Word: cleopatras
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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...
...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...
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...
...himself one of the Festival's finest character actors a few seasons ago. He has elicited bright and vigorous performances from most of his players, and his blockings are unfailingly attractive (though he should have got the cast to agree on the pronunciation of the vowels in Cleopatra's name...
...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...