Word: caesar
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Shaw was also teaching a lesson about war. He has Caesar proclaim: "Murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand." And the second Prologue warns: "I bid you beware, ye who would all be Pompeys if ye dared; for war is a wolf that may come to your own door." Like many great creative artists, Shaw could sense the course of world events some years ahead; he foresaw World War I and its wake, just as Mahler...
Another of Shaw's targets in this play has receded from view a good deal since his day: the Victorian melodrama. But Shaw, as a practicing drama reviewer in the 1890's, was fed up to the gills with this type of play. In Caesar and Cleopatra (as well as the other two "Puritan" plays) he was poking fun at this genre and pulling the pedestal out from under the Romantic hero. The play is, then--if I may run the risk of Polonius' excessive categorization--an example of the didactic parody - melodrama. Brilliant comedy, epigrammatic wit, and hectic melodrama...
...trimmings have not turned the show into an extravaganza, which is what would have resulted if all of Shaw's directions had been followed exactly. Even if these excessive directions were an intentional part of his parody, it is wise to modify them; otherwise no Caesar--not even the real one--could survive amid the morass of spectacle...
...only is this Prologue a wonderfully funny scene in itself, but it is also necessary to the form and the full meaning of the play. Furthermore, it is needed to build up in the minds of the audience a picture of Caesar and his legions as nothing better than the awful Anthropophagi that Othello mentions. Otherwise the ironic effect of Caesar's first entrance is nullified; and the audience, let in on a secret, cannot properly appreciate Cleopatra's experience of going through a similar anxiety and discovery in the ensuing scenes...
...purely practical concern--by starting the performance with Caesar's apostrophe to the Sphinx, Rabb has guaranteed that this great poetic aria will be ruined by the scramble of late comers to their seats...