1890–1904: Private Venture, Public Enterprise

Abstract

Shaw’s early career as a playwright is bound in with the emergence in London of private theatres, generally called ‘societies’, during the 1890s. Modest though they were, they gave him his entree to the theatre, and without this it is likely that his impact as a playwright on Edwardian England, when opportunity presented itself at the Court Theatre, would have been considerably less emphatic than it was.