The Project Gutenberg EBook of Caesar and Cleopatra, by George Bernard Shaw

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Title: Caesar and Cleopatra

Author: George Bernard Shaw

Posting Date: January 23, 2009 [EBook #3329]
Release Date: July, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA ***

Produced by Eve Sobol

CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA

By George Bernard Shaw

ACT I

An October night on the Syrian border of Egypt towards the end of
the XXXIII Dynasty, in the year 706 by Roman computation, afterwards
reckoned by Christian computation as 48 B.C. A great radiance of silver
fire, the dawn of a moonlit night, is rising in the east. The stars
and the cloudless sky are our own contemporaries, nineteen and a half
centuries younger than we know them; but you would not guess that from
their appearance. Below them are two notable drawbacks of civilization:
a palace, and soldiers. The palace, an old, low, Syrian building of
whitened mud, is not so ugly as Buckingham Palace; and the officers in
the courtyard are more highly civilized than modern English officers:
for example, they do not dig up the corpses of their dead enemies and
mutilate them, as we dug up Cromwell and the Mahdi. They are in two
groups: one intent on the gambling of their captain Belzanor, a warrior
of fifty, who, with his spear on the ground beside his knee, is stooping
to throw dice with a sly-looking young Persian recruit; the other
gathered about a guardsman who has just finished telling a naughty
story (still current in English barracks) at which they are laughing
uproariously. They are about a dozen in number, all highly aristocratic
young Egyptian guardsmen, handsomely equipped with weapons and armor,
very unEnglish in point of not being ashamed of and uncomfortable in
their professional dress; on the contrary, rather ostentatiously and
arrogantly warlike, as valuing themselves on their military caste.

Belzanor is a typical veteran, tough and wilful; prompt, capable and
crafty where brute force will serve; helpless and boyish when it
will not: an effective sergeant, an incompetent general, a deplorable
dictator. Would, if influentially co