Touched by Evil: Performing Theodicy in Orson Welles’s Shakespeare Adaptations

Abstract

In translating a pot-boiler roman policier, Badge of Evil, into a cinematic meditation of the corrupting wages of power, Welles substituted “touch” for “badge” in his title. Fluent in a number of European languages, Welles understood “touch” in a multiplicity of ways: a dexterous riposte, as in the French touché; a quantity barely to be perceived; a tactile, sensory path to knowledge as the empiricists and rationalists of the Seventeenth Century postulated. The present study intends to demonstrate that throughout performing career – as a voice actor in radio and audio recordings, as a stage actor, and as the protagonist of his own films and those of other directors – Welles accepted the existence of evil and strove to illustrate its omnipresence in human affairs. He even demanded that his fellow directors allow him to play characters in his own idiosyncratic manner, and he radically revised plays and novels in order to make his protagonists more morally culpable than they are in his sources. In so doing Welles amplified the ethical conflicts deployed by his favourite authors: Conrad, Dinesen, Cervantes, Kafka, and above all, Shakespeare. Welles’s tyrants and supermen owed little to Nietzsche, being more akin to those celebrated by Machiavelli and decried by Vives, Erasmus, and Montaigne. Alive to the philosophical discourses permeating Shakespeare’s plays well before their elucidation by today’s scholarship, and yet deeply concerned with conveying them to a wide public, Welles paid the price of having many of his Shakespearean projects unrealized. Traces of the latter exist in archives in Torino, München, Michigan and Indiana, and the present work “touches” on these as well as his extant oeuvre to illustrate the full extent of his theodicy. Jan Kott, Welles’s contemporary, outlived him; but it was Welles who first re- established Shakespeare as “our contemporary.”