Caesar and Cleopatra

About

Shaw's 1898 play is a revisionist history of Caesar's time in Egypt, in which the young Cleopatra — not yet the political genius of later life — is educated by the fifty-four-year-old Caesar in the arts of power. Shaw uses the period not for romance (the Caesar-Cleopatra liaison is explicitly non-erotic) but to dramatize his theory of the great man: practical, unsentimental, free from conventional morality, focused entirely on what works. The play was a great vehicle for Johnston Forbes-Robertson and later for Laurence Olivier. It is one of Shaw's most entertaining historical comedies and a useful corrective to the Shakespeare-Antony view of the same period.