Caesar and Cleopatra
A balding middle-aged Roman general finds a frightened sixteen-year-old hiding between the paws of the Sphinx at night and, without saying who he is, begins teaching her how to be a queen. The lessons take in the Alexandrian mob, the library, the palace guard and her brother's ministers, and she proves a faster pupil in cruelty than in statecraft. Shaw wrote it as a corrective to Shakespeare and printed the argument as a preface asking whether it was better than him.
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Lineage
- responds to ↑ Antony and Cleopatra
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 53% · 15 shared
- 52% · 13 shared
- 52% · 10 shared
- 49% · 11 shared
- 49% · 11 shared
- 49% · 10 shared