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We Have Heard the Chimes at Midnight

Writer's picture: Bradley Olson, Ph.D.Bradley Olson, Ph.D.

Updated: Jan 24


Still from Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight (1966)
Still from Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight (1966)

Happy New Year, and thank you to all who continue to read and support JCF’s MythBlast Series. May the new year bring you all love, joy, and peace.


The theme for the MythBlast series during the first month of 2025 is “The Fool at the Movies.” This is a rich vein to mine, indeed, given the cinematic contributions of great geniuses like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx, Madeline Kahn, Gilda Radner, and Robin Williams, to name just a few. All of them, for the most part, absurdly, chaotically, hilariously foolish. But I want to focus on an often overlooked variant of the archetype, the tragic fool.


The Film

Chimes at Midnight is a 1966 film written, directed by and starring Orson Welles. It's a masterpiece of a film made of loosely adapted scenes from William Shakespeare's plays, Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor that focus on the relationship between the young Prince Hal (Keith Baxter) and his roguish companion Sir John Falstaff (Welles). It is, by the way, Welles’ favorite of all his films: “It's my favorite picture, yes. If I wanted to get into heaven on the basis of one movie, that's the one I would offer up” (Estrin and Welles Orson Welles Interviews), and more than a few critics have insisted that it is the best Shakespearean film ever made. For what it's worth, so do I.


Welles had great affection for Falstaff, he may well have identified strongly with the clever, creative, “huge hill of flesh.” Certainly, they both were similarly immense (Prince Hal says Falstaff “sweats to death and lards the lean earth as he walks along”), both challenged conventional norms, loved wit, revelry, and drink; they were raconteurs of the first order (as an example, do yourself a favor and watch Orson Welles’ Sketchbook, which aired on television in the mid-1950s), and they were both painfully ejected from orbit around a world that was everything to them. Near the end of his life, Welles himself may have become something of a tragic fool, suffering a painful, humiliating fall from cinematic royalty that included drunkenly shilling Paul Masson wine in television commercials.


I think that Falstaff is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most vividly human, most fully realized and embodied figure of all the characters he imagined, and probably for that very reason, one of his most beloved. So much beloved that tradition has it that Shakespeare couldn’t bear to see Falstaff die on stage, and after seeing Henry IV Part I, Queen Elizabeth I asked Shakespeare to write The Merry Wives of Windsor, requesting that Falstaff be shown in love.


I think that Falstaff is, perhaps, Shakespeare’s most vividly human, most fully realized and embodied figure of all the characters he imagined, and probably for that very reason, one of his most beloved.

Falstaff Was My Tutor

If I might be allowed a short digression, in the early Twenty Teens I wrote a blog called Falstaff Was My Tutor. It proved to be modestly popular; in fact at one point I was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in creative nonfiction, and some of you who followed me then may remember it. I began the blog thinking that I would share sad, funny, strange, poignant stories from the time when I, a rather callow young man, was a police officer. The blog was inspired by a friend and frequent patrol partner who, as I reflected upon his premature death, I understood to be a Fallstaffian influence: a man of vast appetites, sometimes questionable ethics, a riotously funny, self-deceptive man who often told the hard truth about the world, while struggling with the fact of seeming ill-suited for it.


Having left that career, that world, behind, I foolishly identified with Prince Hal, who as king finally decided to take upon himself all the responsibilities of his station and renounce his former way of life:


I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool, and jester! I have long dream'd of such a man, So surfeit-swell'd, so old, and so profane; But being awake, I do despise my dream [...] Presume not, that I am the thing I was [...] I have turn'd away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me; and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots: Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death (emphasis is mine).


I say foolishly because now, in my late middle age, I see that I have always been Falstaff. Not so much in the sense of his riotous behaviors or too much sherris-sack, food, or licentiousness, but rather in the sense of his tragic foolishness: his vulnerability, his loneliness, and his self-delusional overcompensation. How could Shakespeare not be speaking to me? Just look at my photo accompanying this post. “How ill white hairs become a fool and a jester.” But unlike Hal, I no longer despise my dream, and I attempt to incorporate it into the broader fabric of my life. That’s the thing with archetypes; we’re constituted by so many, and each one contains its own opposite which, at some time or another demands to be reckoned with. Shakespeare’s Falstaff reflects this quality, and Welles’ film depends upon this nuance.


The Fool as Truth Teller

Falstaff, like other Shakespearian fools, was a truth-teller. He revealed the sordid realities underlying high flown ideals like honor, duty, and patriotism. He even tells the unflinching truth about himself. When the Lord Chief Justice, a grave, important advisor to the king, scolds Falstaff, saying, “Well, the truth is, Sir John, you live in great infamy…Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.” Falstaff replies, “I would it were otherwise. I would my means were greater and my waist slender.” He knows, painfully, that he is not what he once aspired to be, and instead he finds his untapped potential in the youthful Prince Hal, who will soon be the shining sun of the realm. Traditionally, the king is the central source of life, power, and authority within the kingdom, just as the sun is the center of the solar system, providing light and warmth to all who come into his orbit, and Falstaff loves the young prince whose bright light warms his old heart.


Earlier in the film his companions ask him to put his ear to the ground and listen for the approach of travelers of whom they might relieve their material goods and Falstaff—knowing that once he’s prostrate on the ground will have great difficulty rising—replies, “Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?” But Falstaff's question seems to foreshadow a time when he will be so far down that no lever large enough could ever be found to lift him up again and he will die, killed by regret and a broken heart.


And sure enough that old heart, that great ironic, comic heart, that poor, foolish heart, is broken when Henry V banishes Falstaff from his presence, a fate he can’t quite accept. In the film we’re told that Falstaff is dead, that “the King has killed his heart.” His companions can’t accept that Falstaff is dead, and because Shakespeare and Welles have given such zeal to Falstaff, such an immense, vivid vitality that theatergoers, like the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth I and those of us watching the film, have a hard time accepting it, too. Mistress Quickly insists that surely he’s not in hell, but instead, “He’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever a man went to Arthur’s bosom.” A curious thing to say, and a number of scholars argue that being an uneducated, uncouth woman, Mistress Quickly intended to say “Abraham’s bosom” rather than Arthur’s. But I think she’s got it exactly right. Falstaff went to Arthur’s bosom, and like the once and future king, he will return when we most need him.


This is the essence of a tragic fool; they live life to the fullest while knowing they will surely die—perhaps sooner rather than later since they tempt fate so often—and they diminish the influence and authority of death by laughing at it, taunting it, domesticating it, and most of all, humanizing it. The rest of us may not realize their value until they’re dead, but like Orson Welles, we love them all the more after death. The archetypal fool provides a lever large enough to lift us all out of our powerlessness, ennui, and existential dread, encouraging the rest of us to make a game of life, discovering joy, enthusiasm, and wonder in the midst of its terrifying mystery.


Thanks for reading.





MythBlast authored by:


Bradley Olson, Ph.D. is an author, speaker, and a psychotherapist. He serves as the Publications Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and the host of JCF's flagship podcast, Pathways With Joseph Campbell. Dr. Olson holds a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Dr. OIson is also a depth psychologist in private practice in Flagstaff, Arizona, where he has lived since 1995. Dr. Olson has graduate degrees in psychology from the University of Oklahoma. Dr. Olson offers mythic life coaching at What's Mything in Your Life (bradleyolsonphd.com)





This MythBlast was inspired by Creative Mythology and the archetype of The Fool.

 

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