George Bernard Shaw provoke, although it was shown at the city's Royal Theatre in November 1907. Shaw later wrote that William Butler Yeats, who had requested the play, "got rather more than he bargained for... It was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-Gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentment of the real old Ireland." Nonetheless, Shaw and Yeats were close friends; Yeats and Lady Gregory tried unsuccessfully to persuade Shaw to take up the vacant co-directorship of the Abbey Theatre after J. M. Synge's death in
George Bernard Shaw Margaret Cole, who considered Shaw the greatest writer of his age, professed never to have understood him. She thought he worked "immensely hard" at politics, but essentially, she surmises, it was for fun—"the fun of a brilliant artist". After Shaw's death, Pearson wrote: "No one since the time of Tom Paine has had so definite an influence on the social and political life of his time and country as Bernard Shaw." In its obituary tribute to Shaw, "The Times Literary Supplement" concluded: George Bernard Shaw George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply