CHAPTER XI
Cæsar and Cleopatra, unique in Bernard Shaw's theatre, alike in subject matter and genre, warrants individual consideration. To an interviewer, on April 30th, 1898, Shaw related that he was just in the middle of the first act of a new play, in which he was going “to give Shakespeare a lead.” Unlike Oscar Wilde, who once said that the writing of plays for a particular actor or actress was work for the artisan in literature, not for the artist, Shaw freely confessed that he wrote Cæsar and Cleopatra for Forbes Robertson, “because he is the classic actor of our day, and had a right to require such a service from me.”[160] Asked if he had not been reading up “Mommsen and people like that,” Shaw replied, “Not a bit of it. History is only a dramatization of events. And if I start telling lies about Cæsar, it's a hundred to one that they will be just the same lies that other people have told about him.... Given Cæsar and a certain set of circumstances, I know what would happen, and when I have finished the play you will find I have written history.”[161]
In an opening scene of rare beauty and mystery, Cæsar discovers the child-truant Cleopatra reclining between the paws of her “baby-sphinx.” What possibilities, what previsions are packed in this prophetic hour, which witnesses the meeting of these two supreme representatives of two alien worlds, two diverse civilizations! From the sublime we are hurled down to the ridiculous. Cæsar, dreamer and world-conquerer, apostrophizing the sphinx in the immemorial moonlight of Egypt, is suddenly feazed out of countenance by a childish voice: “Old gentleman!—don't run away, old gentleman.” It is the voice of Shaw to his public: “I may take unpardonable liberties with you; but—don't run away.”