When, in 1908, in answer to reviewers who dismissed Caesar and Cleopatra as opéra bouffe, Bernard Shaw prophesied to his Julius, Forbes-Robertson, “In 1920 Caesar will be a masterpiece,” he might safely have written “1950” instead. The little editorial note prefixed to the American edition of Three Plays for Puritans (1906), informing us (incorrectly) that Caesar had at that date never been produced and “perhaps could not be” (p. xl), has long since proved absurdly overmodest. Three performances within the last decade have demonstrated that in the theatre no less than in the library Shaw's unique blend of wit and insight is more keenly relished than ever. Moreover, whether or not we agree with Shaw that in Antony and Cleopatra Shakespeare reversed the Circean formula and turned hogs into heroes (Works, p. xxx), we cannot deny that half a century of Hollywood “love-interest” has been sufficient to make Shaw's comedy doubly welcome as, in Sir Max Beerbohm's phrase, “a man's play.”
A major sortie in what Maxwell Anderson has called Bernard Shaw's “furious critical assault on the romantic theatre” is the section entitled “Better than Shakespear?” in the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans. Well-known today, this discussion offers proof of Eric Bentley's assertion that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism should be judged as polemic rather than criticism of a more objective sort. Shaw's attack in that Preface on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has naturally been a principal object of critical attention ever since it was penned, but this fact should not blind us to another, that Shaw was at least as much concerned with Antony and Cleopatra, and that in fact his own comedy, as one scholar pointed out more than a generation ago, was more of a counterblast to Antony than to Caesar. It is easy to forget that Shaw followed the lead of certain of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries in re-introducing Cleopatra into a play about Caesar (whom he called “this greatest of all protagonists”) whereas Shakespeare keeps the two rigorously separate. Shaw's purpose in doing what he did was clear, and this purpose is explicated in detail in his comments on Shakespeare's Antony.
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