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.