Caesar and Cleopatra
The Story:
Act I. Caesar was alone at night in the Egyptian desert, apostrophizing a statue of the Sphinx. Caesar was startled when a young girl, Cleopatra, addressed him from the paws of the Sphinx. He climbed up to her, thinking he was dreaming. She was full of superstitions about cats and Nile water. She told Caesar she was there because the Romans were coming to eat her people.
could show herself to him as a woman, not a girl. Cleopatra put herself in the hands of this Roman and they
moved to her throne room. Caesar tried to persuade Cleopatra to act like a queen; Ftatateeta entered and began
to order Cleopatra about until the nurse was chased from the room. Caesar ordered Cleopatra’s servants to
dress her in her royal robes. When Roman soldiers entered and saluted Caesar, Cleopatra finally realized who
he was and, with a sob of relief, fell into his arms.
Act II. The ten-year-old king Ptolemy was delivering a speech from the throne in Alexandria, prompted by his
tutor and guardian. Caesar entered and demanded taxes, then called for Cleopatra. Rufio reminded Caesar that
there was a Roman army of occupation in Egypt, commanded by Achillas and supporting the Egyptians, while
Caesar had only four thousand men. Achillas and Pothinus suggested that they held the upper hand, but when
Roman troops entered, the Egyptians backed off. Lucius Septimius and Pothinus reminded Caesar that they
had decapitated Pompey in order to ingratiate themselves with Caesar, who was horrified to hear of the act.
All the Egyptians but Ptolemy left, and Rufio again protested against Caesar’s clemency. Ptolemy was
escorted out. Cleopatra and Caesar discussed how much Cleopatra had grown up, and Caesar promised to
send strong young Mark Antony to Cleopatra. A wounded Roman soldier entered to inform Caesar that the
Roman army of occupation had come; Caesar ordered that all the ships be burned except those that were to
carry the Romans to the lighthouse on an island in the harbor. As Caesar started to arm himself, Pothinus
entered, followed by Theodotus with the news that the great library in Alexandria was burning. After Pothinus
and Theodotus left, Cleopatra helped Caesar put on his armor and made fun of his baldness. Caesar and Rufio
left to lead the troops to the Pharos.
Act III. On a quay in front of Cleopatra’s palace, Apollodorus, who had brought carpets for Cleopatra to look
at, argued with the Roman sentinel. Cleopatra wanted to be rowed to the lighthouse, but the sentinel refused to
allow it. Cleopatra thereupon said she would make a present of a carpet to Caesar, and secretly she had herself
rolled up in one and put in a boat that was sailing for the lighthouse that the Egyptians had begun to attack.
When Apollodorus entered with the carpet, which was unrolled and revealed Cleopatra, Caesar regarded the
young woman as a nuisance. The Egyptians had cut off the Romans and were approaching. Several Roman
ships approached, whereupon Apollodorus, Caesar, and Rufio dove into the sea to swim to them. Cleopatra
was tossed into the sea as well and carried along.
Act IV. Six months later, Cleopatra and her serving women were discussing Caesar when Ftatateeta brought in
Pothinus, who was now a prisoner of the Romans and wanted to make a deal with Cleopatra. After Rufio and
Caesar entered, Rufio brought Pothinus to talk to Caesar privately. Pothinus finally blurted out that Cleopatra
wanted Caesar out of the way so that she could rule alone. Cleopatra denied this, but Caesar knew it was true.
Caesar and Cleopatra 1
When Pothinus left, Cleopatra ordered Ftatateeta to kill him. Caesar, Rufio, and Apollodorus had just returned
for a banquet when a terrible scream was heard. Apollodorus, sent to investigate, reported that Pothinus had
been assassinated and that the city, in an uproar, was blaming Caesar. Cleopatra admitted that she had given
the order, but Caesar could not make her understand that this was not his way of governing. Lucius Septimius
approached Caesar and told him that the relief army under Mithridates was near. Realizing that the Egyptian
army had left to fight Mithridates, Caesar left, intending to meet Mithridates and fight the Egyptian army.
When Rufio learned that Ftatateeta had killed Pothinus, he killed her.
Act V. Having won the battle, Caesar prepared to return to Rome. He appointed Rufio to be the Roman
governor of Egypt, praised Britannus for his conduct in the battle, and left Apollodorus in charge of Egyptian
art. Cleopatra, in mourning for Ftatateeta, pleaded for revenge against Rufio, who had admitted to killing
Ftatateeta; since it had been a justified slaying, Caesar denied Cleopatra’s plea. He said that Cleopatra had
learned little from him but again promised to send her Mark Antony. Caesar boarded the ship to a salute from
the Roman soldiers. Cleopatra remained behind, saddened but content.
Critical Evaluation:
Ever since the publication in 1579 of Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Cleopatra
has been one of the great romantic figures of English literature. To be sure, Dante had briefly glimpsed her,
“tossed on the blast,” in Hell’s Circle of the Lustful in his Inferno (c. 1320), but he had hurried on to give the
famous story of Paolo and Francesca. It remained for William Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra
(1606-1607), to make her immortal as “the serpent of old Nile,” the epitome of the eternal and irresistible
female. Even the neoclassic John Dryden, in 1678, still found her the archetype of an all-consuming passion,
for whose sake Antony held “the world well lost.”
As for Caesar, his imprint has been upon the European mind since 44 b.c.e. To Dante—who saw him in Limbo
as “Caesar armed, with the falcon eyes”—he was the founder of the Roman empire, and his murder was so
terrible an example of treachery to lords and benefactors that Cassius and Brutus, his asssassins, were placed
with Judas in the jaws of Satan in the lowest pit of Hell. To Shakespeare, he was a man who in spite of
arrogance and a thinly disguised ambition for absolute power actually bestrode “the narrow world like a
Colossus.” These are the figures of world history and world legend whom George Bernard Shaw chose to
bring together in a comedy.
So strongly has Shakespeare stamped his interpretation of Cleopatra on Western literary consciousness that
Shaw’s heroine inflicts a distinct shock when audiences meet a girl of sixteen, crouched, on a moonlit
October night, between the paws of the Sphinx in the desert where she has fled to escape the invading
Romans. She is the typical schoolgirl: high-strung, giggly, impulsive, terrified of her nurse, ready to believe
that Romans have trunks, tusks, tails, and seven arms, each carrying a hundred arrows. She has the instinctive
cruelty of a child; after encountering Caesar—whom she does not recognize and who forces her nurse to cringe
at her feet—she is eager to beat the nurse and can talk gleefully of poisoning slaves and cutting off her
brother’s head. Shaw has set his plot at the moment in history when Egypt is divided. Ptolemy Dionysus has
driven Cleopatra from Alexandria, and while the two foes—Ptolemy represented by Pothinus and Cleopatra by
Ftatateeta—are at swords’ points, Egypt is ready to fall into the conqueror’s hand. It is the familiar situation
of an immensely old and decadent civilization at the mercy of a rising world power, represented by Caesar.
Audiences with memories of Caesar’s commentaries on the Gallic War and Mark Antony’s funeral oration
receive another shock when Caesar appears. The conqueror of the world is presented as a middle-aged man,
painfully conscious of his years, somewhat prosaic, very far indeed from “Caesar armed, with the falcon
eyes.” He is past fifty, and the fateful Ides of March is less than four years away. As most men of his age in
any period of history would be, he is somewhat amused and yet wholly fascinated by the lovely child he has
The Story: 2
met under such strange circumstances. Since he is quite aware of his weakness for women, the audience
begins to anticipate a romantic turn to the plot. Shaw was not, however, a romantic dramatist. When Caesar
returns Cleopatra to her palace, reveals his identity, and forces her to abandon her childishness and to assume
her position as queen, he is revealed as a man who is eminently practical, imperturbable in moments of
danger, and endowed with the slightly cynical detachment of a superior mind surrounded by inferiors.
The outline that Shaw used for his somewhat rambling plot is to be found in Plutarch’s Life of Caesar and in
Caesar’s Civil War. Shaw followed his sources quite faithfully, except in inventing a meeting between Caesar
and Cleopatra in the desert and calling for Pothinus to be killed by Ftatateeta at Cleopatra’s instigation after
Caesar had promised him safe conduct from the palace. There is also a possible debt to the almost forgotten
drama, The False One, written by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger around 1620, which deals with the same
story. Certainly Shaw’s blunt-spoken Rufio appears to be a reworking of that play’s Sceva.
Shaw also added two characters of his own to the story: the savage Ftatateeta, who is eventually killed by
Rufio; and Britannus, Caesar’s secretary. The latter is Shaw’s picture of the eternal
Englishman—conventional, easily shocked, unable to understand any customs but those of his own island. It is
in characterization, rather than in plot, that the play excels, and it also excels through the element of surprise,
created by the device of presenting familiar literary figures from new angles, for it is obvious that Shaw
intended to rub some of the romantic gilding from them. Cleopatra, although under Caesar’s influence she
becomes a precocious adult, loses her girlish charm without becoming a particularly attractive woman. She
never really loves Caesar, nor he her, for Shaw rearranged history in this aspect of their relationship, and her
one thought is of the arrival of Antony, whom she has met before and never forgotten. She has a presentiment
of her coming tragedy, yet, eternally childish, is poised to run to meet it.
The critic James Huneker maintained that this drama “entitled [Shaw] to a free pass to that pantheon wherein
our beloved Mark Twain sits enthroned.” Yet this play is no Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889), which was based on a conviction of the vast progress achieved since the Middle Ages. It was Shaw’s
conviction that there had been no perceptible progress since Caesar’s day. Caesar himself knew that history
would continue to unroll an endless series of murders and wars, always disguised under high-sounding and
noble names. He was a great man, not because he was “ahead of his age” but because he stood outside it and
could rule with mercy and without revenge. Such a leader would be great in any period of history.
Bibliography:
Crompton, Louis. “Caesar and Cleopatra.” In Shaw the Dramatist. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1969. Discusses the social, philosophical, and especially historical backgrounds. A clear and accessible
presentation of Shaw’s ideas and their sources in the nineteenth century intellectual tradition.
Dukore, Bernard F. “The Center and the Frame.” In Bernard Shaw, Playwright: Aspects of Shavian Drama.
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1973. Concentrates on the formal aspects of the play and discusses
how certain central scenes contribute to the whole. Deals at length with the prologues (which are seldom
played) and Act III, which Shaw had suggested could be omitted but which Dukore claims is important and
even necessary.
Evans, T. F., ed. Shaw: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976. A useful collection of
generally brief early reviews and notices of Shaw’s plays, including Caesar and Cleopatra. Interesting to
compare these early reviews with later scholarly views.
Holroyd, Michael. Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love. New York: Random House, 1988. In this first volume
of the standard and indispensable biography of Shaw, Holroyd relates Shaw’s life and thought to his works.
Critical Evaluation: 3
Whitman, Robert F. “Plays for Realists.” In Shaw and the Play of Ideas. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University
Press, 1977. Discusses the play’s conflict between realist and idealist. Caesar’s grasp of reality makes him
immune to the temptations of vengeance and to Cleopatra’s sensuality. Caesar is the representative of the
future.
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