`Call Down the Corridors of Time'

Recently I watched the best Shakespeare screen adaptation I know, Chimes at Midnight, directed by Orson Welles, who also plays Sir John Falstaff. Welles stitches together scenes from both parts of Henry IV with others from Richard II, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry V, and excerpts from Shakespeare’s source for the history plays, Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. Welles’ Falstaff is seldom the cartoonish buffoon we expect. He’s somber, more tired and sad than lusty and rambunctious. The role is subtly comic but rarely laugh-out-loud funny.

With this viewing, my third or fourth since I first saw Chimes at Midnight on public television in the early nineteen-seventies, what most impressed me was Welles’ 10-minute recreation of the Battle of Shrewsbury. It was fought July 21, 1403, in what is now Shropshire, with Henry IV and his men facing a rebel army led by Henry “Hotspur” Percy, from Northumberland. Most of us know the battle best as the climax of Henry IV, Part 1, and in my case, Welles’ film.

His scenes of fighting are chaotic and noisy – the crash of armor and swords, men and horses screaming – and with few Hollywood heroics. Welles transposed the summer battle to winter, so the armies clash on ice and snow and the air is clouded with condensed breath. It reminded me of comparable sequences in Eisenstein, Kurosawa and Polanski’s MacBeth, and of Olivier’s staging of the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V, but seemed harsher because of the rapid editing and the clamor on the soundtrack. I also heard non-Shakespearean literary echoes. Take this passage from Briggflatts, published by Basil Bunting in 1966, the year after Chimes at Midnight premiered. It describes the death of Eric Bloodaxe at Stainmore in 954:

“Loaded with mail of linked lies,
what weapon can the kind lift to fight
when chance-met enemies employ sly
sword and shoulder-piercing pike,
pressed into the mire,
trampled and hewn till a knife
-- in whose hand? – severs tight
neck cords? Axe rusts. Spine
picked bare by raven, agile
maggots devour the slack side
and inert brain, never wise…”

Bunting’s lines are music – so many one-syllable words enjambed, so much alliteration, each line ending with the long “I” sound. He renders the chaos of medieval battle with densely patterned lines. The other poet Chimes at Midnight brought to mind was Christopher Logue, in his ongoing translations from Homer’s Iliad. Logue’s battles are graphically savage. This is from War Music:

“Impacted battle. Dust above a herd.
Trachea, source of tears, sliced clean.
Deckle-edged wounds: `Poor Jataphect, to know,’ knocked clean
Out of his armour like a half-set jelly
`Your eyes to be still open yet not see,’ or see
By an abandoned chariot a dog
With something like your forearm in its mouth;
A face split off,
Sent skimming lidlike through the crunch
Still smiling, but its pupils dots on dice:
Bodies so intermixed
The tremor of their impact keeps the dead
Upright with the mass.”

In The Shakespeare Wars, Ron Rosenbaum, who adores Chimes at Midnight, tells of his interview with Keith Baxter, the actor who played Prince Hal to Welles’ Falstaff and John Gielgud’s Henry IV:

“Baxter told some wonderful tales about Welles’s Falstafian filmmaking. But when I asked him about specific acting directions Welles had given, Baxter told me, `Orson didn’t give suggestions, but the one thing he did say, the night before we started shooting, was, `We want to call down the corridors of time with this.’”

And he did.