Edward R. Murrow and Shakespeare

In her new book A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare, critic and scholar Marjorie Garber explores the constructive force of literature in opposing political oppression during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s in America. Garber shows how writers versed in the literary tropes of revenge—William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Donne, George Herbert, Francis Bellamy, and others—appeared during the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee. But the agent of revenge is not the author of the work; it is the work itself, with all its cultural power and relevance, spanning years or centuries.

From Paul Robeson to J. Robert Oppenheimer, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie to Joe Papp, Garber looks at Americans called before the committee and those who covered it. In an excerpt from Chapter 3, “’Not in Our Stars’ Ed Murrow Saw It Then,” we learn how Shakespeare first inspired the journalist as a student and the role it continued to play in his reporting.

HAMLET: My lord, you played once i’ th’ university, you say?
POLONIUS: That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.
HAMLET: What did you enact?
POLONIUS: I did enact Julius Caesar. I was kill’d i’ th’ Capitol.
Brutus kill’d me.
—Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

For months, Edward R. Murrow had chafed at the calumnies of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose cruelty, irresponsibility, and demeanor all outraged his sensibilities as a newsman and a citizen. On March 9, 1954, after negotiating with his network (CBS) and his sponsor (ALCOA), Murrow aired a See It Now program that consisted almost entirely of film footage showing McCarthy in action: conducting hearings, interrogating (and intimidating) witnesses, discussing Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, disconcertingly giggling during a speech, posturing for the camera. Periodically Murrow appeared on-screen to introduce segments and read from newspaper editorials opposing McCarthy.

He ended his broadcast with a personal comment and a stinging reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. … We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home. The actions of the junior senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies, and whose fault is that? Not really his, he didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Good night, and good luck.

The date was not quite the Ides of March, but it was close enough.

Shakespeare’s play, which had long struck revolutionaries and foes of tyranny as highly pertinent to their own times, was once again speaking to the moment. For Ed Murrow, it may also have had a special resonance, going back to his college days. As a student at Washington State University, the young Ed Murrow had encountered a professor of speech and drama who was to have a great influence on his life and career. Ida Lou Anderson, despite a childhood bout of polio that left her with a double curvature of the spine, became, through sheer determination—and a gift of a mesmerizing voice—a charismatic teacher and performer. Murrow switched his major to speech, talked his way into advanced classes, and became Anderson’s protégé, learning from her poetry, prose, delivery, and an admiration for the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Years later, Anderson told him he was her “masterpiece.” She occasionally perfected the masterpiece, suggesting that Murrow change the banal “London calling” to his signature “This is London,” and applauding his new signoff, “Good night, and good luck,” as a keeper.

In 1929, while still in college, Murrow was cast in a school play called The Valiant, which went on tour in the region. His role was that of a stubbornly taciturn prisoner, convicted of murder and condemned to death, who is confronted on the eve of his execution by a young girl who says she is his sister. As children, she tells the warden, the two of them memorized speeches from Shakespeare: he had learned the lines because he planned to be an actor, and he taught them to her, including two “good night” speeches from Romeo and Juliet that they always said to one another before she went to sleep. The warden is skeptical: “This boy isn’t your brother  This boy never heard of Shakespeare, much less learned him.” When they meet, the prisoner denies that she is his sister, and seems not to recognize either of the passages from Romeo when she recites them to him. Learning that her mother is ill, and seeing the girl’s distress, he pretends to remember a young man with her brother’s name who “died like a brave man and a soldier” in the war, “not as a criminal.” Leaving, she recites, once again, Juliet’s lines, lines that he had claimed not to recognize:

Good night, good night, parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say good night till it be morrow.

and once the door closes on her he speaks Romeo’s reply:

Sleep dwell upon thine eyes, peace in thy breast,
Would I were sleep and peace, so sweet to rest.
—Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, Scene 1

But it is another passage from Shakespeare that, after a moment, he recites, witnessed this time by the warden and the prison chaplain—the passage from which the play gets its name:

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
—Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2

The play is Julius Caesar; the speaker is Caesar, vowing to go forth to the Capitol, where he will meet his death.

Murrow the journalist and broadcaster knew Shakespeare’s plays well, and did not hesitate to cite what he regarded as pertinent lines or passages. As Joseph Persico says, “If he believed a thought was best expressed through a classical allusion, a quote from Shakespeare or Marcus Aurelius, he used it. He did not, as he was told, assume that the audience was a collective 12-year-old. He was willing to let the listener work a little, to exercise the mind.”

When Neville Chamberlain departed on his ill-fated journey to Munich in September 1938, Murrow reported and commented upon the event: Chamberlain, he noted, had “said he hoped when he returned to be able to say, as Hotspur says in Henry IV, ‘Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’ Mr. Chamberlain’s opponents say, ‘But don’t forget the nettle is still there.’ Hisopponents are still wondering how much of the nettle will remain when they have learned the terms of the agreement that has been signed in Munich tonight.” The quotation (Henry IV, Part 1, 2.4.8) is Hotspur’s irritated response to a mealy-mouthed letter begging off participation in his revolt; it is an odd choice for Chamberlain, just as Chamberlain is singularly unlike the bravely impetuous Hotspur.

Broadcasting in London on September 3, 1939, Murrow adapted a speech from Macbeth to express the view that England would support Poland against Hitler: “Stands England where she did? . . . I believe that Britain in the end of the day will stand where she is pledged to stand, by the side of Poland in a war that is now in progress.” In Shakespeare’s play the line is Macduff’s (“Stands Scotland where it did?”[4.3.164]). Murrow’s “she” rather than “it” suggests that he is quoting from memory (a later line, “It cannot / Be called our mother, but our grave” [166–67] adds the element of gender), and the important change from “Scotland” to “England” makes it clear both that Murrow is knowledgeably citing from the text and that he expects listeners, or at least some listeners, to catch the allusion. England and France had given Hitler a deadline of 11 a.m. to pull out of Poland. Fifteen minutes after the deadline, Neville Chamberlain announced on the BBC that a state of war existed between Britain and Germany.

A few months later, when Winston Churchill attacked Chamberlain in the House of Commons for the way he had man-aged the war, Murrow told his wife it was “the best bit of acting I’ve ever seen.” After Churchill succeeded Chamberlain he compared the two prime ministers, describing Churchill—in a broadcast—as “the best broadcaster in this country.” From Edward Murrow this was high praise indeed. His highest praise of Winston Churchill’s great speech to the House of Commons during the Blitz (“We shall fight in the seas and oceans, we shall fight on the beaches, in the fields, in the streets, in the hills. We shall never surrender”) was that Churchill “spoke the language of Shakespeare with a direct urgency such as I have never heard before.” And on the side of bathos rather than pathos: on one occasion CBS boss Bill Paley, arriving in London, wanted to be able to witness in real time the New York premiere of a CBS Shakespeare program. Murrow arranged this with considerable difficulty, time, and effort—only to have Paley fall asleep and miss the entire event.

But it was in his dealings with McCarthy and McCarthyism that Murrow’s citation of Shakespeare becomes most vivid, and most memorable. His “Cassius was right” tailpiece (as Murrow called his closing editorial remarks; the word is a translation of the Latin coda) alludes to a well-known passage in Julius Caesar in which Cassius tries to convince Brutus to join those who are plotting the death of Caesar, whom they see as becoming a tyrant, and thus threatening the republic of Rome.

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
—Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2

In quoting the last two lines of this speech, Murrow omits the final phrase (“that we are underlings”), making the question one of moral and ethical responsibility rather than of political rivalry or revenge. What is manifestly “dishonorable” is McCarthy’s behavior and, by association, the moral cowardice of those who will not speak out against him.

Excerpted from A Treacherous Secret Agent: How Literature Spoke Truth to Power During the Red Scare by Marjorie Garber. Copyright © 2026 by Marjorie Garbert. Used with permission of the publisher, Yale University Press. All rights reserved. 

About the author

Marjorie Garber is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Research Professor of English and of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of twenty books, including Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. She lives in London, UK.

Learn more at marjoriegarber.com