| George Bernard Shaw (1856--1950) had a lifelong fascination with William Shakespeare (1564--1616). First as a student and critic, and then as a playwright, Shaw saw in Shakespeare both a dramatic idol and teacher---and a competing rival to be challenged, and overcome.;This feeling that Shakespeare was an opponent to be defeated is made most explicit in the miniature play Shaw originally intended to be his final dramatic statement, at the end of his professional life: Shakes Versus Shav (1949), a novelty marionette play, in which puppet figures of Shaw and Shakespeare literally fight, or spar, comparing their dramatic achievements, with puppets representing and quoting some of their iconic characters. The onstage fight is warm-hearted, the competition good-natured, and the respect mutual, between the two playwrights. Of course---Shaw himself wrote this text, and so was able to manipulate this brotherhood, according to his own needs, and assert his ownership of the competition on his own terms.;Shaw's pleas, in that and many other plays, to Shakespeare to clear out of the way and allow his own body of work to have its due credit, without suffering under Shakespeare's shadow, is the critical problem I am exploring, following his earlier boast of having taught Shakespeare's characters some reason, to go with their deep feeling. This chronological suspension and confusion illustrates a paradoxical attitude towards his dramatic predecessor---simultaneously resenting and revering him---that colored Shaw's career. His words in his Preface to this puppet play express his paradox: "Enough too for my feeling that the real Shakespeare might have been myself, and for the shallow mistaking of [my interest in him] for mere professional jealousy".;In my work, I am examining Shaw's feelings of being a reincarnation of a playwright for whom he had both great regard, and of whom he wrote severe criticism. And in the larger context, this interaction between the two playwrights could be seen as part of Shaw's attempted mission to affect, or influence, early 20th-Century modernism, by asserting the possibility of theatre as an agent for political action. |
