A review by dilby
Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw
Wow. What a delightful first experience with Shaw. Hilarious and moving and puzzling, and, to my delight, it feels incomplete without seeing it in performance (lucky me, I get to see it at the American Shakespeare Center in a few days).
Approaching this play in conversation with Shakespeare's Roman plays in mind, then, I was perhaps extra keyed in to a concern that Shaw himself raises in the play's notes: "whether our world has not been wrong in its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or so" when it comes to the construction of enormous figures at the center of the Western identity. Shaw was referring to his deliberately (sort of) counterintuitive depiction of Caesar as a rather laid-back, frequently hilarious domineer, certainly a tactical genius but decidedly not in the vein of Caesar's own self-styling in De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili. When you see a bust of Caesar in a stuffy Yale University library, it is probably not meant to be Shaw's Caesar.
So it feels, to me, more in the vein of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra than Julius Caesar. To me, JC's characters are stand-ins for certain political/philosophical principles, manifested in both the ideas they articulate and in the rhetorical structures they use to do so. A&C, on the other hand, abounds in contradictions, self-doubt, fickleness--and I think in that later play, Shakespeare discovered that by making his characters contain multitudes, in some ways making them more like ordinary people (who are nevertheless participants in extraordinary events), he actually lent them greater tragic/dramatic stature. I tend to find Cleopatra's "His legs bestrid the ocean [etc.]" more impactful and believable than Cassius' "Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs."
Anyway, I think that is partly what Shaw is up to here, and he keys us in to that fact with the prologue, so I may simply be playing into his hands by writing all of this. I am delighted to come away from this play with questions that I feel cannot bed answered by the text alone: Are we to sincerely believe that Caesar’s sheer force of personality “made a woman of [Cleopatra],” or is this simply what Caesar himself would like to believe? Is Shaw's Caesar really a once-in-a-civilization genius, or does he simply have extremely good luck? Only performance will tell.
Approaching this play in conversation with Shakespeare's Roman plays in mind, then, I was perhaps extra keyed in to a concern that Shaw himself raises in the play's notes: "whether our world has not been wrong in its moral theory for the last 2,500 years or so" when it comes to the construction of enormous figures at the center of the Western identity. Shaw was referring to his deliberately (sort of) counterintuitive depiction of Caesar as a rather laid-back, frequently hilarious domineer, certainly a tactical genius but decidedly not in the vein of Caesar's own self-styling in De Bello Gallico and De Bello Civili. When you see a bust of Caesar in a stuffy Yale University library, it is probably not meant to be Shaw's Caesar.
So it feels, to me, more in the vein of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra than Julius Caesar. To me, JC's characters are stand-ins for certain political/philosophical principles, manifested in both the ideas they articulate and in the rhetorical structures they use to do so. A&C, on the other hand, abounds in contradictions, self-doubt, fickleness--and I think in that later play, Shakespeare discovered that by making his characters contain multitudes, in some ways making them more like ordinary people (who are nevertheless participants in extraordinary events), he actually lent them greater tragic/dramatic stature. I tend to find Cleopatra's "His legs bestrid the ocean [etc.]" more impactful and believable than Cassius' "Like a Colossus, and we petty men / Walk under his huge legs."
Anyway, I think that is partly what Shaw is up to here, and he keys us in to that fact with the prologue, so I may simply be playing into his hands by writing all of this. I am delighted to come away from this play with questions that I feel cannot bed answered by the text alone: Are we to sincerely believe that Caesar’s sheer force of personality “made a woman of [Cleopatra],” or is this simply what Caesar himself would like to believe? Is Shaw's Caesar really a once-in-a-civilization genius, or does he simply have extremely good luck? Only performance will tell.