The attempt to rescue British Drama from the theatre's rowdy spectacle began a few months before Princess Victoria became Queen. By the time the Empress died, the theatre itself had grown respectable and a drama of ideas, adapted (more or less) to middle-class taste, had its place in that respectability. For without the approbation of the box-office, no dramatist, however independent and open-minded, could make his mark. Until theatre buildings and actor-managers became fashionable enough to attract the sort of audience which might, for whatever reason, support a serious drama, ‘the worst and deadliest enemy of the English drama [was] – the English theatre’. Even by the mid nineties, when theatres had become safely domestic and actors were gentlemen and ladies, a mind like Shaw's was prisoner to a manager's idea of popular taste.