Especially during the formative years leading up to his emergence as a playwright with Widowers' Houses (1892), the course of Shaw's career was deeply influenced by his friend and self-proclaimed mentor, William Archer. Archer, born in the same year as Shaw (1856), became one of the foremost early translators of Ibsen's dramas and, next to Shaw, their most vigorous advocate in the English theatre of the late nineteenth century. He first came across Shaw, at the age of 26, in the British Museum Reading Room, where he noticed both the pale young man with the bright red beard and “the odd combination of authors whom he used to study - for I saw him day after day poring over Karl Marx's Das Kapital and an orchestral score of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.” Not long afterwards, early in 1884, Archer was hired by Edmund Yates's World as that newspaper's drama critic, and he soon persuaded his publisher to take on his unemployed friend as well, to serve as the paper's art critic. Some time later, Archer recalls, “the post of musical critic fell vacant, and I secured it for Shaw by the simple process of telling Yates the truth: namely, that he was at once the most competent and most brilliant writer on music then living in England.” Shaw himself could not have put it better in one of his prefaces.