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
George Bernard Shaw stand alone in their mastery of English and compulsive readability." Shaw ceased to be a salaried music critic in August 1894, but published occasional articles on the subject throughout his career, his last in 1950. From 1895 to 1898, Shaw was the theatre critic for "The Saturday Review", edited by his friend Frank Harris. As at "The World", he used the by-line "G.B.S." He campaigned against the artificial conventions and hypocrisies of the Victorian theatre and called for plays of real ideas and true characters. By this time he had embarked in earnest on a career as a playwright: "I