"The Dark Lady of the Sonnets" by George Bernard Shaw is a short comedy written in 1910. The play imagines William Shakespeare waiting at Whitehall Palace for a secret meeting with his mysterious lover. Instead, he accidentally encounters Queen Elizabeth I and seizes the opportunity to pitch an ambitious idea: the creation of a national theatre. Shaw wrote this witty one-act play as part of a real campaign to establish a Shakespeare National Theatre by 1916, blending historical figures with literary mystery and theatrical ambition. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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