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GB Shaw
theatre pay-boxes, and raised the expenses of management
to such a degree that unless the houses were quite full every
night, profit was impossible. Even bare solvency could not
be attained without a very wide popularity. Now what had
made serious drama possible to a limited extent before the
war was that a play could pay its way even if the theatre were
only half full until Saturday and three-quarters full then. A
manager who was an enthusiast and a desperately hard
worker, with an occasional grant-in-aid from an artistically
disposed millionaire, and a due proportion of those rare and
happy accidents by which plays of the higher sort turn out
to be potboilers as well, could hold out for some years, by
which time a relay might arrive in the person of another
enthusiast. Thus and not otherwise occurred that remark-
able revival of the British drama at the beginning of the cen-
tury which made my own career as a playwright possible in
England. In America I had already established myself, not as
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