George Bernard Shaw at Whitehall Court. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Shaw secured a firm reputation as a playwright. In 1904 J. E. Vedrenne and Harley Granville-Barker established a company at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, Chelsea to present modern drama. Over the next five years they staged fourteen of Shaw's plays. The first, "John Bull's Other Island", a comedy about an Englishman in Ireland, attracted leading politicians and was seen by Edward VII, who laughed so much that he broke his chair. The play was withheld from Dublin's Abbey Theatre, for fear of the affront it might
W. B. Yeats is commemorated in Sligo town by a statue, created in 1989 by sculptor Ronan Gillespie. It was erected outside the Ulster Bank, at the corner of Stephen Street and Markievicz Road, on the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death. Yeats had remarked, on receiving his Nobel Prize that the Royal Palace in Stockholm "resembled the Ulster Bank in Sligo". Across the river is the Yeats Memorial Building, home to the Sligo Yeats Society. W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (13 June 186528 January 1939) was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of