George Bernard Shaw and "Caesar and Cleopatra", Shaw's counterblast to Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra", seen in New York in 1906 and in London the following year. Now prosperous and established, Shaw experimented with unorthodox theatrical forms described by his biographer Stanley Weintraub as "discussion drama" and "serious farce". These plays included "Getting Married" (premiered 1908), "The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet" (1909), "Misalliance" (1910), and "Fanny's First Play" (1911). "Blanco Posnet" was banned on religious grounds by the Lord Chamberlain (the official theatre censor in England), and was produced instead in Dublin; it filled the Abbey Theatre to capacity. "Fanny's First Play", a comedy
W. B. Yeats ancient sagas and Ossianic poetry and the more recent folk song tradition in Irish. One of the most significant of these was Douglas Hyde, later the first President of Ireland, whose "Love Songs of Connacht" was widely admired. In 1899, Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and George Moore began the Irish Literary Theatre to present Irish plays. The ideals of the Abbey were derived from the avant-garde French theatre, which sought to express the "ascendancy of the playwright rather than the actor-manager "à l'anglais"." The group's manifesto, which Yeats wrote, declared, "We hope to find in Ireland an uncorrupted &