“These are not natural events”: Ariel’s Technodramaturgy in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s The Tempest

HowlRound: In one of the weirder annals of theatre history, the playwright and notorious Shakespeare iconoclast Sir George Bernard Shaw was solicited in 1949 by the Malvern Marionette Theatre to write a ten-minute comedy for two of the company’s most eminent puppets—Shakespeare and Shaw himself. The result is the profoundly silly Shakes Versus Shav, wherein the puppet Bard and Bardolator engage in a battle of wits (and fists) over their respective theatrical legacies. Rest assured—it’s not his most incisive work.