Irish theatre playwright now stands outside the gallery entrance. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925. A sea change in the history of the Irish theatre came with the establishment in Dublin in 1899 of the Irish Literary Theatre by W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, George Moore and Edward Martyn. This was followed by the Irish National Theatre Society, later to become the Abbey Theatre. The history of this theatre is well documented, and its importance can be seen from the list of writers whose plays were first performed here in the early days of the 20th century. These included
Palgrave's Golden Treasury Robert Bridges – Gerard Manley Hopkins – Andrew Lang – A. W. E. O’Shaughnessy – R. L. Stevenson – John Davidson – A. E. Housman – Francis Thompson – Mary E. Coleridge – Rudyard Kipling – W. B. Yeats – Ernest Dowson – Lionel Johnson – Laurence Binyon – Edwin Arlington Robinson – Hilaire Belloc – T. Sturge Moore – W. H. Davies – Ralph Hodgson – Walter de la Mare – G. K. Chesterton – Robert Frost – John Masefield – Edward Thomas – Harold Monro – Padraic Colum – James Stephens – James Elroy Flecker – D. H.