Word: conquerors
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...still vastness of the old church she shuffled slowly down a shadowy side aisle to the ornate tomb of Francisco Piz-zarro. Within a glass-walled casket lay the old conqueror's mummy with bones showing here & there through the dark yellow skin. "This was our gold mine [for tips]. Pizzarro is like one of my family," she smiled. "It was my job to keep his chapel clean. I also kept all the keys, including the keys to the underground vaults where archbishops and bishops lie buried. And of course I helped to ring the bells...
...Caesar who really dominates the stage: a Caesar who is neither the image on a Roman coin nor the stern voice of the Roman Capitol, but a great and contradictory man molded into a peculiarly Shavian hero. Shaw's Caesar is much more the clement conqueror than the model for dictators, a man above meanness and resentment, with a lonely rather than a loving heart. On him first Rome and then middle age have set their heavy seal. His is a sad skepticism, not quite Pilate's "What is truth?" nor the Preacher's "All is vanity...
...Caesar and Cleopatra, e.g., his burlesqued esthete (well played by John Buckmaster) and frightfully proper Early Briton (well played by Arthur Treacher). But the tone of the play is prevailingly wry and ironic. The air seems very chill at times for all the Mediterranean sunlight. A bald and aging conqueror withholds his heart from a violent young girl rather than have her torture it; then, with a rueful smile, promises to send her a dashing young Marc Antony. "Murder shall breed murder . . ." he laments, "until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand...