disappointments in his life. However, his efforts did not go to waste but added to the growth of the regional repertory movement in Britain. Granville-Barker's directing career boomed with three famous productions of Shakespeare at the Savoy Theatre: The Winter's Tale and Twelfth Night during 1912 and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1914. Granville-Barker took these productions and removed all classic scenery and replaced it with symbolic scenery, as well as enforcing ensemble acting. Writing career The year before he met his first wife, Granville-Barker wrote The Voysey Inheritance which is considered to be a masterpiece of the Edwardian stage. His other plays, however. did not sit well with the Edwardian audience. They found his plays to be incomprehensible. According to The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance, his style was more similar to the style of Chekhov in that it put the "action under the surface." Although his audience may not have understood him, this did not stop Granville-Barker from discussing important issues in society. In 1907 Granville-Barker's play Waste was banned due to the topic of abortion and its politics. In 1909, three volumes of his plays, The Voysey Inheritance, Waste, and The Marrying of Ann Leete, were published in a limited edition of 50 copies printed on handmade paper in a slipcase. Granville-Barker's most notable prose work is the Prefaces to Shakespeare written from 1927 to the end of his life in 1946. Prefaces to Shakespeare was considered the first major Shakespeare study to attend to the practical matters of staging. The prefaces were published in two hardback volumes in 1946 and 1947. Personal life In 1906, Granville-Barker met his first wife Lillah McCarthy on tour with Ben Greet's Shakespeare and Old English Touring Company in 1895 when he was 17. In Ben Greet's company, he played Paris to McCarthy's Juliet. McCarthy first appeared at The Court Theatre under Barker's co-management in "John Bull's Other Island" in 1895. Shortly thereafter, Barker played opposite McCarthy in Man and Superman (1895). They married on April 24, 1906 at the West Strand Registry Office. McCarthy was to have a leading part in Barker's personal and professional life until their split after World War I. He divorced McCarthy and married an American writer named Helen Huntington who supposedly disliked the stage, actors, and especially Shaw. He then hyphenated his name, causing his colleagues to believe that he was abandoning the battle