Old History and New: Anachronism in Caesar and Cleopatra

OLD HISTORY AND NEW: ANACHRONISM IN CAESAR AND CLEOPATRA THE SHAW THAT BORES today is yesterday's imp, the red beard, the twinkle in the eye, the puppeteer of paradoxes that turn back upon themselves. We have found the playwright inside the iconoclast, the Shaw apart from the the author of Shavianism. The task for current Shaw criticism is the final synthesis: the demonstration that the iconoclasm, so far from being a dismissible burden on .the play, is vital to it. In the case of Caesar and Cleopatra, critical consensus is fairly represented by Eric Bentley, who bases the play's claim to be "for Puritans" on its quality of "inverted melodrama."l Caesar is an early Superman , a Life Force hero, heroic precisely because, in Bentley's words, he "refuses to perform either of the two types of melodramatic action: he refuses to avenge himself and he refuses to make love."2 Shaw "did bring the hero off his pedestal, but only to demonstrate that the flesh-and-blood man was much more of a hero than the statue and the legend."3 To John Gassner the play "is the most completely anti-heroic play in existence that manages at the same time to be heroic,"4 and the reason, in the words of Gordon W. Couchman, is that "Shaw has endowed [Caesar] with a new heroism to which the many little touches of commonness ... add rather than detract."5 This is just about what Shaw himself said about his hero in the notes to the play: "Caesar is greater off the battlefield than on it." The apparent debunking is, in fact, a deeply respectful humanization. But in rescuing Shaw's balding Caesar from Shavian iconoclasm one tends to miss the bitter-sweet comedy of anachronism which the play also is. And if the anachronisms bring the solemnities of the past down to the trivialities of the present, the iconoclasm is crucial to the play's meaning: its ironies of time constitute the essence of Shaw's reading 9f history. "Eulogy through disparagement" is, I submit, too simple a formula to account for the play's power. The significance Qf the play's obvious verbal anachronisms is not the 1. Eric Bentley, Bemard Shaw, amended ed. (New Directions, 1957), p. 113. 2. Bentley, p. 113. 3. Bentley, p. 112. 4. John Gassnerj.,Mastl1l's of the Drama, rev. ed. (New York, 1954), p. 605. 5. Gordon W. ,",ouehman, "Here Was a Caesar: Shaw's Comedy Today," PMLA, LXII (March, 1957), 284. . 37 38 MODERN DRAMA May significance suggested by the heading of one of Shaw's notes: «Apparent Anachronisms." For if the anachronisms are only apparent and not real, the reason is not that ancient Romans and Egyptians went around saying "Double or quits," "Peace with honor," "Egypt for the Egyptians," "New woman," and "Art for art's sake," or because Shaw believed they did or wanted us to believe they did or even because they quite possibly used contemporary equivalents. Shaw's point is simply that where there has been no change there can be no anachronism. The modernisms are not flippantly irreverent, do not defy an Irvingian pedantry that seeks "historical authenticity." They are verbal symptoms of what the play dramatizes: that progress is a myth. Not only Ra, the divine Prologue, but the events of the play itself tell us that since we are like Caesar's contemporaries in essentials, that is, in morality , we can hardly protest when Shaw lets t~em share with us such trifles as current colloquialisms and political slogans. Ra, though rarely discussed, is an important character in Caesar and Cleopatra, representing the divine dimension, measured against which human past, present, and future resolve themselves into a perpetuity of vicious pettiness. Anachronism is the confusion of the present and the past, but it could also be said to be the coalescence of both in a timeless now and hence represent the divine, the eternal point of view of human affairs. Ra speaks for the eternal. Like other Prologues, he both informs and insults. He insults us because he is angered by our imagined superiority over the past. He informs us because...