Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture

Film and Culture Series

by Michael Anderegg

From the earliest days of radio to the golden age of television and beyond, Orson Welles has occupied a unique place in American culture. In Orson Welles, Shakespeare, and Popular Culture, Michael Anderegg considers Welles's influence as an interpreter of Shakespeare for twentieth-century American popular audiences. Exploring his works on stage, radio, and in film, Anderegg reveals Welles's unique position as an artist of both high and popular culture. At once intellectually respected and commercially viable, the Shakespeare Welles gave the American public reflects his unique genius as a writer, director, and actor.

From early plays in school to the Everybody's Shakespeare books and the Mercury Text Records adaptations, Anderegg illustrates how Welles tried to transcend the barriers between the classical and the popular. He argues that "Welles the Shakespearean" sought to be a restorer as well as an innovator by drawing on his knowledge of the abundant, lowbrow popularity of Shakespeare in nineteenth-century America. Welles's three film adaptations of Shakespeare, Macbeth, Othello, and Chimes at Midnight, are examined. From his peculiarly "Scottish" version of Macbeth, to his postmodern reading of the history plays in Chimes at Midnight, Welles's interpretive strategies--and the public's reception of them--are considered. In the final chapter, Anderegg surveys Welles's work as an actor--his legacy and myth--and reexamines the common view that he squandered his talents in the era after Citizen Kane. Taking into account his non-Shakespearean roles, Anderegg shows Welles to have been a markedly "Shakespearean" actor and, in his versions of the Bard's plays, a key arbiter of culture.

Genres: Nonfiction

216 pages, Paperback

First published November 17, 1998

Reviews

[Matt Carton]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️-1/2, if only for the over-usage of the variations of the word “text” in certain parts of the book. All in all, a scholarly, thoughtful, and proving look into Welles as the ultimate Shakespearean “actor-manager” of the 20th century.

[Carmen]

Nothing has made more sense than contextualising Orson Welles within the US's unique 19th-century Shakespeare scene and how he took this into television/film/radio. Art as instruction and education as well as for its own sake - two ideas Welles understood were not opposed!