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
George Bernard Shaw a death-blow to 19th-century melodrama. According to Laurence, Shaw pioneered "intelligent" theatre, in which the audience was required to think, thereby paving the way for the new breeds of twentieth-century playwrights from Galsworthy to Pinter. Crawford lists numerous playwrights whose work owes something to that of Shaw. Among those active in Shaw's lifetime he includes Noël Coward, who based his early comedy "The Young Idea" on "You Never Can Tell" and continued to draw on the older man's works in later plays. T. S. Eliot, by no means an admirer of Shaw, admitted that the epilogue of "Murder in the