Word: caesar
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...Antony and Cleopatra, but Caesar and Cleopatra has just joined the repertory of the American Shakespeare Festival--which thus, for the first time in its history, has staged a non-Shakespearean work (of this departure more anon...
Though Shaw would later surpass it three or four times, Caesar and Cleopatra (written in 1899) found him first hitting his major stride; consequently it is his first really great play. It is the middle one of three related "Plays for Puritans," as Shaw called them--flanked by The Devil's Disciple and Captain Brassbound's Conversion, both considerably inferior...
...historical facts, nor even to ferret them all out in the first place. Nor did he hesitate to fill the play with anachronisms, thereby incurring the wrath of a host of commentators (most of whom, however, would not dream of criticizing Shakespeare for including clock-strikings in Jullus Caesar and billiards in Antony and Cleopatra...
...audience: "Men twenty centuries ago were already just such as you, and spoke and lived as ye speak and live, no worse and no better, no wiser and no sillier." And in a postscriptal Note to the play Shaw said, "The notion that there has been any ... Progress since Caesar's time ... is too absurd for discussion" (but he goes on to discuss it anyhow...
Cleopatra. As the Serpent of the Nile, Elizabeth Taylor hisses and shows her fangs; she also shows her bangles and her bosom, but little indication that she knows what made Cleo slither. If Rex Harrison is splendid as the urbane Caesar, Richard Burton is disappointing as the befuddled Antony who confuses lust with love...