Shakes versus Shav

Shakes versus Shav (1949) is a puppet play written by George Bernard Shaw. It was Shaw's penultimate dramatic work. The play runs for 20 minutes in performance.

The play was written by Shaw for the Lanchester Marionettes who were based in their own theatre in Foley House, Malvern, Worcestershire, UK. The company's founders, Waldo and Muriel Lanchester, performed regularly in the Malvern Festival. Shaw, having seen their performances over the years, wrote Shakes Versus Shav for the company in 1949.^[1] The play comprises a comic argument between the two playwrights, as a form of intellectual equivalent of Punch and Judy.

In 2007 it was revived by Henry Bell at the Orange Tree Theatre with Dudley Hinton and John Paul Connelly playing the parts written for puppets. John Thaxter of The Stage described it as 'history making'.^[2]

Plot summary

William Shakespeare challenges Shaw as an upstart, quoting lines from his own plays. Shaw claims that Macbeth has been bettered by Scott's novel Rob Roy, and "proves" the point by staging a fight between the ghosts of the two Scots, which Rob Roy wins.

Shaw then asserts that Adam Lindsay Gordon has outdone Shakespeare's verse, quoting the lines "The beetle booms adown the glooms/And bumps among the clumps" (in fact a garbled version of lines by James Whitcomb Riley). Shakespeare laughs at this. He tells Shaw that he could never have written Hamlet or King Lear. Shaw replies that Shakespeare could not have written Heartbreak House, and creates a pastiche of his own play with the characters posed in imitation of Millais's painting The North-West Passage.

Shakespeare defends the emotional power of his work. Shaw defends the practical value of his. Shaw ends by quoting Shakespeare's own words and bringing into being a small light to symbolise his own reputation. Shakespeare puts out the light and the play ends.

Puppets

Waldo Lanchester carved the six marionettes (heads were carved by Jack Whitehead) and Muriel costumed them, having sought advice from Scotland on the correct tartans.^[3] The Shaw puppet is now housed in the George Bernard Shaw Museum, Shaw's Corner, at Ayot St Lawrence, the Shakespeare puppet is in the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and the other four puppets - MacBeth, Rob Roy, Captain Shotover and his Daughter - are in the Staffordshire County Museum^[4] at Shugborough Hall.

Notes

External links

• Full text of Shakes versus Shav.

v t e The plays of George Bernard Shaw Passion Play Un Petit Drame Widowers' Houses The Philanderer Mrs. Warren's Profession Arms and the Man Candida The Man of Destiny You Never Can Tell The Devil's Disciple The Gadfly Caesar and Cleopatra Captain Brassbound's Conversion The Admirable Bashville Man and Superman John Bull's Other Island How He Lied to Her Husband Major Barbara Passion, Poison, and Petrifaction The Doctor's Dilemma The Interlude at the Playhouse Getting Married The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet Press Cuttings Fascinating Foundling The Glimpse of Reality Misalliance The Dark Lady of the Sonnets Fanny's First Play Androcles and the Lion Overruled Beauty's Duty Pygmalion Great Catherine The Music Cure O'Flaherty V.C. The Inca of Perusalem Augustus Does His Bit Macbeth Skit Annajanska, the Bolshevik Empress Heartbreak House Back to Methuselah A Glimpse of the Domesticity of Franklin Barnabas Jitta's Atonement Saint Joan The Apple Cart Too True to Be Good How These Doctors Love One Another! Village Wooing On the Rocks The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles The Six of Calais The Millionairess Arthur and the Acetone Cymbeline Refinished Geneva In Good King Charles's Golden Days The British Party System Buoyant Billions Farfetched Fables Shakes versus Shav Why She Would Not