Caesar and Cleopatra

by George Bernard Shaw

Overview

Caesar and Cleopatra is a play written in 1898 by George Bernard Shaw that depicts a fictionalized account of the relationship between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. It was first published with Captain Brassbound's Conversion and The Devil's Disciple in Shaw's 1901 collection Three Plays for Puritans. It was first performed in a single staged reading at Newcastle upon Tyne on 15 March 1899, to secure the copyright. The play was produced in New York in 1906 and in London at the Savoy Theatre in 1907.

The play has a prologue and an "Alternative to the Prologue". The prologue consists of the Egyptian god Ra addressing the audience directly, as if he could see them in the theater (i.e., breaking the fourth wall). He says that Pompey represents the old Rome and Caesar represents the new Rome. The gods favored Caesar, according to Ra, because he "lived the life they had given him boldly". Ra recounts the conflict between Caesar and Pompey, their battle at Pharsalus, and Pompey's eventual assassination in Egypt at the hands of Lucius Septimius.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940162203216
Publisher:	Whispering Pines Press
Publication date:	08/02/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	536 KB

About the Author

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894. Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas. By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.