BECAUSE he put it forth as a rival to “Julius Cæsar” and “Anthony and Cleopatra,” Shaw’s “Cæsar and Cleopatra” has been the football in an immense number of sanguinary critical rushes. His preface to it is headed “Better than Shakespeare?” and he frankly says that he thinks it is better. But that he means thereby to elbow himself into the exalted position occupied by William of Avon for 300 years does not follow. “In manner and art,” he said, in a recent letter to the London Daily News, “nobody can write better than Shakespeare, because, carelessness apart, he did the thing as well as it can be done within the limits of human faculty.” Shaw, in other words, by no means lacks a true appreciation of Shakespeare’s genius. What he endeavors to maintain is simply the claim that, to modern audiences, his Cæsar and his Cleopatra should seem more human and more logical than Shakespeare’s. That this is a thesis susceptible of argument no one who has read “Cæsar and Cleopatra” will deny.
“The sun do move,” said the Rev. Mr. Jasper. Shaw says the same thing of the world. In Shakespeare’s day knighthood was still in flower and the popular ideals of military perfection were medieval. A hero was esteemed in proportion as he approached Richard Cœur de Lion. Chivalry was yet a very real thing and the masses of the people were still influenced by the transcendentalism of the Crusades. And so, when Shakespeare set out to draw a conqueror and hero of the first rank, he evolved an incarnation of these far-fetched and rather grotesque ideals and called it Julius Cæsar.
To-day men have very different notions. In these piping times of common-sense, were a Joan of Arc to arise, she would be packed off to a home for feeble-minded children. People admire, not Chevalier Bayard, but Lord Kitchener and U. S. Grant; not so much lofty purposes as tangible achievements; not so much rhetoric as accomplishment. For a man to occupy to-day the position held by Cæsar at the beginning of the year 44 B.C. he would have to possess traits far different from those Shakespeare gave his hero. Shaw endeavors to draw a Cæsar with just such modern marks of heroism—to create a Roman with the attributes that might exalt a man, in this prosaic twentieth century, to the eminence attained by the immortal Julius 1900 years ago. In other words, Shaw tries to reconstruct Shakespeare’s Cæsar (and incidentally, of course, his Cleopatra) just as a latter-day stage manager must reconstruct the scenes and language of Shakespeare to make them understandable to-day. That his own Cæsar, in consequence, is a more comprehensible, a more human and, on the whole, a more possible hero than Shakespeare’s is the substance of his argument.
The period of the play is the year 48 B.C., when Cleopatra was a girl of sixteen and Cæsar an oldster of fifty-two, with a widening bald spot beneath his laurel and a gradually lessening interest in the romantic side of life. Shaw depicts the young queen as an adolescent savage: ignorant, cruel, passionate, animal, impulsive, selfish and blood-thirsty. She is monarch in name only and spends her time as any child might. Egypt is torn by the feud that finally leads to the Alexandrine war, and, Cleopatra, perforce, is the nominal head of one of the two parties. But she knows little of the wire-pulling and intriguing, and the death of her brother and rival, Ptolemy Dionysius, interests her merely as an artistic example of murder. The health of a sacred cat seems of far more consequence to her than the welfare of Asia Minor.
Cæsar comes to Alexandria to take a hand in the affairs of Egypt and, incidentally, to collect certain moneys due him for past services as a professional conqueror. Cleopatra fears him at first, as a most potent and evil bogey-man, and is so vastly surprised when she finds him quite human, and even commonplace, that she straightway falls in love with him. Cæsar, in return, regards her with a mild and cynical interest. “He is an important public man,” says Max Beerbohm, “who knows that a little chit of a girl-queen has taken a fancy to him and is tickled by the knowledge, and behaves very kindly to her and rather wishes he were young enough to love her.” He needs 1600 talents in cash and tries to collect the money. In truth, he has little time to waste in listening to her sighs. Pothinus, of the palace—an early Roman Polonius—is appalled.
“Is it possible,” he gasps, “that Cæsar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?”
“My friend,” replies Cæsar affably, “taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.”
And so there comes fighting and the burning of the Alexandrine library and the historic heaving of Cleopatra into the sea and other incidents more or less familiar. Through it all the figure of Cæsar looms calm and unromantic. To him this business of war has become a pretty dull trade: he longs for the time when he may retire and nurse his weary bones. He fishes Cleopatra out of the water—and complains of a touch of rheumatism. He sits down to a gorgeous banquet of peacock’s brains and nightingale’s tongues—and asks for oysters and barley water. Now and then Cleopatra’s blandishments tire him. Again, her frank savagery startles and enrages him. In the end, when his work is done and his fee pocketed, when Cleopatra’s throne is safe, with Roman soldiers on guard about it, he goes home.
“I will send you a beautiful present from Rome,” he tells the volcanic girl-queen.
She demands to know what Rome can offer Egypt.
“I will send you a man,” says Cæsar, “Roman from head to heel and Roman of the noblest; not old and ripe for the knife; not lean in the arms and cold in the heart; not hiding a bald head under his conqueror’s laurels; not stooped with the weight of the world on his shoulders; but brisk and fresh, strong and young, hoping in the morning, fighting in the day and revelling in the evening. Will you take such an one in exchange for Cæsar?”
“His name? His name?” breathes the palpitating Cleopatra.
“Shall it be Mark Anthony?” says Cæsar.
And the erotic little Cleopatra, who has a vivid remembrance of Anthony’s manly charms, born of a fleeting glimpse of him, falls into her elderly friend’s arms, speechless with gratitude.
Unlike most of Shaw’s plays, “Cæsar and Cleopatra” is modelled upon sweeping and spectacular lines. In its five acts there are countless scenes that recall Sardou at his most magnificent—scenes that would make “Ben Hur” seem pale and “The Darling of the Gods” a parlor play. And so, too, there is plenty of the more exciting sort of action—stabbings, rows, bugle-calls, shouts and tumults. What opportunity it would give to the riotous, purple fancy of Klaw and Erlanger or the pomp and pageantry of David Belasco!
Shaw makes Cleopatra a much more human character than Cæsar. In the latter there appears rather too much of the icy sang froid we have grown accustomed to encounter in the heroes of the brigade commanded by “The Prisoner of Zenda.” Some of Cæsar’s witticisms are just a bit too redolent of the professional epigrammatist. Reading the play we fancy him in choker collar and silk hat, with his feet hoisted upon a club window-sill and an Havana cigar in his mouth,—the cynical man-of-the-world of the women novelists. In other words, Shaw, in attempting to bring the great conqueror down to date, has rather expatriated him. He is scarcely a Roman.
Cleopatra, on the contrary, is admirable. Shaw very frankly makes her an animal and her passion for Cæsar is the backbone of the play. She is fiery, lustful and murderous; a veritable she-devil; and all the while an impressionable, superstitious, shadow-fearing child. In his masterly gallery of women’s portraits—Mrs. Warren, Blanche Sartorius, Candida, Ann Whitefield and their company—Cleopatra is by no means the least.
The lesser characters—Brittanus, the primitive Briton (a parody of the latter-day Britisher); Apollodorus, the Sicilian dilletante; Ftatateeta, Cleopatra’s menial and mistress; Rufio, the Roman general (a sort of Tiber-bred William Dobbin); and the boy Ptolemy—all remain in the memory as personages clearly and certainly drawn.
In view of the chances that the play affords the player and the stage manager it seems curious that it was so long neglected by the Frohmans of the day. Between Shaw’s Cæsar and Shakespeare’s Cæsar there is a difference wide enough to make a choice necessary. That a great many persons, pondering the matter calmly, would cast their ballots for the former is a prophecy not altogether absurd. Just as the world has outgrown, in succession, the fairy tale, the morality play, the story in verse, the epic and the ode, so it has outgrown many ideas and ideals regarding humanity that once appeared as universal truths. Shakespeare, says Shaw, was far ahead of his time. This is shown by his Lear. But the need for earning his living made him write down to its level. As a result those of his characters that best pleased his contemporaries—Cæsar, Rosalind, Brutus, etc.—now seem obviously and somewhat painfully Elizabethan.