Caesar and Cleopatra

Exclusive to Penguin Classics: the definitive text of one of Shakespeare’s most affecting plays—part of the official Bernard Shaw Library

A Penguin Classic

In a cheeky nod to Shakespeare’s towering reputation, Shaw reinvents two of his historical characters but sets his own play in a period predating both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. Shaw’s Cleopatra is a kittenish girl with a streak of cruelty, while his Caesar is a world-weary philosopher-soldier who is as much a stranger in Rome as in the barbaric court of Egypt. With wit, irony, and an undertone of melancholy, Caesar and Cleopatra satirizes Shakespeare’s use of history and comments wryly on the politics of Shaw’s own time.
 
This is the definitive text prepared under the editorial supervision of Dan H. Laurence. The volume includes Shaw’s preface of 1900.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) is one of the world’s greatest literary figures. Born in Dublin, Ireland, he left school at fourteen and in 1876 went to London, where he began his literary career with a series of unsuccessful novels. In 1884 he became a founder of the Fabian Society, the famous British socialist organization. After becoming a reviewer and drama critic, he published a study of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen in 1891 and became determined to create plays as he felt Ibsen did: to shake audiences out of their moral complacency and to attack social problems. However, Shaw was an irrepressible wit, and his plays are as entertaining as they are socially provocative. Basically shy, Shaw created a public persona for himself: G.B.S., a bearded eccentric, crusading social critic, antivivisectionist, language reformer, strict vegetarian, and renowned public speaker. The author of fifty-three plays, hundreds of essays, reviews, and letters, and several books, Shaw is best known for Widowers’ Houses, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Arms and the Man, Caesar and Cleopatra, Man and Superman, Major Barbara, Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, and Saint Joan. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

Stanley Weintraub (introducer) is the Evan Pugh Professor Emeritus of Arts and Humanities at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of numerous histories and biographies, including Silent Night.

Dan H. Laurence (series editor; 1920–2008) was series editor for the works of George Bernard Shaw in Penguin. Formerly a New York University faculty member, Mr. Laurence left his tenured position in 1970 to dedicated his life to the collection and curation of Shaw's life, work, and letters. He served as the official literary advisor to Shaw's estate and published four volumes of his correspondence.