Abbey Theatre works by Seumas O'Cuisin, Fred Ryan and Yeats. The third base was the financial support and experience of Annie Horniman, a middle-class Englishwoman with previous experience of theatre production, having been involved in the presentation of George Bernard Shaw's "Arms and the Man" in London in 1894. An acquaintance of Yeats from London circles, including the Order of the Golden Dawn, she came to Dublin in 1903 to act as Yeats' unpaid secretary and to make costumes for a production of his play "The King's Threshold". Her money helped found the Abbey Theatre and, according to the critic Adrian Frazier,
George Bernard Shaw Osborne's plays, and concludes that though the latter's work is neither imitative nor derivative, these affinities are sufficient to classify Osborne as an inheritor of Shaw. In a 1983 study, R. J. Kaufmann suggests that Shaw was a key forerunner—"godfather, if not actually finicky paterfamilias"—of the Theatre of the Absurd. Two further aspects of Shaw's theatrical legacy are noted by Crawford: his opposition to stage censorship, which was finally ended in 1968, and his efforts which extended over many years to establish a National Theatre. Shaw's short 1910 play "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets", in which Shakespeare pleads with