Caesar and Cleopatra

"Shaw had a very high view of himself and compared himself constantly to Shakespeare. He thought that, in respect of the handling of power, Shakespeare had got the Romans wrong. His idea was that Shakespeare was very good at dealing with failure and romance, but not very good at dealing with the great hero. Shaw paints a portrait of Caesar in which his motivations, those that romantic biographers and filmmakers like to show as being all about love, were actually formed by hard-nosed, brutal political calculations and realities. Shaw was making comments, in a sense, on the British occupation of Egypt, which had started in 1882, and relating it to the Roman occupation. He took the hardest-nosed, de-romanticised view of that part of Caesar’s life—in contrast to the view put up by so many storywriters, balladeers and Shakespeare. Shaw was very interested in Nietzsche and he thought that Caesar was an example of ‘the New Man’ who would solve the problems of the old world. He saw Pompey, whom Caesar had defeated after his crossing of the Rubicon, as part of the old world that had to be pushed aside. Shaw was writing at a time a time when many people were keen to dismiss the old and corrupt and find new superheroes. He thought that Caesar was a great man who had not been able to find a vehicle to show his greatness. It’s fun and gritty and it was a huge hit on Broadway in its day. It would probably now be considered a bit old-fashioned, but Shaw is a great playwright to read. He always wrote long introductions to his plays explaining what the play was all about. You know what Shaw was trying to say about Julius Caesar, even if the performance doesn’t quite say it."