IN A MUSICAL REVIEW IN 1893 "G.B.S." joked, "It is impossible to say what a man can do until he tries. I may before the end of this year write a tragedy on the subject of King Lear that will efface Shakespear's; but if I do it will be a surprise, not perhaps to myself, but to the public. It is certain that if I took the work in hand I should be able to turn out five acts about King Lear that would be, at least, grammatical, superficially coherent, and arranged in lines that would scan." At the time Shaw had completed only one play, Widowers' Houses; and was working on a second, The Philanderer, one of his least successful efforts. The likelihood of a Shavian Lear was remote. A dozen years later, when he tried to interest classicist and translator of Euripides Gilbert Murray in "a great dramatic theme ... — a Woman Lear with three sons — just the sort of Aeschylean subject in modern life you want,,, the idea was no longer a flippant aside.