Caesar and Cleopatra : Shaw, l’estetismo, il decadentismo e Oscar Wilde

The article investigates the relationship between George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde within British fin-de-siècle drama and the fin-de-siècle literary scene. The two authors shared evident similarities in their lives and careers: both Irish and coming from Anglican families, they were contemporaries and started their literary careers in the same period, while also and especially becoming the two most successful playwrights in 1890s London. Despite obvious rivalry, they respected each other and developed some similar ideas on the Aesthetic Movement and the poetics of fin-de-siècle Decadence, as evidenced in their epistolary exchanges. In particular, Shaw’s play Caesar and Cleopatra (1899) provides a case study for his engagement with Aestheticist and Decadent aesthetics and displays evident, though very seldom studied, analogies with Wilde’s works. The article reassesses the cross-influences between the two authors by offering biographical, historical, textual, and thematic perspectives, as well as a addressing the paucity of previous criticism on the subject.