BORIS, MERRIE ENGLAND & THE CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

"We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow." - Falstaff, Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 2

“Hamlet is death's ambassador while Falstaff is the embassy of life.” - Harold Bloom, Falstaff: Give Me Life

“The film was not intended as a lament for Falstaff, but for the death of Merrie England. Merrie England as a conception, a myth which has been very real to the English-speaking world… It is more than Falstaff who is dying. It’s the old England dying and betrayed”. - Orson Welles

Although we're only half way through January, there has been a recent reprieve over the past week from the wet weather we've typically come to expect in England throughout the first month of a new year.

Roused from my winter hibernation, the dazzling white sunlight has made me squint mole-like toward the amethyst skies whilst also admiring the ground glazed with a light white stubble of frost as I refresh my lungs with every intake of the arctic air about me. It feels almost as if winter is impersonating Spring right now but somehow forgetting the essential bit about being warm. Nevertheless, the depression of winter has been alleviated somewhat and I for one can now see the "savage and serene" March not too far up ahead in the distance which gives me hope.

For my "mid-winter spring" soundtrack I've been playing the new expanded (Intrada) CD release of Angelo Francesco Lavagnino's iconic score for Orson's Welles movie "Chimes At Midnight", which I believe is the perfect music for this current spell of magical winter weather in the not so Merrie England of late.

Shaking off a national Omicron hangover followed by the British media's obsessive banging of pots and pans faux outrage of Boris Johnson ("Falstaff who's been forced to play Hamlet") and his office parties during lockdown, the season is definitely ripe for some more endless self flagellating punishment of England in general for its overall awfulness. Our self loathing has become a national pastime where most of us seem to compete to find out whose vision of the country is the bleakest.

I should state for the record here that I don't personally subscribe to a dislike, hatred or overall pessimistic view of the country I live in quite as much as others do, but I understand some of the grievances often aired. We are, as Emma Thompson once famously said, "a cake-filled, misery-laden grey old island" and are often, much like our routinely terrible weather, used to being grumbled at and stereotyped as the sad clown of Europe.

And yet there are still some of us who will nod in sympathy with those disillusioned on 'cake island' but who still secretly hold the dream of "deep England" close to their hearts, more forgiving of our past and generally more optimistic about our future.

To my mind the greatest act of rebellion in the modern world is to be an optimist; I think of this current zeitgeist mind virus of national pessimism akin to that of that spell of pepertual winter the Queen of Narnia cast upon that fictional land in C.S Lewis's classic book, and feel that Aslan must return soon, to bring joy back once again, if only for a summer.

For I fear the dream of Merrie England has been dead and buried for far too long, suffocating under the soil. Perhaps it is time for a re-awakening of the idea, so that for once the poets and artists of this current age might be charitable enough to remind the hand wringers that there are indeed some virtues (yes virtues) and good things going for us here in Blighty. I'm not suggesting anyone portray a cheap illusion of false reality like Zuckerberg's Meta, but simply not to deny a genuine romantic appreciation of the things we love about this place. The self deprecating wit, the humanity of our many contradictions, culture, the hedgerows, and yes even the weather, for it is as idiosyncratic as the people of this kingdom, I believe.

"I think Falstaff is really Merrie England. I think Shakespeare was greatly pre-occupied as I am in a humble way with the loss of innocence. I think there has always been an England, an older England which was sweeter and purer, where the hay smelt better and the weather was always springtime and the daffodils blew in the gentle, warm breezes. You feel a nostalgia for it in Chaucer and you feel it all through Shakespeare and I think he was profoundly against the modern age, as I am. " - Orson Welles on Falstaff, Merrie England and Shakespeare

Someone else who believed in the great dream of England was Orson Welles.

I've always appreciated Orson Welles's love for what some might call the fanciful conceit of Merrie England.

Similar to his love of Cervantes's Don Quixote, he had it appears from his interviews speaking on the subject an equal love for Falstaff, that comic tragic hero of Shakespeare who many of us idle layabouts find hard to resist. Welles commited to celluoid what I believe is the most atmospherically perfect rendering of any Shakespeare play on screen. Chimes at Midnight (1965) is not by any stretch of the imagination a perfect movie, but it is one that is made with a rare love and its soul radiates through the screen each time I sit down and watch it. It is as unkempt as Falstaff, that loveable buffoon himself and is somehow able to conjure the magic of a time that may or may not have existed the way it's been depicted in books, plays or poetry.

Perhaps Merrie England is as fictional a notion as Narnia, but nonetheless it is as real to the poets and dreamers who love this country as the ground we walk upon and feel it has been given an unfairly bad rap of late.

As for our modern day Falstaff, Prime Minister Boris Johnson (at least at the time of writing this), I'm sure The Labour Party, establishment media and cake island whingers would have all of us, like Prince Hal, turn our backs and shun the fat fool. And yet, somehow, while I listen to Lavagnino's spectacular soundtrack for Chimes at Midnight whilst the unexpected brilliant sunshine of January brings some small hope from despair, I can at least see that some semblance of the farce and glory of Merrie England is still manifest in these chaotic times.

"This whiskery swag-bellied omnivorous cornucopia of appetites, red-eyed, unbuttoned, sherry-soaked. This nightwalker and whoremonger, a “muddy conger,” swinging at his old mistress Doll Tearsheet, a life-affirming liar whose truth is never to be a counterfeit. Falstaff is ancient energy thumping at volume through a temporary poundage of flesh. He is part pagan — the Lord of Misrule on the loose in Eastcheap." - Harold Bloom, Falstaff: Give Me Life