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Authorship and Shaw's Shakes Versus Shav

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 33; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/shaw.33.1.0079

1529-1480

Christopher Wixson,

Migration, Policy, and Dickens Studies

The fact is, you look on an author as a sort of god. I look on him as a man I pay to do a certain thing for me…. Who and what is an author that he should be privileged to take liberties that are not allowed to other men?—Misalliance1I confess that though as a matter of business I wish my plays to be performed, as a matter of instinct I fight against the inevitable misrepresentation of them.—Preface to Plays Pleasant2 In his final speech in The Tempest, Prospero, bereft of his “potent art” and the aid of his “demi-puppets,” pleads with the audience to set him free.3 Particularly in light of the Victorian sentimental tradition that elided the character with the retiring Shakespeare, the image of the magician ultimately subject to the pull of commerce is startling yet prophetic, given the industry the Bard would become in subsequent centuries, his works perpetually refinished to suit popular taste. Our last glimpse of the author/character is as a puppet trapped within his own text, the authority shifted from the producer to the consumers. Mortality's effects on authorial control were also on Bernard Shaw's mind late in his life when he concluded a 1949 op-ed piece about tax-code discrimination against writers with the questions: “Why is property in our creations communized after less than two lifetimes and that of simple distributors made perpetual? Why is property in turnips made eternal and absolute when property in ideas is temporary and conditional?”4 In his published response, novelist Charles Morgan amplified its underlying concern that, “when Mr. Shaw's heirs are deprived of their power to prevent it, [any disreputable cad or political enthusiast] will be able, by garbling the text and adding his own introductions, to represent Shavianism as advocacy of almost anything on earth.” Shaw's anxiety is not surprising, considering the playwright's prolific success at self-authorization and frequent skirmishes with theatrical adversaries for textual mastery. A few months after this piece, he wrote Shakes Versus Shav, which he believed in all “actuarial probability” to be his “last play” and “the climax of [his] eminence.”5 In it, playwrights are depicted as actual puppets, and their petty squabbles become Shaw's response to the fate of the late playwright, his charms o'erthrown, his image at the mercy of other hands.Commissioned by Waldo Lanchester for the Malvern Marionette Theater, Shakes Versus Shav begins with Shakes out for revenge, angry that his authorial persona is being disparaged and his words appropriated by an upstart crow named Shav, whom he condemns as a “shameless fraud,” an “infamous imposter” lost in an “ecstasy of self-conceit” in “[daring] to pretend / here to reincarnate my very self.”6 When Shav appears, they brawl, stage a bout between surrogates Macbeth and Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy, and view a presentation of Heartbreak House in dramaticule. Following further heated charges of plagiarism and pessimism, Shav asks Shakes to “for a moment suffer / My glimmering light to shine.” A light suddenly and mysteriously appears between them, to which Shakes responds by immediately “puffing out” the splendid torch, saying “out, out brief candle.”7 Treated as an eccentric one-off, Shakes Versus Shav is rarely performed and considered, at least by one midcentury scholar, “one of [Shaw's] dotages, a pathetic exhibition of nonagenarian gaminerie.”8 Taken more seriously, biographers have found it a rich mine of allusion, invoking (among other things) the playwright's interest in the infamous “long count” of the 1927 Tunney-Dempsey boxing match as well as purported genealogical links between the Shaws and Rob Roy and Macduff. Contemporary scholars have approached the play, which begins and ends with Shakespearean quotation, mainly within the context of Shaw's ongoing professional rivalry with his predecessor.9 This essay seeks to reframe the grappling portrayed in Shakes Versus Shav within the larger idea of the uniquely vexed creative authority for playwrights, arguing that Shaw presciently muses over the ramifications for the Shavian text upon the death of the author. Mechanic slavesWith greasy aprons, rules, and hammers, shallUplift us to the view.—Antony and Cleopatra10 For Shaw, authorship was a source of tremendous aesthetic and economic autonomy, his plays, as Margot Peters contends, “a commodity over whose publication, distribution, and profit-taking he exercised more control than perhaps any other writer in history.”11 “I half suspect,” he wrote in 1898, “that those managers who have had the most to do with me, if asked to name the main obstacle to the performance of my plays, would unhesitatingly and unanimously reply ‘the author.’”12 Shaw's preface to Plays Unpleasant details the struggle with managers and actors to produce an authentic representation of the author's artistic intent, a scuffle so disheartening that the playwright arrives at “the conclusion that his own view of his work can only be conveyed by himself[, that] he must fall back on his powers of literary expression.”13 The playwright's decision to “put [his] plays before the public in [his] own way”14 enabled him to bypass the fiscal exigencies of the commercial stage, which foreclosed performance opportunities and in a larger sense constricted theater's possibilities as a “social organ.”15 Furthermore, transforming his plays into legal property, copyright protection secures textual borders so as to stave off the crisis in meaning that occurs when access to the territory is granted to all. That its authority is derived by a juridical system of economic privilege that Shaw the Socialist spent a lifetime attacking produces an intriguing friction.16 Railing against what he called “the tragedy of private property,” Shaw vehemently expressed his repugnance toward “our continual aspiration to possess property, our common hailing of it as sacred, our setting apart of the word Respectable for those who have attained it, our ascription of pre-eminent religiousness to commandments forbidding its violation, and our identification of law and order among men with its protection.”17Nonetheless, staking the playwright's claim, Shaw zealously policed his scripts against prospective poachers and squatters.Authorship in the theater of course is never singular—rather, it is always collaborative, always negotiated, always fluid. The playwright's script is filtered through the interpretive gestures of a second group of artists made up of designers, performers, and the director before it reaches the audience. Even the paratextual apparati surrounding the theatrical text rebuke the playwright's exclusive control; the script is subject to the elements of performance (the varying intentional and accidental significations of body and language, audience and performer) that circumscribe the meaning of any theater event. On the printed page, Shaw is able to substitute his own literary paratext (prefaces, appendices, lengthy stage directions), that, as Katherine Kelly asserts, “[condition] the reader's reception of the play both before and after reading it,”18 thereby consolidating his authority over its meaning. It is the paratextual material that makes reading a Shaw play feel curiously more like an experience with a writer than with a group of characters, creating an experiential disparity for the respective audiences. The published texts seek to displace theatrical elements that stand as the limits of the author's control, conferring upon the playwright an unusual degree of textual sovereignty. In addition to political motivations, then, Shaw's publication of his plays can be seen as a kind of coping strategy for the challenge theater itself presents to the writer's absolute dominance.Those forces that the dramatist specifically strives to marshal are also those inherent to the theatrical text, ameliorated only by a translation to the printed page that sacrifices what is aesthetically distinctive about the stage. Shaw understood that consequence when he imagined published volumes of drama engendering a new hybrid genre of text. Similar to the puppeteering performance texts exalted by Shakes Versus Shav's preface, these literary pastiches would be, according to Shaw, “part narrative, part homily, part description, part dialogue, and (possibly) part drama,”19 its parts made whole through the solo performance of the master Author. As accurate a description of his own published volumes as that is, Shaw claimed he was not interested in producing them; rather, his goal was to write as a “practical dramatist[,] … to put down nothing that is irrelevant to the actor's performance and, through it, to the audience's comprehension of the play.”20 As Ian Clarke points out, though, “The lengthy passages of explicit analysis and commentary printed as stage directions have little direct tangible existence in the theatre.”21 While Shaw carefully adapts the theatrical material explicitly and self-consciously for a reader, his stage direction moves far beyond ordinary expository description, seeking to appropriate models of prose narration in order to determine more powerfully the theatrical text. In Our Theatre in the Nineties, for instance, he admits taking from Dickens a style of “description of the persons of the drama so vivid and precise that no actor with the faintest sense of character could mistake the sort of figure he has to represent.”22 The paratextual material seeks to solve the writer's dilemma, what Shaw refers to in one preface as “the actor's excess of power,” which results inevitably in “the very originality and genius of the performers [clashing] with the originality and genius of the author.”23I could interpret between you and your love, if I could see the puppets dallying.—Hamlet24 The presence of GBS on the page as narrator/author is both direct and profuse; on stage, it is less tangible and evasive, even as critics compulsively attempt to pin it down, locate it in a single character or speech. Indeed, the critic is another primary combatant in the interpretive field, attempting to replace the writer as the text's origin in divining its intended meaning. Shaw wrote eight plays while still working for the Saturday Review, and his published volumes are expressions of the “critic-dramatist” codependence, “G.B.S.” the nexus of the mutual exegetical investment of the two roles. Donald Pease posits that “[similar to] the division of industrial labor within the economic realm[,] what alienated the author from his work's means of production … was not a factory owner but the literary critic who claimed a power to understand it greater than the author's own.”25 Harley Granville Barker attributes culpability to the playwright, writing in 1934 about plays that “criticism will kill” as “full of fine poetry, clever ideas, striking characters [and flawed only by] the failure of the dramatist to eliminate himself from the play, [the audience] unceasingly conscious of the author, of his poetry, his ideas, his characters.”26To the writer, Barker prescribes self-effacement for the sake of the art to stave off the cancerous critical invasion hellbent on interpolating the author through the play. In light of Shaw's usual self-assertive strategy to ward off misinterpretations, the preface to Shakes Versus Shav surprisingly praises the inclination toward discretionary inconspicuousness in puppets (and, by analogical extension, in playwrights), what Shaw describes as an unfailing instinct to remain “invisible” when another performer is “speaking or tumbling.” The playwright adopted this tactic in his puckish concealment of Fanny's First Play's authorship from its opening night audience so as to provide “a measure of relief to those critics and playgoers who are so obsessed by my strained legendary reputation that they approach my plays in a condition which is really one of derangement.”27Indeed, a frequent assumption in both media reviews of productions and academic scholarship on his plays is that a single character is simply the author's mouthpiece, a premise that sometimes infuriated Shaw. In 1932, for instance, Aubrey Bagot, Too True to Be Good's notorious magician preacher, was quickly interpreted as Shaw's “satirical self-portrait … [a] confession of the bankruptcy of his own thought.”28 Shaw complained first in the Malvern Festival Book about American critics who elided playwright and character: “They annoyed me by … informing the world that I am finishing my life in a condition of pitiable but theatrically very tiresome disillusion and despair, having recanted all my professions, renounced all my convictions, abandoned all my hopes, and demolished all my Utopias.” Later, in the published version of Too True to Be Good, Shaw directly addressed the situation again in both the preface and the concluding stage direction, explicitly placing distance between himself and Aubrey. In spite of Shaw's protestations, reviewers and scholars seem as invested as he is in preventing the sundering of the play's language from a prescriptive authorial origin yet dedicated to situating themselves in that creative role.Further challenging the playwright's textual sovereignty, new antagonists were on the horizon when Shakes Versus Shav is written. Methods of interpretative analysis emerging right around the time of Shaw's death sought to unshackle the reader from the author's control. In the mid-1940s, American scholars William K. Wimsatt and Monroe K. Beardsley influentially claimed that a poem or a story “is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it,” its meaning independent of all intention.29 They go on to propose the intentional fallacy, after which the thread is taken up in the 1960s and 1970s by semiotic and poststructuralist theorists who conceptualize the Author as merely a shorthand rhetorical conceit, a figure of speech that, as Roland Barthes maintains, “[imposes] a limit on that text, [furnishes] it with a final signified, to close the writing.”30 For Michel Foucault, that restriction of expression performs an ideological function “by [impeding] the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition” of the text.31 The struggle to liberate prose and poetry from determinate meaning originating from an Author involves a kind of theatricalizing of the paged text, unlocking its potential for the unbounded play of signification.32 Like the interference of theater artists, managers, and critics, the “death of the Author” paradigm dissolves any hope for the writer of agency over the work. Copyright only protects the text and the Author temporarily before the inevitable transformation of writer into puppet. Read in this context, Shakes Versus Shav is not only the culminating meditation on, but a final resolution to, a lifelong struggle for aesthetic autonomy.O excellent motion! O exceeding Puppet!—The Two Gentlemen of Verona33 According to the preface, Shakes Versus Shav's originated not in Shaw's imagination but in the puppets themselves. Lanchester constructed Shakes and Shav and sent them along with a “request for one of [his] famous dramas,” a gesture that suggested to Shaw that he was “finished … as a playwright.”34 Neither that reaction nor his choice of this genre to explore the playwright's beleaguered lot is surprising, considering that one of the central conventions of the English puppet play is the lack of a fixed script. Like commedia dell'arte, the medium is resiliently antiliterary and vibrantly performative, rooted in an oral tradition in which scenarios are passed down through the generations, the performance texts “with each new generation … [evolving] to mirror events, personalities, and popular songs of the time.”35 Rendered irrelevant, the vulnerable playwright is displaced by a solitary storyteller who exerts an envious amount of dominance over the text. Not subject to the will of producers or actors, all of the scriptural and performance elements in theory are, as historian George Speaight asserts, the “direct projection of the performer's dramatic sense, and the show stands or falls by the personality of the man inside.”36Shakes Versus Shav's “Punch-and-Judy” idiom tacitly evokes the view that Shaw's dramaturgy was merely a puppet regime, populated by, as one of the critics in Fanny's First Play asserts, stand-ins “stuck up to spout Shaw.”37 The trend for marionette cabaret, newly resurgent during the late 1940s when Shaw wrote Shakes Versus Shav, was for the operating puppeteer to be clearly visible to the audience. Al Hirschfield's famous artwork advertising the original production of My Fair Lady epitomizes this view of Shaw as puppet master manipulating Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins and Julie Andrews's Eliza Doolittle.In Shakes Versus Shav's preface, Shaw extols the virtues of puppets as performers, echoing his preference for single-handed characterization. Sally Peters finds the play's genre especially apt, considering “a puppet theater unhampered by the sensuous presence of flesh-and-blood actors more closely approximates the intellectual theater Shaw has long sought.”38 Exploiting the puppets' ability to “survive treatment that would kill live actors,”39Shakes Versus Shav provides a graphic illustration of a playwright's preference for bridled stage signifiers in its rendition of Macbeth's famously offstage decapitation. In the Shakespearean original, Macduff slays the Scottish king, carries the body out, and returns with his head. The logistical awkwardness of this sequence is a result of conventions of the early modern stage, particularly the lack of a curtain and of artificial lighting. Shaw demonstrates the superiority of puppets in not only solving the problem of representing a beheading but providing a creative solution to removing one of the only stage corpses in the Shavian canon. The headless Macbeth rises and comments, “I will return to Stratford: the hotels are cheaper there”; then he “picks up his head and goes off to the tune of the British Grenadiers.”40 The character's grotesque resurrection makes clear that, in essence, the puppet is a tool, an object whose animation solely and wholly is a function of the master's subjectivity. It is a writer's prop, lacking the live actor's body and subjectivity, which potentially disavows authorial direction.Shaw's most brilliant sleight of hand, demonstrating ingenious dexterity at what manufacturers nowadays call branding, was his creation of GBS, a surrogate persona he conceives within the tradition of a commedia archetype. “It was as Punch,” Shaw wrote, “that I emerged from obscurity … to be the most humourously extravagant paradoxer in London.”41 In 1911, he deemed his successful authorial camouflage of Fanny's First Play during its first production a “secret de Polichinelle.”42 The impish puppet Shaw imagines the critic-dramatist to be seems far removed from the insecurities and impotencies of Shakes and Shav. Rather, his metonymic characterization gestures to the hand inside the glove, to what he calls “the actor” performing “a fantastic personality fit and apt for dealing with men.”43 As Sally Peters observes, the moniker suggests “someone famous enough to need only initials for identification [yet also] the absence of a name, veiling a secret name, even a secret self.”44 As such, “G.B.S.” simultaneously obfuscates the author and asserts his total mastery, a puppet through which the master could ventriloquize his ideas and ward off those forces that threaten the integrity of the intended meaning. Shaw's page voice replicates this autocracy within his published volumes, in which he pulls all the strings, inside (“G.B.S.”) and outside (Shaw) of the dramatic text simultaneously.45 In stage practice, however, this unusual level of command for the dramatist is never realized, even in Shaw's only puppet play.If, in Shakes Versus Shav, playwrights are on the ropes, the puppeteer's authority is also unexpectedly in crisis. Its preface opens on a note of trepidation that the evolution of “stagecraft into filmcraft” threatens to cause “the death of puppetry[, by taking away] its charm with its magic.”46 Shaw is apprehensive over the encroachment of technology on the genre, which will result in an audience distracted from appreciating the master's solitary technical skill and “completely illuded” by “simulations of live performers” against “scenic backgrounds of the cinema.”47 In other words, the theatrical text no longer proceeds from a stable, singular origin, a master synthesizing every element; instead, the live performance is at the mercy of ostentatious spectacle to which the master's real-time puppetry must conform. Shaw particularly laments the displacement by soundtracks of “the old puppet master [who] spoke all the parts himself.”48 As an example, the audience of the initial productions of Shakes Versus Shav experienced Macbeth's posthumous comment via prerecording, and the moment uncannily anticipates Samuel Beckett's Rockaby (1980) in its staging the splitting of the subject, the divorcing of voice and body. This dissociation of authorial voice from textual body is emblematic for what is at stake first at the writer's death and later at the end of copyright. Like all puppets, Shakes and Shav are objects posing as subjects, fitting emblems of the author's uncertain posthumous ontology, grasping in vain at artistic autonomy.49 Circumscribed to a degree by a soundtrack, the puppet in performance is a more conflicted production element than the genre theoretically guarantees, one that, like a human actor, can potentially assert and undermine the playwright's authority.As much as Shaw rhapsodizes about the genre's centrifugal authorial figure in its preface, Shakes Versus Shav deliberately departs from convention in other ways, seemingly self-aware of the impossibility of total authorial control. Pointedly, as written, it is impossible for a single master to perform. In a traditional puppet booth, “to keep the action going, and avoid leaving the stage empty, … the chief character [must]remain in sight of the audience … while a succession of other characters is introduced [so that] it is not possible to have more than two figures in view at a time.”50Shakes Versus Shav requires Shakes and Shav to behold the skirmish between Macbeth and Rob Roy as well as the Heartbreak House tableau, necessitating either multiple puppeteers or the very sort of intrusions of technology the preface denounces. The most puzzling dramaturgical feat for which the script calls is a “transparency suddenly lit up” that renders Captain Shotover and (presumably, since he oddly does not identify her by name) Ellie Dunn in tableau “as in Millais' picture called North-West passage.”51 The description, as well as the subsequent reference to the effect as a “picture,” suggests a still life, yet the stage direction calls for Shotover to “raise his hand” as he “intones” his lines, eliminating the possibility of a projected slide image. The precise medium here is puzzling since, say, a puppet booth is not usually equipped with a scrim masking an inner stage. The possibility also exists that Shaw might have in mind a “televised” image accompanied by the recorded voices of “first-rate speakers.”52 In any case, though, Shakes Versus Shav itself fails to embody the dream of the master's unified text and mandates the kind of “reformer” puppeteering Shaw identifies as lethal to the form. The practical impossibility of total authorial mastery is already a foregone conclusion, and the playwright finds himself on equal footing with his characters, unable to own his words, to enforce the boundaries of his realm. The friction of Shakes Versus Shav proceeds from this central paradox of Shaw, as Sally Peters describes it, as “both puppet and puppetmaster, subject (acting) and object (acted upon).”53Fie, fie! You counterfeit, you puppet, you!”—A Midsummer Night's Dream54 The second half of Shakes Versus Shav's preface focuses on the Shakespeare authorship question whose persistent existence attests that vaulted acclaim does not dispel the exigencies of authorship. As Peters notes, in spite of the fact that “Shakespeare alone has the place in history that Shaw supposedly longs for,” Shakes is “the aggressor” in the play, the “prosecuting plaintiff.”55 The dangers of open textual borders are nowhere more starkly realized than in the baleful trespasses against the work of that most institutionalized and idolized of playwrights. At times, Shaw objected to those who altered the plays, often as if their crimes were perpetrated against the man as well as the work. For instance, he characterized Henry Irving's Cymbeline as a “disemboweling,” a word that conflates the author's body with the play's textual body, and more generally described the process of stage adaptation of Shakespeare's works as “one of debasement and mutilation,” an “extremity of misrepresentation” from which only the “living author can protect himself.”56 By contrast, as Sonya Freeman Loftis remarks, “Shaw's sustained attack on Shakespeare's canon attempts to erase elements of Shakespeare's works with which Shaw disagreed,”57 situating him within the long tradition of Shakespearean refashioning that he frequently repudiated. For instance, Shaw's 1937 revision of Cymbeline results in a last act that, as Joseph Wood Krutch put it, “all of the characters talk like Shaw rather than like themselves.”58 Reconceiving the fifth act “as Shakespear might have written it if he had been post-Ibsen and post-Shaw instead of post-Marlowe,”59 Shaw's desire to fashion a post-Shaw Shakespeare masks a fantasy of producing the Author he wants as critic as well as the ability, writing as a “post-Shaw Shakespeare,” of extending authorial control postmortem to craft his legacy.A decade later, aiming to affirm the figure of the single author, Shaw in the preface to Shakes Versus Shav delivers a “knockout [to] Bacon-Shakespear and all the other fables founded on that entirely fictitious figure.”60 Destroying the image of the Bard, he argues, underwrites all rival claims, that of “an illiterate clown and poacher who could hardly write his own name,”61 Shaw wishes to restore the authority of the “authentic” Shakespeare, a “well read grammar-schooled son in a family of good middle-class standing.”62 Yet the writing is mindful enough to realize that the latter, like characters in his Cymbeline revision, is a thinly disguised, self-serving Shavian simulacrum: “Nothing can extinguish my interest in Shakespeare [because his biographical details] are just like my own[,] Stratford-upon-Avon … a supplementary birthplace of my own.”63This identity-blending extends into the play as well in that the grappling authorial effigies are not as distinct as the binary title would suggest. Shakes's complaints against Shav, for example, sound awfully similar to GBS's early criticisms of Shakespeare when he accuses the Bard of being a “pretentiously platitudinous pilferer of other men's stories and ideas.”64 If Shakes is a self-caricature of the angry critic-dramatist, Shav is a version of his Stratfordian target, the reified author getting credit for other people's stories. Although the preface concludes with confirmation that Shaw and Shakespeare are separate, their surrogates embody their fortune as Time's puppets, when authors themselves become text and are not immune to refinishing. For Bernard Dukore, the protracted fray “concludes without a victor[, moving] from litigation to [an] accommodation between the disputants [that] places [Shaw] in Shakespeare's company, but not surpassing him.”65 What begins as a squabble over plagiarism and evolves into a contest of artistic superiority ends in the recognition of the irreversible succession of the future, replete with an ever-advancing army of ambitious younger playwrights and the promise of eventual self-extinction.Belike you mean to make a puppet of me.—Taming of the Shrew66 If Shakes Versus Shav in the end is a reluctant concession to forces that seek to challenge the author's master control, the loss is offset by a more expansive perspective in the form of Shav's vision of the future, itself a patchwork repurposing of lines from three Shakespeare plays: Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrowWe puppets shall replay our scene. Meanwhile,Immortal William dead and turned to clayMay stop a hole to keep the wind away.67 Hamlet's musing on the irony of mortality is here applied to the death of the author, whose decayed body becomes the clay that seals the broken wall. For the deceased writer, copyright enables the same posthumous preserving of textual borders, protecting what is inside from what Hamlet calls “the winter's flaw.”68 William can thus be dead and immortal simultaneously.As Shakes has discovered, though, any immunity of intrusion is short-lived, and the play portrays the successful annihilation of transgressive new dramatists to be perversely myopic. At its end, the Bard seems to emerge victorious, blowing out Shav's light, and the preface similarly concludes with Shaw extinguishing the “feeling that the real Shakespear might have been myself.”69 But, rather than modeling a fantasy wielding of authorial authority in perpetuity, Shakes Versus Shav deftly undercuts what appears to be a triumph of the will.Shakes Versus Shav is complicit with those literary scholars crafting the author's obituary in its satire of the quixotic vanity of playwrights and their futile mucking around for mastery. Shav's lines contain the distant echo of Othello's angry renunciation of his former self and faith, when he refers to cannons who “counterfeit … immortal Jove's dread clamours.” Shaw's interpolation casts the overreaching authorial claims emerging from the “rude throats” of playwrights as the arrogant bounding of “mortal engines.”70 The poor author struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more, his fury drowned out by the sound of his own swirling authorless language. Their vain short-sightedness is illustrated when Shakes's blowing out of the candle vanquishes both figures, not simply Shav, and quite literally ends the play with what Sally Peters refers to as a “[nihilistic] curse of darkness and final silence.”71 Within this genre, there is finally no room for playwrights. According to Speaight, puppetry produces “a drama that has no author, for—as every puppeteer knows—the puppets have a way of imposing their actions and their own personalities upon the performance.”72 Granville Barker argued that point about all theater, noting that “drama's peculiar and triumphant gift to us—that hour or so of complete illusion—is only to be gained by the dramatist's suppression of himself for the time being in favour of his characters and the actors of them.”73 Shaw's claim to have learned “part of [his] craft as conductor of rehearsals … from puppets” intimates that they embodied for him the rough magic of stage creation.74 In Shakes Versus Shav, the puppets incorporate at once playwrights, critics, actors, character, and even audience, all the players with a stake in the theatrical text at and in play.75 Conspicuously lacking Macbeth's sense of futility, Shav's forward reaching “tomorrows” suggest that the future of drama lies within the endless replaying of the puppets' scene, what Shaw calls, the “marvel that never pales.”76In the foreword to his revision of Cymbeline, Shaw reflects that he “[stands] in the same time relation to Shakespear as Mozart to Handel, or Wagner to Beethoven”: “Like Mozart, I have not confined myself to the journeyman's ‘additional accompaniments’; I have luxuriated in variations.”77Shakes Versus Shav leaves behind the pretense of intact intention and implies that true durability lies within the theatrical encounter itself, the vital luxury of its infinite variations. It intimates that the erasure of living playwrights animates rather than inhibits textual play, sets the puppets in motion, and recasts individual mandate into collaborative and sundry meanings. As the plays enter the public domain in the twenty-first century, we are faced with the same question that confronted the playwright at the end of his life: What will Shaw look like post-Shaw? Rather than providing a specific answer, Shakes Versus Shav refuses to affirm the possibility of master control and instead celebrates contention itself. Without Shav's pilfering advances, Shakes and theater itself cease to endure. Forgoing the dead-end pursuit of hermetically packaged artistic texts, the play expresses a renewed faith in the political and artistic productivity of the wrangling revisions, in the vigorous acrobatics of stage signification. Put another way, as we ponder the implications and witness the contemporary permutations of “Immortal Bernard Dead,” for Shaw, the thing's the play.