‘A Thousand Shylocks’: Orson Welles and The Merchant of Venice

Summary

Today Orson Welles (1915–85) is known to most in the Shakespeare community for his work on the New York stage in the 1930s, primarily the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth (1936) and ‘fascist’ Julius Caesar (1937), and for his film adaptations of Macbeth (1948), Othello (1952) and Chimes at Midnight (1965 ). Less well known is that at the very outset of his career Welles co-edited three Shakespeare plays with Roger Hill, his former prep school headmaster at the Todd School in Woodstock, Illinois. Everybody’s Shakespeare was published by Todd Press in 1934, and included modern spelling versions of The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar. These first appeared in individual editions, but later they were collected and published as one book. The primary audience was high school and college students, and the editorial apparatus was designed to get them not to study the plays but rather ‘Read them. Enjoy them. Act them.’ To this end Hill cut the texts, Welles created nearly 500 drawings to illustrate the plays, they wrote detailed stage directions together, and each penned introductory essays (Hill on the life and the editorial tradition; Welles on staging the plays). It was a true work of collaboration, and produced at a time when Welles was still in his teens.

While over the years Welles’s stage and film work has been the subject of much scholarship, these ‘performances’ on the page have not received nearly enough attention. Simon Callow argues that ‘Welles’s sense of theatre, the wit and point of his drawing, and the articulate enthusiasm of his approach makes Everybody’s Shakespeare one of the outstanding achievements of his entire output’ (p. 185). His editorial work on The Merchant of Venice especially deserves wider recognition today because, apart from a few minutes of film shot years later, this is the only evidence we have of Welles engaging with the play.