^{Note 1 in page 272} Hesketh Pearson, G.B.S.: A Full Length Portrait (New York, 1942), p. 250. Subsequent references to this edition will appear in the text. The 1950 edition, containing the Postscript, is identically paged.

Shaw's sensitivity to the charge of opéra bouffe is understandable, although not entirely lacking in disingenuousness. A. B. Walkley, the chief offender, devoted nearly half of his unsigned review the morning after the first London performance to an elaboration of his opening thesis: “To see Caesar and Cleopatra is once again to regret Offenbach” (London Times, 26 Nov. 1907, p. 5, by permission). The review in the Athenaeum the following Saturday (30 Nov., p. 699) commences with the blithe assertion: “There is no reason why, because Mr. Shaw takes his so-called ‘history’ seriously, critics or the public should hesitate to confess that they find ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’ a delightful opéra-boujfe libretto, which calls aloud for music.” According to Hesketh Pearson (p. 188) William Archer called the play an “extravaganza”; this description was only grudgingly modified in The Old Drama and the New (Boston, 1923), p. 350. A good share of the references to “comic opera,” “burlesque,” and “extravaganza,” however, are accompanied by quite a generous portion of praise, which Shaw rather ungenerously ignores. His complaint to Forbes-Robertson takes no account of Henry Massingham, who in the Nation (London), n (7 Dec. 1907), 338, rebukes the other reviewers for their failure to rise above the music hall fare, which was their usual diet, to appreciate a superior dish, or of Arthur Baumann, who also takes issue with the newspaper reviewers in Sat. Rev., civ (30 Nov. 1907), 662-663; and in 1913, even though Forbes-Robertson's revival of Caesar was now having a considerable success, Shaw returns to the attack, including Massingham and Desmond MacCarthy with the other malefactors. See “Caesar and Cleopatra, By the Author of the Play,” New Statesman, I (3 May 1913), 112–113. I have yet to see any acknowledgment by Shaw of three reviews of the earlier performance by Forbes-Robertson in Leeds on 16 Sept. 1907. These reviews appeared in the Yorkshire Post, 17 Sept. 1907, the Yorkshire Evening Post of the same day, and the Leeds Mercury of the following day, and are far from lacking in appreciation of Shaw's underlying intent in his comedy. (For copies of these reviews I am indebted to the City Librarian of Leeds.) In view of Shaw's dudgeon, it is amusing to compare the description of Caesar offered by Shaw's “authorized” biographer, Archibald Henderson, in Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet (New York, 1932), p. 495, in which, clearly intending his remarks to be complimentary, the biographer explicitly alludes to the “many reminders here of light opera … the music of Offenbach alone is wanting.”

^{Note 2 in page 272} This note is not in the Works, the collected edition of 1930. References to the play, the Preface, and the Notes will hereafter be to Vol. ix of the Works (London, 1930). It is evident from Hesketh Pearson's biography that Shaw himself had qualms about the feasibility of producing Caesar, and his skepticism was shared by others, including Max Beerbohm and Forbes-Robertson himself. The first London production of the play (following two earlier performances in the provinces) was on 25 Nov. 1907. The first New York production already had been given on 30 Oct. 1906, and a production in Berlin had preceded this (31 March).

^{Note 3 in page 273} The first of these performances was Gabriel Pascal's motion picture with Vivien Leigh and Claude Rains, released 16 Aug. 1946. The second was the Broadway stage production with Lilli Palmer and Sir Cedric Hardwicke, opening 21 Dec. 1949, followed by the production by Sir Lawrence and Lady Olivier (Vivien Leigh), which opened on Broadway 19 Dec. 1951, and alternated with Shakespeare's tragedy.

^{Note 4 in page 273} In a review of a production of Julius Caesar by Beerbohm-Tree, Sat. Rev., xc (15 Sept. 1900), 327–328, Sir Max applies this phrase to Shakespeare's tragedy, adding, “May Shakespeare, with Mr. Tree's help, now gain a few imitators in this line.” Earlier in the same year–Sat. Rev., LXXXIX (27 Jan. 1900), 105–106—in “Historic Characters and the Stage,” Beerbohm had maintained that Shakespeare's Caesar was beyond the capacity of a mere actor to make credible, an opinion he followed in the next year by praise of Shaw's re-creation in “Mr. Shaw Crescent,” Sat. Rev., xci (26 Jan. 1901), 108. The latter two articles were reprinted in Around Theatres (London, 1924), i, 98–102, 209–216 resp.

^{Note 5 in page 273} “The Quintessence of Shaw,” in Iconoclasts (New York, 1905), p. 248.

^{Note 6 in page 274} New York, 1948, p. vii. In Drama and Life (London, 1907), p. 216, A. B. Walkley goes so far as to call Candida a fantasy.

^{Note 7 in page 274} It is only fair to note Shaw's disclaimer in Three Plays, Pref., p. xxxviii: “with no thought of pretending to express the Mommsenite view of Caesar any better than Shakespeare expressed a view which was not even Plutarchian …” In the playbills of the early performances of Caesar, Shaw printed a list of other authorities. See Henderson, p. 492, and the review in the Yorkshire Post, above.

^{Note 8 in page 274} The History of Rome, trans. William P. Dickson, rev. ed. (New York, 1908), v, 314. In all citations from Mommsen I have compared the original. Subsequent references to this translation will appear in the text.

^{Note 9 in page 275} New York, 1932, ix, 671. Subsequent references will be to this volume.

^{Note 10 in page 275} Trans. A. G. Peskett (Loeb Classical Library, 1921), Book in, p. 359, par. 112.

^{Note 11 in page 275} Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, 1919), vii, 557, par. 48; 559, par. 49.

^{Note 12 in page 275} Roman History, trans. Cary-Foster (Loeb Classical Library, 1916), iv, xlii, 177. 13 Roman History, trans. Horace White (Loeb Classical Library, 1913), iii, ii, 393, par. 90.

^{Note 14 in page 275} George Bernard Shaw (London, 1948), pp. 144–145.

^{Note 15 in page 275} Bernard Shaw (Norfolk, Conn., 1947), p. 114.

^{Note 16 in page 275} See the review by Arthur Baumann mentioned earlier, in Sat. Rev. civ (30 Nov. 1907), p. 663. The review is entitled “Mr. Shaw Run to Waste.” Baumann seems to have been the only person to remark the change that had been made: “Plutarch, by the way, makes Caesar order the killing of Pothinus. I do not know why Mr. Shaw fastened this crime on the girl-queen; it struck me as a needless, and therefore inartistic, piece of brutality.” Shaw himself, in his reply to critics of the play in the New Statesman, loc. cit., stands by his guns; his Caesar is revolted by “a treacherous and spiteful murder like that of Pothinus,” even though the real Caesar apparently was of a different mind.

^{Note 17 in page 276} Guglielrno Ferrero, The Greatness and Decline of Rome, trans. Alfred Zimmern (New York, 1909), ii, 284.

^{Note 18 in page 277} Plutarch's exact words are Shaw's “he turned away in horror from Theodotus as he presented the head of Pompey, but he accepted Pompey's seal-ring, and shed tears over it” (op. cit., pp. 555–557). The language of the “Pompey” is even stronger (v, 325, par. 80).

^{Note 19 in page 277} See above, p. 275. Appian adds a little later that Caesar could not bear to look at Pompey's head when it was brought to him (loc. cit.). In The Mantle of Caesar, trans. J. W. Hartmann (New York, 1928), p. 135, Friedrich Gundolf, tracing “Caesar's forced tears over Pompey's head” back to Lucan, compares Boccaccio's medieval “naïveté” in accepting the story at face value with Petrarch's belief, out of wider “general knowledge,” in Caesar's sincerity.

^{Note 20 in page 277} John Mason Brown, “Hail Caesar—and Cleopatra,” SRL, xxxiii (14 Jan. 1950), 26: “Shaw also admitted his debt to Carlyle for his concept of the historical hero capable of bearing ‘the weight of life’ realistically rather than suffering from a passion to die gallantly.”

^{Note 21 in page 278} Ibid.: “The champion of the superman, who was fascinated by Napoleon and who had kind words to say about Stalin and even Mussolini, was bound sooner or later to be drawn to Caesar.” Shaw himself called Caesar “this greatest of all protagonists” in Play Pictorial x, No. 62 (1907), 111. (The text of this article is virtually identical with that of “Caesar and Cleopatra,” Scots Pictorial, 16 Nov. 1912, p. 108.) A number of reviews take Caesar as a study in power. Reviewing the production of the Oliviers—Nation, CLXXIV (5 Jan. 1952), 17—Joseph Wood Krutch refers to “the obvious fact that he [Shaw] sees in Caesar a hint of both the superman and the philosopher-king” (a position somewhat more tough-minded than that taken by Krutch in his review of the 1925 Broadway production); while Edmund Wilson calls Shaw's Caesar one of his “despot-heroes,” “acting in the right of their own superiority, and giving people what they know to be good for them,” in “Bernard Shaw at Eighty,” The Triple Thinkers (New York, 1938), p. 227.

^{Note 22 in page 278} Page 274. Mommsen's source is Plutarch, p. 559: “[Caesar] now demanded payment of ten millions for the support of his army. When, however, Pothinus bade him go away now and attend to his great affairs, … Caesar replied that he had no need whatever of Egyptians as advisers.” Shaw also may have had Dio in mind, who says of Caesar: “In short, he showed himself a money-getter, declaring that there were two things which created, protected, and increased sovereignties,—soldiers and money,—and that these two were dependent upon each other” (p. 193).

^{Note 23 in page 279} Suetonius, trans. J. C. Rolfe (Loeb Classical Library, 1935), i, 61, par. 44; Mommsen, p. 376; Ferrero, p. 328. Shaw's own beginnings in the British Museum provide a curious sidelight on the attitude here given to Caesar, whose words remind one of Spengler: “There is sense in the contempt with which statesmen and soldiers of all times have regarded the ‘ink-slinger’ and the ‘book-worm’ who think that world-history exists for the sake of the intellect or science or even art” (The Decline of the West, trans. Atkinson, New York, 1934, II, 17).

^{Note 24 in page 280} See Edmund Wilson, p. 234: “In the autumn of 1927, he [Shaw] was staying in Italy on the Lago Maggiore and throwing bouquets at Mussolini. It was his old admiration for the romantic hero, his old glorification … of the great statesman who makes people stand around.” In the reprinted version in Louis Kronenberger's George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Survey (Cleveland, 19S3), p. 134, “idealization” replaces “glorification.”

^{Note 25 in page 280} The Life and Times of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, rev. ed. (New York, 1924), p. 91. See also Suetonius, I, 71, par. 52. Max Radin's Marcus Brutus (New York, 1939), p. 38, offers a doggerel version of the song different from that found in Suetonius.

^{Note 26 in page 280} James Anthony Froude, Caesar: A Sketch (New York, 1899), p. 353, note. Froude also disputes the presence of Cleopatra in Rome (pp. 425-426). In his Julius Caesar and the Foundation of the Roman Imperial System (New York, 1899), p. 311, W. Warde-Fowler (whom Shaw included in the list of authorities given on the playbill of Caesar) regards Froude's position with good-natured skepticism, which seems to be borne out by Momm-sen and Ferrero.

^{Note 27 in page 281} For an appraisal of this aspect of Shaw by a confirmed bachelor, see George Jean Nathan, “Ditto [i.e., Shaw] and Sex,” in Testament of a Critic (New York, 1931), pp. 169 178, reprinted in Kronenberger's Survey under the title, “Mr. Shaw and the Ogre,” pp 114-119. Eric Bentley's assertion (pp. 113–114), “Yet the critics are wrong in imagining that Shaw shies off the erotic theme. William Archer was nearer the mark in accusing Shaw of being obsessed with sex,” does not necessarily contradict Nathan's arguments. The recently published biography by St. John Ervine, Bernard Shaw: Bis Life, Work and Friends (New York, 1956), documents further the story of Shaw's amours given by Henderson and Pearson without contradicting the significant expressions of puritanical feeling quoted by Pearson.

^{Note 28 in page 281} Pref., p. xxxii. See H. B. Charlton's comment in Shakespeare Politics and Politicians (English Assoc. Pamphlet No. 72), pp. 23–24: “There is no doubt at all about it: Shakespeare wrote Caesar as far down as any traditional character could be written down. But why assume that he did it ‘to write Brutus up’? His Brutus is not in fact ‘written up’ in the same sense that Caesar is written down. That is, Plutarch's Brutus is at least as noble in soul as is Shakespeare's, whereas Shakespeare's Caesar is a pygmy to Plutarch's… . Caesar is written down that Caesarism may be written up.” Shaw's views of Brutus and Caesar are elaborated in “Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor,” Play Pictorial, pp. 110–111, and expressed with even greater force in the earlier “Tappertit on Caesar,” Shaw's review of Beerbohm Tree's production of Julius Caesar, reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties (London, 1932), m, 298. See also Shaw's article in the New Statesman, note 1 above. 282

^{Note 29 in page 281} “Bernard Shaw's ‘Julius Caesar’,” New Statesman, I (26 April 1913), 83. After Shaw's reply (see n. 1), MacCarthy returned to the attack in “Caesar Again,” 10 May p. 149, attributing Mommsen's description of the gaiety at Alexandria and the value Caesar placed on his conquests over women to mere “professorial skittishness” but objecting to Shaw's episode for being “as wrong at the other extreme.” MacCarthy's criticisms are reprinted in his Shaw's Plays in Review (New York, 1951), pp. 93–97, 97–101 respectively. Caesar's absent-mindedness at this crucial moment in the play seems to have attracted the attention of the German commentators more than the English, American, or French. But Arthur H. Nethercot, in his recent study Men and Supermen: The Shavian Portrait Gallery (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 82–83, points out the sufficient fact that Shaw suppresses Cleopatra's subsequent visit to Rome, and the birth of Caesarion.

^{Note 30 in page 281} Shaw's words (Pref., p. xxxi) afford an interesting comparison with Schucking's famous thesis in Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (London, 1922), pp. 119 ff.

^{Note 31 in page 281} Shaw makes Cleopatra 16, perhaps misreading Mommsen, who gives this age at the time she was driven from the throne by Ptolemy, 3 years before Caesar's coming.

^{Note 32 in page 284} Pref., p. xxx. A sensible reduction of this diatribe by Shaw to its proper proportions is Dixon Scott's surgical dissection in “The Innocence of Bernard Shaw,” Men of Letters (London, 1917), pp. 28–29. Originally published in the London Bookman, XLIV (Sept. 1913), 248–249, this article has been reprinted also by Kronenberger, pp. 72–104; the specific reference is on p. 91.

^{Note 33 in page 284} See G. K. Chesterton, “The Critic,” in George Bernard Shaw (London, 1948), p. 94: “But Shaw's attack on Shakespeare, though exaggerated for the fun of the thing, was not by any means the mere folly or firework paradox that has been supposed. He meant what he said; what was called his levity was merely the laughter of a man who enjoyed saying what he meant…” Archibald Henderson offers confirmation, asserting that Shaw's Preface to Caesar was “entirely serious” (p. 725). The background for all this, in Shaw's early championship of Ibsen, is documented by Shaw himself in “How Frank Ought To Have Done It” (1919), reprinted in Sixteen Self-Sketches (New York, 1949), pp. 200–201.

^{Note 34 in page 284} “O Eastern Star,” SRL, xxx (20 Dec. 1947), 23.

^{Note 35 in page 284} “Bernard Shaw and the Heroic Actor,” Play Pictorial, p. 110; quoted by Archibald Henderson, p. 493.

^{Note 36 in page 284} See John Mason Brown, “Hail, Caesar—and Cleopatra,” SRL, xxxiii (14 Jan. 1950), 27: “But what is often overlooked is that GBS [sic] regardless of his impertinences, was never a debunker.”

^{Note 37 in page 285} New Statesman, i (26 April 1913), 82. See also Eric Bentley's excellent analysis, pp 112–113.

^{Note 38 in page 285} Masters of the Drama, rev. ed. (New York, 1954), p. 605. The wording is unchanged from the earlier edition. In The Theatre in Our Times (New York, 1955), Gassner calls Caesar a “minor achievement” (p. 143).

^{Note 39 in page 285} See G. B. Harrison, Shakespeare's Tragedies (New York, 1953), p. 65: “certainly he [Caesar] did not deserve the adulations of such nineteenth-century historians as Mommsen or Froude …” Henderson refers to Shaw's Caesar as “a dramatization of the heroic Caesar as ‘restored’ by the romantic imperialist Mommsen” (p. 322). E. G. Sihler's Annals of Caesar (New York, 1911), Appendix, pp. 309-319, makes short work of Mommsen, Froude, and Ferrero as well, anticipating Eduard Meyer, whose words in the light of our study are not without an ironic humor: “Sodann aber hat er [i.e., Mommsen] Caesar nicht nur als eine Idealgestalt, ja als ‘das Vollkommene’ schlechthin geschildert, sondern ihn geradezu in eine übermenschliche Sphäre gertickt” (Caesars Monarchie, 3^te Aufl., Stuttgart u. Berlin, 1922, p. 327).