wednesday anachronistic books

[landofnowhere]

Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw. Readaloud. Another Shaw that I had read when I was 12ish and remembered very little. I mean it's not surprising that I didn't notice how immature Cleopatra is in the play, I mean, I was like, 12. I'm not sure why Shaw chose to make his Cleopatra as immature as he did -- though he does make it clear that it's not just her age (she's 16), it's part of her character -- and I can see how he could come up with that, extrapolating back from the source material to Antony and Cleopatra. I think this suffers from comparison with Saint Joan, or even Pygmalion: Joan and Eliza Doolittle are Great Women of their sorts, if flawed, while Cleopatra is just a girl who has been Born Great. Caesar is interesting, though, as is the choice to make his relationship with Cleopatra not at all sexual. Apollodorus turned out to be the surprise fun swashbuckling character of the show!

Too Like the Lightning/Trop Semblable à l'éclair, Ada Palmer (tr. Michelle Charrier). Enjoying close reading this translation (and reading the original first for reference) -- though doing so means I notice the few things the proofreader missed, which is understandable, this is a hard book to proofread! (To make Eureka's messages look like text-speak, they are missing not only capital letters but also accent marks, except, oddly, that "déjà" is always accented.) Have got pronouns sorted out, though I should pay more attention to when the translator chooses to use "tu" vs "vous". Also I've learned, among other vocabulary, that the verb "irrigue" can refer to blood circulation, which makes the phrase "la manière dont le sang du monde l'irrigue tout entier" less creepy that it came across to me at first.

Comments

[selenak]

Re: teenage immature Cleopatra - partly because of a misunderstanding on Shaw's part of Mommsen's Caesar (one of his key sources), which lists Cleopatra's age when the Egyptian civil war started, but by the time Caesar show's up, several years have passed - but partly because of the parody intent. Cleopatra for the late Victorians was the sinful woman (never mind that the only men we know for sure she had sex with she considered herself married to), threatening empires, and to present her as a childish teen whose relationship with Caesar is completely platonic was a deliberate reverse of expectations. (As you say, it's not just a question of her age, but a deliberate authorial choice - Shaw's Joan is also a teenager (as she was in rl) who does some growing up through the two years covered by the show, but she's never childish.) With early Shaw, it's always worth checking out the theatre habits of his day because as many a socially engaged author, he does a lot of parodying. (The very first play, Arms and the Men, parodies the type of Ruritanian swashbuckling adventure in fashion then.) Most obviously with Britannus as the parody of the audience of Shaw's day, but also Cleopatra as the reverse of a femme fatale of the fin de siècle.

[landofnowhere]

Thanks for explaining how Shaw got the idea that Cleopatra was 16 -- I'd been wondering. And yes, I do appreciate the subversion of the "femme fatale" tropes, and making the Caesar/Cleopatra relationship platonic, but some of Cleopatra's immaturity (the clinginess and inability to realize that Caesar's work takes priority over her) seems to go above and beyond what's necessary for that -- we generaly agreed that she reads as much younger than 16.

[stdesjardins]

I saw a magnificent production of this at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in 2009 with Christopher Plummer as Caesar. The extreme age difference worked well, I thought, giving Caesar an avuncular air which softened the condescension, and of course Plummer had extraordinary stage presence.