Caesar and Cleopatra

Caesar is alone at night in the Egyptian desert, apostrophizing a statue of the Sphinx. Caesar is startled when a young girl, Cleopatra, addresses him from the paws of the Sphinx. He climbs up to her, thinking he is dreaming. She is full of superstitions about cats and Nile water. She tells Caesar she is there because the Romans are coming to eat her people. Caesar sees that he is not dreaming and identifies himself to Cleopatra as a Roman. She is terror-stricken, but Caesar tells her that he will eat her unless she can show herself to him as a woman, not a girl. Cleopatra puts herself in the hands of this Roman and they move to her throne room. Caesar tries to persuade Cleopatra to act like a queen; Ftatateeta enters and begins to order Cleopatra about until the nurse is chased from the room. Caesar orders Cleopatra's servants to dress her in her royal robes. When Roman soldiers enter and salute Caesar, Cleopatra finally realizes who he is and, with a sob of relief, falls into his arms.
The ten-year-old king Ptolemy is delivering a speech from the throne in Alexandria, prompted by his tutor and guardian. Caesar enters and demands taxes, then calls for Cleopatra. Rufio reminds Caesar that there is a Roman army of occupation in Egypt, commanded by Achillas and supporting the Egyptians, while Caesar has only four thousand men. Achillas and Pothinus suggest that they hold the upper hand, but when Roman troops enter, the Egyptians back off. Lucius Septimius and Pothinus remind Caesar that they decapitated Pompey to ingratiate themselves with Caesar, who is horrified to hear of the act. All the Egyptians but Ptolemy leave, and Rufio again protests against Caesar's clemency. Ptolemy is escorted out. Cleopatra and Caesar discuss how much Cleopatra has grown, and Caesar promises to send strong young Mark Antony to Cleopatra. A wounded Roman soldier enters to inform Caesar that the Roman army of occupation has come; Caesar orders that all the ships be burned except those that are to carry the Romans to the lighthouse on an island in the harbor. As Caesar starts to arm himself, Pothinus enters, followed by Theodotus with the news that the great library in Alexandria is burning. After Pothinus and Theodotus leave, Cleopatra helps Caesar put on his armor and makes fun of his baldness. Caesar and Rufio leave to lead the troops to the Pharos.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in Dublin, the son of a civil servant. His education was irregular, due to his dislike of any organized training. After working in an estate agents office for a while he moved to London as a young man (1876), where he established himself as a leading music and theatre critic in the eighties and nineties and became a prominent member of the Fabian Society, for which he composed many pamphlets. He began his literary career as a novelist; as a fervent advocate of the new theatre of Ibsen (The Quintessence of Ibsenism, 1891) he decided to write plays in order to illustrate his criticism of the English stage. His earliest dramas were called appropriately Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898). Among these, Widowers Houses and Mrs. Warrens Profession savagely attack social hypocrisy, while in plays such as Arms and the Manand The Man of Destiny the criticism is less fierce. Shaws radical rationalism, his utter disregard of conventions, his keen dialectic interest and verbal wit often turn the stage into a forum of ideas, and nowhere more openly than in the famous discourses on the Life Force, «Don Juan in Hell», the third act of the dramatization of womans love chase of man, Man and Superman (1903).In the plays of his later period discussion sometimes drowns the drama, in Back to Methuselah (1921), although in the same period he worked on his masterpiece Saint Joan (1923), in which he rewrites the well-known story of the French maiden and extends it from the Middle Ages to the present.