins with an “elegiac prologue sequence” (65); noted that Shakespeare, unlike Welles, does not depict the tavern; commented that the prologue’s “idyllic winter” is juxtaposed with the “brutal winter” of the credits; and observed that the Shrewsbury battle sequence emphasizes Falstaff and his followers. Babiak asserted that a later scene echoes but revises the initial prologue; that Shallow’s personality has come to seem “inane and irritating this” by this time (66); that the film thus challenges Ralph Richardson’s narration’s “version of events”; and that again, in the conclusion, Richardson’s narration is once more complicated or undercut (67).

In an essay published in 2016 titled “Intermediality in Orson Welles’s Shakespearean Collage: Competing Narrative Modes and Media in Chimes at Midnight,” Benjamin Hilb argued that Chimes “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. The film, moreover, incorporates several narrative modes, which are linked by their shared concern with the past” (86). He asserted that “[r]esolving 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 … 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,” he maintained, “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” (87).