Bernard Shaw 1940–

Television news anchor and reporter

At a Glance…

Hungry for International Experience

Taking a Career Gamble

“Chicken Noodle Network”

From “The Center of Hell”

A Star Is Born

Sources

Television news anchor Bernard Shaw’s dispassionate manner, steady gaze, rich baritone voice, and crisply precise delivery virtually blend into the fabric of the news. As Cable News Network’s (CNN) principal Washington anchor, he takes a serious approach to journalism and is widely regarded for his belief that the messenger should not get in the way of the message. Shaw has worked for two of the three national television networks, CBS and ABC, and holds the number one anchor position at a number one ranked TV news network—the “fourth” network—CNN. In a career spanning three decades, he has covered some of modern history’s most dramatic events: Watergate (a political scandal that centered on the infiltration of Democratic party headquarters by Republicans during the 1972 presidential campaign), the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, China’s Tiananmen Square student massacre, and American involvement in the Persian Gulf War. As CNN’s top anchor, Shaw is at the helm of television’s news phenomenon: a 24-hour, all-news cable network that has arisen as a challenge to the three leading networks.

Shaw is one of the rare few who has realized his childhood dreams. He grew up during the years of World War II, the emergence of television, and the days that begat the baby boom. His father was a house painter, his mother cleaned other people’s homes, and they lived on the South Side of Chicago. But far from being isolated in the “wrong” part of town and at the wrong end of the economic spectrum, the family brought the world into their home. “In those days,” Shaw told Parade Magazine, “Chicago had four papers and we got all four every day.” Even in his teens, Shaw had an obsessive interest in the news. “My ritual on Sunday morning was to walk to a place called the Green Door bookstore near the University of Chicago, which was the closest place I could find the Sunday New York Times, ” Shaw told New York magazine. Fourteen years old, paper cradled in his arms, the boy would plant himself in a coffeeshop and read the paper all the way through. But Shaw was not merely a spectator. He made announcements on the school public address system, participated in radio amateur hours, and, while some teenagers of the 1950s may have been totally absorbed in the birth of rock ‘n roll, Shaw found time to dial up newspaper and broadcast reporters and pepper them with questions about story preparation and deadline

At a Glance…

Born May 22, 1940, in Chicago, IL; son of Edgar (a railroad man and house painter) and Camilia (a housekeeper; maiden name, Murphy) Shaw; married Linda Allston, 1973; children: Amar Edgar, Anil Louise. Education: Attended University of Illinois, 1963-66.

Reporter, correspondent, and news anchor. WYNR/WNUS all-news radio, Chicago, IL, reporter and anchor, 1964-66; Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W, Chicago, reporter, 1966-68, White House correspondent, 1968-71; Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS-TV), reporter for Washington bureau, 1971-74, correspondent, 1974-77; American Broadcasting Companies (ABC-TV), Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, 1977-79, also ABC-News’ senior Capitol Hill correspondent; Cable News Network (CNN), Washington DC, news anchor, 1980—; one of three CNN Gulf War correspondents in Baghdad, 1991. Military service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1959-63.

Awards: International Platform Association’s Lowell Thomas Electronic Journalist Award, 1988; Award for Cable Excellence from the National Academy of Cable Programming, 1988; Emmy Award, 1989, for outstanding coverage of a single breaking news story; gold medal, 32nd annual International Film and TV Festival of New York, 1989; National Association of Black Journalists annual award, 1989; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, 1990; ACE Award, 1990; Bernard Shaw Endowment Fund created by University of Illinois, 1991; Eduard Rhein Foundation’s Cultural-H/Journalistic Award, 1991.

Member: Society of Professional Journalists (fellow), National Press Club, Sigma Delta Chi.

Addresses: Office —Cable News Network, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., 111 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., 3rd Floor, Washington, D.C. 20001.

pressures. Even in his youth, Shaw’s tastes in television programming ran toward the news and information genre: he used to watch the television news program Meet the Press religiously, and his hero was legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow. At 16, he personally witnessed his second Democratic convention—he had managed to engineer his way into both the 1952 and 1956 conventions. Shaw told Time: “When I looked up at the anchor booths, I knew I was looking at the altar.”

On the road to the “altar,” Shaw wangled another opportunity to speak to a journalist about his craft. It was 1961, the beginning of an era of political tensions that resulted in such historic moves as the construction of the Berlin Wall by the East German government and the infamous Cuban Missile Crisis (a period of threatened military confrontation between the U.S. and Soviet governments following the American discovery of Soviet missile sites in Cuba). Shaw was a 21-year-old corporal in the Marines stationed in Hawaii at the time, and Walter Cronkite, his other hero, was passing through. With the tenacity of youth—or perhaps that of a budding reporter—the corporal rang Cronkite’s room a total of 34 times. “He was the most persistent guy I’ve ever met in my life,” Cronkite said in the Washington Post, “I was going to give him five begrudging minutes and ended up talking to him for a half hour. He was just determined to be a journalist.” The two have been friends ever since.

In 1963, with four years of the marines behind him, a new sense of maturity, and college money, Shaw entered the University of Illinois, choosing history as his major. His career in journalism officially began just a year later when he joined Chicago’s WNUS, one of the nation’s first all-news radio stations. He worked there as a reporter and anchor until 1966 when Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W offered him a job. He quit school, relocated to Washington, D.C., and, at 28, became a White House correspondent. In the five years with Westinghouse Shaw’s assignments included local and national urban affairs, and the struggles of Hispanics and Native Americans.

In 1971, Walter Cronkite helped Shaw land a job with CBS. Shaw started as a reporter for the CBS News Washington bureau and in three years became a correspondent. It was during this period that his career got a boost: he conducted an exclusive interview with then attorney general John Mitchell. It was the height of the Watergate crisis and Mitchell, who was to be convicted for his role in the affair, was a major figure in the scandal. White House correspondent Shaw had pulled off a journalistic coup.

Hungry for International Experience

After nearly ten years of reporting from Capitol Hill, Shaw was restless. He was hungry for international experience. When ABC offered him the job of Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, an impressive but less visible position, he grabbed it. “I pushed myself out the door,” Shaw told the New York Times. The three years he spent with ABC proved especially eventful.

As Latin American correspondent from 1977 to 1979, Shaw covered the 1979 resignation and exile of Nicaragua’s enigmatic president, General Anastasio Somoza, and the months of simmering civil war that enveloped it. The year before, Shaw flew to South America when assigned to investigate rumors of a bizarre massacre in the remote jungles of Guyana. The scene was Jonestown, a religious commune named after its leader, Reverend Jim Jones, and populated by transplanted American families. Shaw was one of the first reporters to file from location, and he scooped the other networks by providing the only aerial photos of the tragedy. The picture that confronted them was sickening: the decomposing bodies of 911 men, women, and children who had died by drinking poisoned punch. The reverend had led the cultists to this mass suicide-execution as a reaction to a U.S. representative’s investigation of alleged mistreatment of the American citizens. Shaw commented in Parade Magazine, “You know how cameramen will shoot 15 minutes of tape just to be sure they get one shot right? Well, at Jonestown, a cameraman could [only] shoot for about six seconds before turning around and retching. That’s how bad it was.”

Back at the bureau Shaw told a colleague that he felt very lucky to have gotten the Jonestown story, adding, as quoted in the Washington Post, “You always have luck when you hustle.” And, as if to confirm this philosophy, ABC chose Shaw to file special reports during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis at the American embassy in Teheran. That led to Shaw’s return to Washington as ABC’s senior Capitol Hill correspondent.

Taking a Career Gamble

1979 was a tumultuous year for personnel at ABC News. As a result, Shaw’s colleague, Washington bureau chief George Watson, left to help start CNN, a 24-hour, all-news cable network. Watson urged Shaw to follow him as the new network’s principal anchor. “I had been negotiating a new contract with ABC, but I was dissatisfied with the terms, so I started talking to [maverick broadcasting entrepreneur and CNN founder] Ted Turner,” Shaw told New York magazine. “The time period in which I was trying to decide, it seemed like agony to me. I’d only been married three years and our children were very small, and I couldn’t selfishly take that gamble by myself.” His worries were compounded by an economy in recession with double digit inflation. “It’s no exaggeration,” Shaw added, “I walked around the dining room for two weeks, talking to myself. My wife, Linda, would wake up around one in the morning and come downstairs. So, finally we just sat down at the dining room table and she said, ‘Okay, you should take the job, because if you don’t and CNN takes off, I won’t be able to live with you.”’ Network bosses told Shaw it would ruin his career, but he disagreed. “I saw it as perhaps the last frontier on television,” he told the New York Times. “The first all-news TV network seemed like revolutionary stuff to me.”

“Chicken Noodle Network”

For three decades the rule of the Big Three had never been seriously challenged and, while they smugly claimed that no one else could pull together the resources to compete, Turner was telling Business Week, “The Turner broadcasting group is going to be the greatest business success story of all time.”

The so-called “Chicken Noodle Network” began broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters on June 1, 1980. Using new satellite technology for live transmission, CNN’s staff of three hundred fresh faces drew on ceaseless energy to get the news out as it was happening, at any hour of the day or night. The cable network’s viewership rose and its presence began to be felt. But it wasn’t until 1987 that it achieved a contender’s rank. That status seemed to become official when Shaw’s became the fourth chair—joining those of CBS, NBC, and ABC—in a nationally televised interview with then U.S. president Ronald Reagan, held in the Oval Office on the eve of the summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That event served to introduce CNN and Shaw to millions of non-cable viewers. Another nationally televised event only a few months later ingrained Shaw’s face and style into viewers’ minds. But not all liked what they saw.

In April of 1988 Shaw moderated the second presidential debate from Los Angeles. In his role, he seemed rough with the debate audience, warning them that he would tell them to keep quiet “only once.” And, in general, he was his usual serious self. But it was his opening questions to the two candidates that caused a stir. George Bush was asked if he wouldn’t be worried about the country under President Dan Quayle’s leadership in the event Bush died before inauguration. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked if he would still be against the death penalty if someone “raped and murdered” his wife Kitty Dukakis. “I’ve heard the questions called ghoulish and tasteless,” Shaw told the Washington Post, “I spent more than a day and a half working on those two questions. They were not asked with trivia in mind.” It’s difficult to accuse Shaw of being trivial. “I hope I didn’t seem severe,” he added, “I took the job seriously.”

The next couple of years drew Shaw into international news. He covered the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit; President Bush’s first visit to Eastern Europe, and his participation in the 1989 Economic Summit in Paris; Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s funeral; and the 40th-anniversary North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Brussels. In May of 1989, Shaw received his biggest story yet: he provided 30 hours of continuous live coverage, worldwide, on the historic student demonstrations in Beijing, China. He was one of only two American anchors in Tiananmen Square when the Chinese government’s tanks rolled in and crushed the pro-democracy movement.

From “The Center of Hell”

Although Shaw initially expressed doubts about the probability of war between the United States and Iraq, four months later he admitted in Gentlemen’s Quarterly that this had been a “prediction grounded in hope.” In January of 1991, he was in Baghdad to interview Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when history took a turn. On the 16th, just one day after the aborted interview, Shaw found himself stranded—along with CNN colleagues, Peter Arnett and John Holliman—in the enemy capital as the allied bombing attack launched the Gulf War. Shaw was one of the first reporters to announce to the world that the United States and its allies had gone to war, and CNN went on to provide continuous coverage for the conflict’s duration. Even after every major newspaper had pulled out, after the Big Three’s phonelines were cut, and after CNN lost its picture transmission, the network was able to make live reports from Baghdad via its secure phoneline. While the night sky was screaming with gunfire and air-raid warnings, the CNN trio crawled around the floor of their hotel room and delivered some of the most spellbinding audio reporting since Edward R. Murrow’s harrowing World War II accounts of the Nazi bombing of London. “By the time we stopped broadcasting to get some sleep,” Shaw told Parade Magazine, “I was so tired I was making no sense whatsoever. I was no sooner in bed and asleep when the bombing started again, and I stumbled down the hall in my pajamas to the suite where we broadcast and went back to work.” The experience unnerved the characteristically composed anchor. He announced: “Clearly I’ve never been there, but it feels like we are in the center of hell.”

CNN’s coverage was being cited by top Pentagon officials at press conferences while being eagerly viewed by Iraqi officials. CBS and NBC humbled themselves by asking the cable network’s reporters for interviews. Television coverage of the war belonged to CNN because it provided an uninterrupted flow of raw information. This process empowered the public: the viewer became the news editor. “We’ve been training for this story 24 hours a day for ten years,” CNN’s executive vice-president Ed Turner (no relation to Ted Turner) told the Chicago Tribune. Live wartime coverage from the center of enemy camp is unprecedented.

A Star Is Born

“Bernie” Shaw came back to the U.S. a star. But the kudos and popular attention seemed unprofessional and embarrassing to him. He was happy to be reunited with his family and had more private thoughts on his mind. “I came back from Baghdad a changed man,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I looked death in the eyes. No human gets many chances to do that twice.”

The journey from the South Side of Chicago to Baghdad was a long one, but Shaw never wavered, and that could have been easy in the beginning. The 1950s had no “black Murrows” as role models for a poor, young black boy with dreams of broadcast journalism. “But I didn’t see Ed Murrow as white,” Shaw told the New York Times, “I saw him as a journalist.” Shaw knew that it was certainly possible that he’d encounter racism along the way, but he says he has never been a knowing victim of it in his career.

Widely regarded as the nation’s most powerful black television journalist, Shaw has maintained his professional philosophy: a reporter must never get in the way of a story. As he told Essence magazine, “I never wanted to sit in this chair until I felt in my mind and heart that I had the necessary experience to anchor.”

Sources

Business Week, June 1980.

Chicago Tribune, January 20, 1991.

Essence, November 1990.

Gentlemen’s Quarterly, May 1991.

Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1991.

New York, February 1991.

New York Times, February 2, 1988; March 20, 1988.

Parade Magazine, June 23, 1991.

Time, February 22, 1988.

Washington Post, June 22, 1991.

—Iva Sipal

George Bernard Shaw

The British playwright, critic, and pamphleteer George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) produced more than 52 plays and playlets, three volumes of music and drama criticism, and one major volume of socialist commentary.

George Bernard Shaw's theater extended to his personal life. He considered himself a cultural miracle, and a partisan conflict among his readers and playgoers provoked a massive body of literature for and against him and his work. Much recent criticism concludes that he ranks as the greatest English dramatist since William Shakespeare.

Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 16, 1856. At an early age he was tutored in classics by an uncle, and when he was 10 years old, he entered the Wesleyan Connexional School in Dublin. There his academic performance was largely a failure. Shaw later described his own education: "I cannot learn anything that does not interest me. My memory is not indiscriminate, it rejects and selects; and its selections are not academic." Part of his nonacademic training was handled by his mother, a music teacher and a mezzo-soprano; Shaw studied music and art at the same time. He became a Dublin office boy in 1871 at a monthly salary equivalent to $4.50. Success in business threatened him: "I made good," he wrote, "in spite of myself and found, to my dismay, that Business, instead of expelling me as the worthless imposter I was, was fastening upon me with no intention of letting me go….In March, 1876, I broke loose." Resigning a cashier's position, Shaw joined his mother and two sisters in London, where they conducted a music school. Shaw had started writing, at the age of 16, criticism and reviews for Irish newspapers and magazines; in 4 years only one piece was accepted. Shaw lived in London for the 9 years after 1876 supported by his parents and continued to write criticism. He also entertained in London society as a singer.

Shaw as a Novelist

Between 1876 and 1885 Shaw wrote five novels. Immaturity, the first, remained unpublished, and the other four, after a series of rejections from London publishers, appeared in radical periodicals. To-Day published An Unsocial Socialist in 1884; it was designed as part of a massive projected work that would cover the entire social reform movement in England. Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) also appeared in To-Day; juvenile, nonsensical, at times hilarious, it was produced in 1901 as the drama The Admirable Bashville; or, Constancy Unrewarded. The IrrationalKnot, a portrayal of modern marriage that Shaw asserted anticipated Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, appeared in another radical periodical, Our Corner, as did Love among the Artists (1887-1888).

Political Activities and Writings

At the age of 23 Shaw had joined a socialist discussion group, of which Sydney Webb was a member, and he joined the Fabian Society in 1884. Fabian Essays (1887), edited by Shaw, emphasized the importance of economics and class structure; for him, economics was "the basis of society." In 1882 Shaw's conversion to socialism began when he heard Henry George, the American author of Progress and Poverty, address a London meeting. George's message "changed the whole current of my life." His reading of Karl Marx's Das Kapital in the same year "made a man of me." For 27 years Shaw served on the Fabian Society's executive committee. In his role as an active polemicist he later published Common Sense about the War on Nov. 14, 1914, a criticism of the British government and its policies. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism (1928) supplied a complete summary of his political position. It remains a major volume of socialist commentary. For 6 years Shaw held office on a municipal level in a London suburb.

Shaw's other careers continued. Between 1888 and 1894 he wrote for newspapers and periodicals as a highly successful music critic. At the end of this period, he began writing on a regular basis for Frank Harris's Saturday Review; as a critic, he introduced Ibsen and the "new" drama to the British public. Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism appeared in 1890, The Sanity of Art in 1895, and The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898. All of them indicate the formation of his esthetics. He married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, an Irish heiress and fellow socialist, in 1898. She died in 1943.

The Plays

Shaw wrote drama between 1892 and 1947, when he completed Buoyant Billions at the age of 91. Widowers' Houses, his first play, was produced in 1892 at London's Royalty Theater. He identified this and the other early plays as "unpleasant." Widowers' Houses was about slum land-lordship. Preoccupied by the "new" woman, Shaw wrote The Philanderers in 1893. Also written in the same year but not produced until 1902 because of British censorship, Mrs. Warren's Profession revealed, he wrote, "the economic basis of modern commercial prostitution." Shaw's first stage successes, Arms and the Man and Candida, both of them "pleasant" plays, were produced in 1894. You Never Can Tell, first produced in 1896 and not often revived, is Shaw's most underrated comedy. The Vedrenne-Barker productions at the Royal Court Theater in London of Shaw, Shakespeare, and Euripides between 1904 and 1907 established Shaw's permanent reputation; 11 of his plays received 701 performances.

Shaw began as a dramatist writing against the mechanical habits of domestic comedy and against the Victorian romanticizing of Shakespeare and drama in general. He wrote that "melodramatic stage illusion is not an illusion of real life, but an illusion of the embodiment of our romantic imaginings."

Shaw's miraculous period began with Man and Superman (1901-1903). It was miraculous even for him; in a late play, Too True to Be Good (1932), one of the characters speaks for him: "My gift is divine: it is not limited by my petty personal convictions. Lucidity is one of the most precious of gifts: the gift of the teacher: the gift of explanation. I can explain anything to anybody; and I love doing it."

Major Barbara (1905) is a drama of ideas, largely about poverty and capitalism; like most of Shaw's drama, Major Barbara poses questions and finally contains messages or arguments. Androcles and the Lion (1911) discusses religion. John Bull's Other Island (1904), which is the least known of his major plays, concerns political relations between England and Ireland. Heartbreak House analyzes the domestic effects of World War I; written between 1913 and 1916, it was first produced in 1920. Most of the plays after Arms and the Man carry long prefaces that are often not directly related to the drama itself. Shaw systematically explored such topics as marriage, parenthood, education, and poverty in the prefaces.

Shaw's popular success was coupled with a growing critical success. Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah (1921; he called it his "metabiological pentateuch"), Androcles and the Lion, and Saint Joan (1923) are considered his best plays. They were all written between the ages of 57 and 67.

Shaw Explaining Shaw

The plays of Shaw express, as did his life, a complex range of impulses, ambitions, and beliefs. Reflecting on his life and his work, he explained at 70: "If I am to be entirely communicative on this subject, I must add that the mere rawness which soon rubs off was complicated by a deeper strangeness which has made me all my life a sojourner on this planet rather than a native of it. Whether it be that I was born mad or a little too sane, my kingdom was not of this world: I was at home only in the realm of my imagination, and at ease only with the mighty dead. Therefore I had to become an actor, and create for myself a fantastic personality fit and apt for dealing with men, and adaptable to the various parts I had to play as an author, journalist, orator, politician, committee man, man of the world, and so forth. In all this I succeeded later on only too well."

Shaw was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature. At the patriarchal age of 94, he died in his home at Ayot St. Lawrence, England, on Nov. 2, 1950.

Further Reading

The literature on Shaw is extensive. Shaw wrote numerous letters, some of which are in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1874-1897, edited and with an introduction by Dan H. Laurence (1965), the first of a projected multivolume collection of his correspondence. Not particularly revealing of Shaw's private life is the Autobiography, edited by Stanley Weintraub (2 vols., 1969-1970), an assemblage of Shaw's personal writings on a host of topics over a half century.

The standard biography of Shaw is Archibald Henderson, Bernard Shaw: Playboy and Prophet (1932). William Irvine, The Universe of G.B.S. (1949), is one of many attempts at a definitive critical biography. Stanley Weintraub, Journey to Heartbreak: The Crucible Years of Bernard Shaw, 1914-1918 (1971), is a fascinating biographical study of Shaw during World War I. Two good introductions to Shaw and his work are G. K. Chesterton, George Bernard Shaw (1909), and Eric Bentley, Bernard Shaw (1947; 2d ed., 1967). Recently there has been a critical reassessment of Shaw. The most important works are Richard M. Ohmann, Shaw: The Style and the Man (1962), and Martin Meisel, Shaw and the Nineteenth-century Theater (1963). □

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), playwright. The most famous and possibly the most controversial of 20th‐century English dramatists was described by the Times in its review of the first major American production of Arms and the Man as “the eccentric and able London socialist, essayist, music critic, Ibsenite, and wearer of gray flannel clothes.” With occasional shadings of difference, critical opinion of Shaw in America has remained much the same ever since. Especially in early years his subjects offended many playgoers and critics, dealing as they did with such matters as prostitution, religious hypocrisy, slum landlordism, profiteering, and, of course, socialism. In these early years his most noted exponents included Richard Mansfield and Arnold Daly, while in after seasons the Theatre Guild regularly offered even his minor plays. The last several decades have witnessed fewer Shaw works on Broadway but a marked increase Off Broadway and in regional venues. Caesar and Cleopatra, Candida, The Devil's Disciple, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, and Saint Joan each has its own entry. A thumbnail history of some other Shaw works in America follows.

The short comedy Androcles and the Lion, twitting early Christians, was hissed at its 1913 London premiere but received a cordial welcome when Harley Granville‐Barker presented it in New York in 1915 with O. P. Heggie as Androcles. The major American revivals occurred in 1925, when the Theatre Guild presented it with Henry Travers as the hero and such superior players as Romney Brent, Clare Eames, Tom Powers, and Edward G. Robinson in supporting roles, and in 1946 when the American Repertory Theatre offered it with Ernest Truex in the lead. Arms and the Man, Shaw's beguiling spoof of militarism, was his first play presented in America. Mansfield played the antihero Bluntschli in 1894, and William Winter thought his performance “a delicious piece of mystification, crisp in speech and diversified by airy nonchalance and whimsical humor.” Never one to proclaim Shaw, Winter admitted the script “causes thought as well as mirth.” A major revival was in 1925 when the Theatre Guild presented Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in the leads. Howard Lindsay recalled Lunt's Bluntschli as “cold, precise, hard and. . . probably one of the greatest high‐comedy performances any actor, American or British, has given in our time.” Of Shaw's most accessible works, Arms and the Man has often been seen in New York since the 1920s but has not enjoyed any outstanding productions. Many Americans know the play best through its musical version, the Viennese operetta The Chocolate Soldier. The Doctor's Dilemma, a comedy about egocentricity and medical ethics, was first produced in New York by Arnold Daly in 1915. The first major revival was by the Theatre Guild in 1927 with a remarkable cast that included Helen Westley, Dudley Digges, Earle Larimore, Fontanne, and Lunt as Dubedat. Many critics felt the acting was superior to the play. A change in emphasis came in 1941 when Katharine Cornell revived the work, playing Jennifer Dubedat with support from Raymond Massey and Bramwell Fletcher. The Phoenix Theatre mounted the play in 1955 with Roddy MacDowall as the doomed artist. The Theatre Guild's 1920 mounting of Heartbreak House provided that play's belated premiere. This look at a modern Armageddon seems to have spoken eloquently to a world where a major war is always looming and so has been offered a number of fine revivals. Orson Welles, dressed to resemble Shaw, played Shotover in the Mercury Theatre's 1938 mounting, while Maurice Evans assumed the role in a 1959 production and Rex Harrison played it in an abridged but superb 1983 revival at the Circle in the Square.

Grace George presented and starred in the 1915 American premiere of Major Barbara, the play about big business and warmongering, offering a notable cast of famous or soon‐to‐be‐famous theatrical names, including Clarence Derwent, Guthrie McClintic, Ernest Lawford, John Cromwell, Mary Nash, and Conway Tearle. It was welcomed at the time as “a provocative, often richly amusing and continuously stimulating comedy.” Major revivals have included a 1928 Theatre Guild presentation; an exceptionally successful 1956 production, which ran seven months, with Glynis Johns and Charles Laughton in the leads; and a well‐acted Broadway revival in 2001 with Cherry Jones as Barbara. Mrs. Warren's Profession, the play about prostitution that prompted court action in 1905, both during its New Haven tryout and in New York, starred Arnold Daly, who was also the producer, and Mary Shaw. Both were arrested but were acquitted of charges of presenting an immoral play. However, the work proved more sensational than durable, revivals being infrequent and short‐lived. Uta Hagen headed a fine 1985 revival. As the fate of Mrs. Warren's Profession suggests, the initial success or notoriety of a Shaw play was no reliable indicator of its future vogue. Several plays that were huge successes at their first American presentation have since been largely neglected, while other works, often branded as minor, have enjoyed tremendous success later on, thanks on occasion to an unusual production or the appearance of a major star. An example of the former would be Fanny's First Play, which ran eight months in New York when it was premiered there in 1912 but which has never had a major revival outside of the Shaw Festival in Canada. By contrast such plays as The Apple Cart and The Millionairess, dismissed or totally ignored at first, enjoyed newsworthy and relatively successful mountings when produced with Maurice Evans (1956) and Katharine Hepburn (1952) respectively.

George Bernard Shaw

Born: July 26, 1856
Dublin, Ireland
Died: November 2, 1950
Ayot St. Lawrence, England
Irish playwright and critic

British playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw produced more than fifty plays and three volumes of music and drama criticism. Many critics consider him the greatest English dramatist since William Shakespeare (1564–1616).

Early years

George Bernard Shaw was born in Dublin, Ireland, on July 26, 1856, the son of George Carr Shaw and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly. His father was the co-owner of a corn mill and had a drinking problem. Shaw was tutored in classics by an uncle, and when he was ten years old, he entered the Wesleyan Connexional School in Dublin. Shaw hated school but loved reading and writing. He also learned a great deal about music and art from his mother, a music teacher and singer.

Shaw took a job as an office boy in 1871 at a monthly salary equal to $4.50. He resigned in 1876 to join his mother and two sisters in London, England, where they ran a music school. At the age of sixteen Shaw had started writing criticism and reviews for Irish newspapers and magazines; in four years only one piece was accepted. Shaw continued to write criticism while supported by his mother; he also entertained the London society as a singer.

Different kinds of writing

Between 1876 and 1885 Shaw wrote five novels. Immaturity, the first, remained unpublished for fifty years, and the other four appeared in various magazines. An Unsocial Socialist (1884) was designed as part of a massive projected history of the entire social reform movement in England. Cashel Byron's Profession (1882) was produced in 1901 as the drama The Admirable Bashville; or, Constancy Unrewarded. The Irrational Knot was a description of modern marriage that was similar to Henrik Ibsen's (1828–1906) A Doll's House. It appeared in a magazine called Our Corner, as did Love Among the Artists (1887–88).

In 1879 Shaw had joined a socialist (one who believes in a society in which the means of production are owned by the people) discussion group, and he joined the socialist Fabian Society in 1884. Fabian Essays (1887), edited by Shaw, discussed the importance of economics (the study of the production, distribution, and use of goods and services) and class structure. In 1882 two events completed Shaw's conversion to socialism: he heard a speech by Henry George, the American author of Progress and Poverty, and he read Karl Marx's (1818–1883) Das Kapital. In 1914 Shaw published Common Sense about the War, a criticism of the British government. The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism, published in 1928, remains a major volume of socialist thought.

Between 1888 and 1894 Shaw wrote for newspapers and magazines as a music critic. At the end of this period, he began writing regularly for the Saturday Review; as a critic, he helped introduce Ibsen to the British public. Shaw's Quintessence of Ibsenism appeared in 1890, The Sanity of Art in 1895, and The Perfect Wagnerite in 1898. He married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow socialist, in 1898. She died in 1943.

Shaw's plays

Widowers' Houses, Shaw's first play, was produced in 1892. He identified this and his other early plays as "unpleasant." Shaw's first stage successes, Arms and the Man and Candida, were produced in 1894. You Never Can Tell, first produced in 1896 and not often performed, is Shaw's most underrated (not highly valued) comedy. The productions at the Royal Court Theater in London of the works of Shaw, Shakespeare, and Euripides (484–406 b.c.e.) between 1904 and 1907 increased Shaw's popularity; eleven of his plays received 701 performances.

Major Barbara (1905) is a drama of ideas, largely about poverty and capitalism (a system in which prices, production, and distribution of goods are determined by competition in a free market); like most of Shaw's drama, the play poses questions and finally contains messages or arguments. Androcles and the Lion (1911) discusses religion. Heartbreak House deals with the effects of World War I (1914–18; a war fought between the German-led Central Powers and the Allies: England, the United States, Italy, and other nations) on England; written between 1913 and 1916, it was first produced in 1920. Shaw's plays explored such topics as marriage, parenthood, and education. Most of his plays after Arms and the Man begin with long essays that are often not directly related to the drama itself.

Shaw's popular success was coupled with growing critical respect. Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah (1921), Androcles and the Lion, and Saint Joan (1923) are considered his best plays. Shaw was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature. He continued writing drama until 1947, when he completed Buoyant Billions at the age of ninety-one. He died in his home at Ayot St. Lawrence, England, on November 2, 1950.

For More Information

Gibbs, A. M. A Bernard Shaw Chronology. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

McCabe, Joseph. George Bernard Shaw: A Critical Study. New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1974.

Ohmann, Richard M. Shaw: The Style and the Man. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962.

Peters, Sally. Bernard Shaw: The Ascent of the Superman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), Irish dramatist, critic, and social reformer, born in Dublin. His mother, a singer and teacher of singing, early imbued him with a knowledge and love of music which qualified him, after migrating to London in 1876, to become music critic of the Star (under the pseudonym of Corno di Bassetto) from 1888 to 1890 and of the World from 1890 to 1894. Admirable though his music articles were, their quality was undoubtedly surpassed by that of the dramatic criticism he contributed to the Saturday Review—where his successor was Max Beerbohm—between Jan. 1895 and Dec. 1898. His interest in social and political reform had led him in 1884 to join the Fabian Society, on whose behalf he soon became a fluent and effective speaker. Though he had no particular love for the theatre of his own time, he was not slow to recognize its value as a platform. This, and his admiration for the ‘new drama’ of Ibsen, which in translations by Shaw's friend William Archer was becoming known in London, led him to the writing of plays. The production in 1892, under the auspices of Grein's Independent Theatre Club, of Widowers' Houses (begun in 1885) inaugurated his long career as the foremost dramatist of his day. This was a private production for Club members, as were the productions in 1902 and 1905 of Mrs Warren's Profession, about prostitution, and The Philanderer (both written in 1893). The first of Shaw's plays to be presented publicly was Arms and the Man, a satire on militarism, produced at the Avenue (later Playhouse) Theatre in 1894 as part of a repertory season run by Florence Farr, who had played in the first production of Widowers' Houses. The others ran into trouble with the censor and, taken in conjunction with Shaw's lectures and writings on behalf of the Fabians, caused him to be regarded in many quarters as a subversive influence. Deliberately disregarding the current conventions of the well-made play, he set out to appeal to the intellect and not the emotions of his audiences, and introduced on stage subjects such as slum landlordism, prostitution, war, religion, family quarrels, health, economics, and the position of women. Thought, not action, was the mainspring of the Shavian play; but, as audiences were eventually to realize, it was thought seasoned by wit and enlivened by eloquence. The popularity of Shaw's plays dates from the seasons of 1904–7 at the Royal Court Theatre, run by Granville-Barker and J. E. Vedrenne, when 10 were performed in repertory—Candida, John Bull's Other Island, How He Lied to Her Husband, You Never Can Tell (first publicly produced at the Strand in 1900), Man and Superman (without Act 3, produced separately in 1907 as Don Juan in Hell), Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma, about medical ethics, Captain Brassbound's Conversion, with Ellen Terry, The Philanderer, and the one-act The Man of Destiny. When Vedrenne and Barker moved to the Savoy Theatre at the end of 1907, they produced there The Devil's Disciple, first seen in New York with Richard Mansfield as early as 1897, and Caesar and Cleopatra, first performed in 1906 in German in Berlin under Max Reinhardt and, in English, in New York the same year.

The chronology of Shaw's plays is complicated by the fact that many of them had copyright, private, amateur, or foreign professional productions before being seen in London. His most important works after Misalliance (1910) are Fanny's First Play (1911; NY, 1912); Androcles and the Lion (1913; NY, 1915); Pygmalion, first seen in Vienna in 1913, in which Mrs Patrick Campbell played Eliza Doolittle in 1914 in both London and New York; and Heartbreak House (NY, 1920; London, 1921), a ‘fantasia’ in the Russian (i.e., Chekhovian) manner first produced by the Theatre Guild, as was the ‘metabiological Pentateuch’ Back to Methuselah (1922; London, 1924). Saint Joan (NY, 1923), Shaw's finest play in the opinion of most critics, was seen in London in 1924 with Sybil Thorndike as an unforgettable Joan, and The Apple Cart (1929) was brought to London from the Malvern Festival, as were Too True to be Good (1932), Geneva (1938), and Shaw's last memorable full-length play In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939). Subtitled by Shaw ‘a true history that never happened’, this brings together Charles II, Isaac Newton, and other historical characters.

It would be impossible to list all the revivals and translations of Shaw's major plays. Pygmalion, Major Barbara, and Saint Joan are the most popular, followed by Candida, Man and Superman, Arms and the Man, The Doctor's Dilemma, and You Never Can Tell. Many of the first productions, particularly of the earlier plays, were directed by Shaw himself, who earned the respect and admiration of his actors and might have been a successful actor himself. He also supervised the printing of his plays with meticulous attention to layout and typography, his detailed stage directions forming a running commentary which helps the reader to visualize the scene; his prefaces to the published plays enlarge on their arguments.

George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950, Irish playwright and critic. He revolutionized the Victorian stage, then dominated by artificial melodramas, by presenting vigorous dramas of ideas. The lengthy prefaces to Shaw's plays reveal his mastery of English prose. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Early Life and Career

Born in Dublin, Shaw was the son of an unsuccessful merchant; his mother was a singer who eventually left her husband to teach singing in London. Shaw left school at 14 to work in an estate agent's office. In 1876 he went to London and for nine years was largely supported by his parents. He wrote five novels, several of them published in small socialist magazines. Shaw was himself an ardent socialist, a member of the Fabian Society , and a popular public speaker on behalf of socialism.

Work as a journalist led to his becoming a music critic for the Star in 1888 and for the World in 1890; his enthusiasm for Wagner proved infectious to his readers. As drama critic for the Saturday Review after 1895, he won readers to Ibsen ; he had already written The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891). In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a wealthy, wellborn Irishwoman. By this time his plays were beginning to be produced.

Plays

Although Shaw's plays focus on ideas and issues, they are vital and absorbing, enlivened by memorable characterizations, a brilliant command of language, and dazzling wit. His early plays were published as Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant (2 vol., 1898). The "unpleasant" plays were Widower's Houses (1892), on slum landlordism; The Philanderer (written 1893, produced 1905); and Mrs. Warren's Profession (written 1893, produced 1902), a jibe at the Victorian attitude toward prostitution. The "pleasant" plays were Arms and the Man (1894), satirizing romantic attitudes toward love and war; Candida (1893); and You Never Can Tell (written 1895).

In 1897 The Devil's Disciple, a play on the American Revolution, was produced with great success in New York City. It was published in the volume Three Plays for Puritans (1901) along with Caesar and Cleopatra (1899), notable for its realistic, humorous portraits of historical figures, and Captain Brassbound's Conversion (1900).

During the early 20th cent. Shaw wrote his greatest and most popular plays: Man and Superman (1903), in which an idealistic, cerebral man succumbs to marriage (the play contains an explicit articulation of a major Shavian theme—that man is the spiritual creator, whereas woman is the biological "life force" that must always triumph over him); Major Barbara (1905), which postulates that poverty is the cause of all evil; Androcles and the Lion (1912; a short play), a charming satire of Christianity; and Pygmalion (1913), which satirizes the English class system through the story of a cockney girl's transformation into a lady at the hands of a speech professor. The latter has proved to be Shaw's most successful work—as a play, as a motion picture, and as the basis for the musical and film My Fair Lady (1956; 1964).

Of Shaw's later plays, Saint Joan (1923) is the most memorable; it argues that Joan of Arc, a harbinger of Protestantism and nationalism, had to be killed because the world was not yet ready for her. In 1920 Shaw, much criticized for his antiwar stance, wrote Heartbreak House, a play that exposed the spiritual bankruptcy of the generation responsible for World War I.

Among Shaw's other plays are John Bull's Other Island (1904), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906), Fanny's First Play (1911), Back to Methuselah (1922), The Apple Cart (1928), Too True to Be Good (1932), The Millionairess (1936), In Good King Charles's Golden Days (1939), and Buoyant Billions (1949). Perhaps his most popular nonfiction work is The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928).

Bibliography

See his collected plays with their prefaces, ed. by D. H. Laurence (7 vol., 1970-75); his letters, particularly those to Ellen Terry (1931), Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1952), Granville-Barker (1957), and Molly Tompkins (1960); his collected letters, ed. by D. H. Laurence (4 vol., 1965-88); his complete musical criticism, ed. by D. H. Laurence (3 vol., 1981); and his autobiography, reconstructed by S. Weintraub (2 vol., 1969-70).

Shaw, (George) Bernard (1856–1950), born in Dublin, came to London in 1876. After an unsuccessful career as a novelist, he wrote music, art, and book criticism for several periodicals including the Pall Mall Gazette (1885–8) and the Star (1888–90, as ‘Corno di Bassetto’). His music criticism has been collected as Shaw's Music (3 vols, 1981; ed. Dan H. Laurence) and his theatre criticism in four volumes as The Drama Observed (1993, ed. B. Dukore). As drama critic for the Saturday Review (1895–8) he produced a series of remarkable and controversial weekly articles (published as Our Theatres in the Nineties, 3 vols, 1932), voicing his impatience with the artificiality of the London theatre and pleading for the performance of plays dealing with contemporary social and moral problems. During these years he joined several literary and political societies, notably the Fabian Society; he edited and contributed to Fabian Essays in socialism (1889) and wrote many tracts setting down his socialist and collectivist principles. He was a freethinker, a supporter of women's rights, and an advocate of equality of income, the abolition of private property, and a radical change in the voting system. He also campaigned for the simplification of spelling and punctuation and the reform of the English alphabet. He was well known as a journalist and public speaker when his first play, Widowers' Houses (pub. 1893), was produced in 1892. There followed Arms and the Man (1894, pub. 1898: later turned into a musical called The Chocolate Soldier), The Devil's Disciple (perf. NY 1897, pub. 1901), You Never Can Tell (1899, pub. 1898), Caesar and Cleopatra (pub. 1901, perf. Berlin 1906), Mrs Warren's Profession (pub. 1898, perf. 1902), and John Bull's Other Island (1904, pub. NY 1907), a play which, thanks to its characteristic ‘Shavian’ wit, brought his first popular success in London.

Shaw wrote over 50 plays, including Man and Superman (pub. 1903, perf. 1905), Major Barbara (1905, pub. 1907), The Doctor's Dilemma (1906, pub. Berlin 1908), Getting Married (1908, pub. Berlin 1910), Androcles and the Lion (pub. Berlin 1913, perf. Hamburg 1913), Pygmalion (perf. Vienna 1913, pub. Berlin 1913, later turned into a popular musical My Fair Lady), Heartbreak House (pub. 1919, perf. 1920, both NY), Back to Methuselah (perf. and pub. NY 1921), Saint Joan (perf. NY 1923, pub. 1924), The Apple Cart (perf. Warsaw 1929, pub. Berlin 1929), and Too True to be Good (perf. Boston 1932, pub. Berlin 1932).

These plays were published with lengthy prefaces in which Shaw clearly expresses his views as a non-romantic and a champion of the thinking man. The dramatic conflict in his plays is the conflict of thought and belief, not that of neurosis or physical passion. Discussion is the basis of the plays, and his great wit and intelligence won audiences over to the idea that mental and moral passion could produce absorbing dramatic material. He believed that war, disease, and the present brevity of our lifespan frustrate the ‘Life Force’ (see under Man and Superman) and that functional adaptation, a current of creative evolution activated by the power of human will, was essential to any real progress, and indeed to the survival of the species. Shaw's unorthodox views, his humour, and his love of paradox have become an institution. Amongst his other works should be mentioned The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891, revised and expanded 1913), which reveals his debt to Ibsen as a playwright and presents an argument for Fabian Socialism; The Perfect Wagnerite (1898); Common Sense About the War (1914); The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928); and Everybody's Political What's What (1944). Shaw's correspondence with the actresses Ellen Terry and Mrs Patrick Campbell and other letters have been published in volumes.

In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend and they lived together until her death in 1943. He was a strict vegetarian and never drank spirits, coffee, or tea. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1925.

SHAW, George Bernard [1856–1950]. Irish dramatist and critic. Born in DUBLIN. Educated at Wesley Connexional School. He moved to London in 1876, where he wrote five novels that had little success, was a music, art, and drama critic, and an early member of the Fabian Society. He found the contemporary English theatre trivial and remote from serious issues, and admired the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen's treatment of social problems; his first play, Widowers' Houses (1893), was an indictment of the profits made by slum landlords. Shaw began a long career as a playwright, controversial about specific issues and challenging the basic assumptions of his contemporaries, which sometimes brought conflict with theatrical censorship. Although polemical, his plays established him as the leading dramatist of his time by their humour, lively dialogue, and strong characterization. Shaw believed that, in order to survive, the human race must become more rational and better organized. He developed a philosophy of Creative Evolution, requiring cooperation with the Life Force, and against the mechanistic theory of Darwin he urged the power of human choice. His ideas on this subject appear in Man and Superman (1903), which emphasizes his belief in the creative strength of women, and Back to Methuselah (1921). Other plays are Caesar and Cleopatra (1898, the film 1945), The Devil's Disciple (1905), Major Barbara (1905, the film 1941), Pygmalion (1913, the film 1938), Heartbreak House (1919), Saint Joan (1923, the film 1956), and The Apple Cart (1929).

Shaw and language

In Pygmalion, the phonetician Henry Higgins teaches a COCKNEY girl to speak with an upper-class accent and adopt some social graces, then introduces her to smart society. Despite dramatic exaggeration, the play makes the point that in the stratified society of England powerful judgements of worth and suitability attached to accent and usage. Shaw's knowledge of phonetics and views on literacy led him to demand a rational system of spelling which would follow the sounds of English and reduce time wasted by traditional orthography. Having campaigned for SPELLING REFORM, he left a bequest for the establishment of a suitable new alphabet reflecting ‘pronunciation to resemble that recorded of His Majesty our late King George V and sometimes described as Northern English’. A system was devised into which the play Androcles and the Lion (1912) was transcribed (published in 1962), but the project has had no further success.

Innovations

In his own work, Shaw adopted three innovations: (1) Some simplified spellings of the North American type, such as cigaret, program, vigor. (2) Omission of the APOSTROPHE in contractions, as in didnt. (3) Spacing between letters for emphasis (m u s t). He complained that dialect speech could not be shown in writing without a phonetic system, but none the less used non-standard spelling for the purpose, as in: ‘Aw knaow. Me an maw few shillins is not good enaff for you. Youre an earl's grandorter, you are. Nathink less than a anderd pahnd for you’ (from Major Barbara) [maw my, grandorter grand-daughter, nathink nothing, anderd pahnd hundred pounds]. Shaw was impatient of insistence on formal grammar and believed that a form of Pidgin English could become a world medium of communication.

Shaw, George Bernard (b Dublin, 1856; d Ayot St Lawrence, 1950). Irish playwright, essayist, and music critic. Wrote mus. criticism—arguably the most brilliant in the language—for London periodicals, the Star and the World, from 1888 to 1894 having earlier (from c.1876) ‘ghosted’ for music critic of The Hornet. Adopted pseudonym ‘Corno di Bassetto’, until 1890. Early champion of Wagner's mus. and one of first to put political interpretation on The Ring (in The Perfect Wagnerite, 1898). Criticisms reprinted in London Music 1888–9, Music in London 1890–94 (3 vols.), How to become a Musical Critic (ed. Laurence 1960), and Shaw's Music (ed. Laurence, 1981). Friend of Elgar, whose Severn Suite is ded. to Shaw. His play Arms and the Man was basis of operetta The Chocolate Soldier (Der tapfere Soldat, 1908) by O. Straus, and his Pygmalion became Loewe's musical My Fair Lady (1956). Composers of music for films based on Shaw plays incl. Honegger (Pygmalion, 1938), Walton (Major Barbara, 1941), Auric (Caesar and Cleopatra, 1945), and Richard Rodney Bennett (The Devil's Disciple, 1959).

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950). Dramatist. Ambitious to write, Shaw left Dublin and his childhood's genteel poverty to join his mother and sisters in London (1876), where he spent hours voraciously in the British Museum's reading room and embraced socialism. His novels rejected, he eventually found steady work as literary, music (‘Corno di Bassetto’), and theatre critic. Now orator, polemicist, and force behind the Fabian Society, he began to write his own plays, influenced by Ibsen and trying to move the English stage away from affectations to a new gravitas: Widowers' Houses (1892), considering slum landlordism, and Mrs Warren's Profession, on organized prostitution, were radical, unromantic, and offensive to many. Prolific, passionate, and witty, he is now regarded as the most significant playwright of the 20th-cent. English-speaking world (Nobel prize for literature, 1925); St Joan (1924) is considered a masterpiece, but Pygmalion (1916) remains the most popular. Shaw's anti-war speeches (1914) drew much criticism, but he continued political writing into old age, outliving his time.

A. S. Hargreaves

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950), playwright and socialist. His upbringing in a shabby‐genteel family produced lasting dislike of Dublin. Shaw moved to London in 1876 as a journalist. He became a socialist, prominent in the Fabian Society, which advocated gradual social reform through administrative professionalism. From the 1890s he achieved fame as a playwright, becoming one of the most widely read authors of the first half of the 20th century; his work was popular for its irreverent humour, though often accused of loving ideas but fearing emotion. Though he was personally generous, belief in the rational reordering of society and disgust at social chaos led Shaw to endorse eugenics and praise interwar European dictators as harsh but necessary experimenters. Shaw stressed his Irishness as a clearsighted outsider in British society, and maintained a semi‐detached relationship with the Irish literary revival; he bequeathed his fortune to the British Museum and the National Gallery of Ireland.

Patrick Maume

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950) Irish dramatist, critic, and member of the Fabian Society. Shaw transformed Victorian theatre, rejecting melodrama in favour of socially conscious drama. Although many of his plays were comedies, they expressed his often radical political and philosophical ideas. His first play was Widower's Houses (1892). Mrs Warren's Profession (1893) was considered immoral and banned from performance. Arms and the Man (1894) was Shaw's first publicly performed play. Other early plays include Candida (1897). Plays such as Man and Superman (1905) and Major Barbara (1905) were first performed at the Royal Court, London. Pygmalion (1913) was turned later into the musical My Fair Lady (1956). Other major plays include Heartbreak House (1920), Back to Methuselah (1922), and Saint Joan (1923). The prefaces to his plays were published separately. In 1925, Shaw received the Nobel Prize in literature.

Shaw, George Bernard (1856–1950). Dramatist. Ambitious to write, Shaw left Dublin and his childhood's genteel poverty to join his mother and sisters in London (1876). His novels rejected, he eventually found steady work as literary, music (‘Corno di Bassetto’), and theatre critic. Force behind the Fabian Society, he began to write his own plays, influenced by Ibsen and trying to move the English stage away from affectations to a new gravitas: Widowers' Houses (1892), considering slum landlordism, and Mrs Warren's Profession, on organized prostitution, were radical, unromantic, and offensive to many. St Joan (1924) is considered a masterpiece, but Pygmalion (1916) remains the most popular.

Bernard Shaw 1940–

Television news anchor and reporter

At a Glance…

Met Journalistic Idol

Hungry for International Experience

“Chicken Noodle Network”

From “The Center of Hell”

A Star Is Born

Sources

Television news anchor Bernard Shaw’s dispassionate manner, steady gaze, rich baritone voice, and crisply precise delivery virtually blend into the fabric of the news. In his twenty years as Cable News Network’s (CNN) principal Washington anchor, he has taken a serious approach to journalism and has been widely regarded for his belief that the messenger should not get in the way of the message. Before joining CNN, Shaw worked for two of the three national television networks, CBS and ABC. In a career spanning three decades, he has covered some of modern history’s most dramatic events: Watergate, the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide, the Nicaraguan Revolution, China’s Tiananmen Square student massacre, and American involvement in the Persian Gulf War. Widely regarded as the nation’s most powerful black television journalist, Shaw, retired from CNN in 2001 in order to pursue his interest in writing.

Shaw grew up during the years of World War II, the emergence of television, and the days that begat the baby boom. His father was a house painter, his mother cleaned other people’s homes, and they lived on the South Side of Chicago. But far from being isolated in the “wrong” part of town and at the wrong end of the economic spectrum, the family brought the world into their home. “In those days,” Shaw told Parade Magazine, “Chicago had four papers and we got all four every day.” Even in his teens, Shaw had an obsessive interest in the news. “My ritual on Sunday morning was to walk to a place called the Green Door bookstore near the University of Chicago, which was the closest place I could find the Sunday New York Times,” Shaw told New York magazine. Fourteen years old, paper cradled in his arms, the boy would plant himself in a coffee shop and read the paper all the way through.

But Shaw was not merely a spectator. He made announcements on:he school public address system, participated in radio amateur hours, and, while some teenagers of the 1950s may have been totally absorbed in the birth of rock ’n roll, Shaw found time to dial up newspaper and broctdcast reporters and pepper them with questions about story preparation and deadline pressures. Even in his youth, Shaw’s tastes in television programming ran toward the news and information genre: he used to watch the television news program Meet the Press religiously, and his hero was legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow. At 16, he personally witnessed his second Democratic convention—he had

At a Glance…

Born May 22, 1940, in Chicago, IL; son of Edgar (a railroad man and house painter) and Camilia (a housekeeper) Shaw; married Linda Allston, 1973; children: Amar Edgar, Anil Louise. Education: University of Illinois, 1963-66. Military Service: U.S. Marine Corps, 1959-63.

Career: Reporter, correspondent, and news anchor. WYNR/WNUS all-news radio, Chicago, IL, reporter and anchor, 1964-66; Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W, Chicago, reporter, 1966-68, White House correspondent, 1968-71; Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS-TV), reporter for Washington bureau, 1971-74, correspondent, 1974-77; American Broadcasting Companies (ABC-TV), Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, 1977-79, senior Capitol Hill correspondent; Cable News Network (CNN), Washington D.C., news anchor, 1980-2001.

Member: Society of Professional Journalists (fellow); National Press Club; Sigma Delta Chi.

Awards: international Platform Association, Lowell Thomas Electronic Journalist Award, 1988; National Academy of Cable Programming, Award for Cable Excellence, 1988; Emmy Award, 1989; 32nd annual International Film and TV Festival of New York, gold medal, 1989; National Association of Black Journalists, annual award, 1989; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, 1990; ACE Award, 1990; Bernard Shaw Endowment Fund created by University of Illinois, 1991; Eduard Rhein Foundation, Cultural-H/Journalistic Award, 1991.

Addresses: Office— CNN 820 1st St. NE, Washington D.C. 20002-4243 (202)898-7900.

managed to engineer his way into both the 1952 and 1956 conventions. Shaw told Time: “When I looked up at the anchor booths, I knew I was looking at the altar.”

Met Journalistic Idol

On the road to the “altar,” Shaw wangled another opportunity to speak to a journalist about his craft. It was 1961, the beginning of an era of political tensions between the U.S. and Soviet Union. Shaw was a 21-year-old corporal in the Marines stationed in Hawaii at the time, and Walter Cronkite, his other hero, was passing through. With the tenacity of youth—or perhaps that of a budding reporter—the corporal rang Cronkite’s room a total of 34 times. “He was the most persistent guy I’ve ever met in my life,” Cronkite said in the Washington Post, “I was going to give him five begrudging minutes and ended up talking to him for a half hour. He was just determined to be a journalist.” The two have been friends ever since.

In 1963, with four years of the marines behind him, and a new sense of maturity, Shaw entered the University of Illinois, choosing history as his major. His career in journalism officially began just a year later when he joined Chicago’s WNUS, one of the nation’s first all-news radio stations. He worked there as a reporter and anchor until 1966 when Westinghouse Broadcasting Company’s Group W offered him a job. He quit school, relocated to Washington, D.C, and, at 28, became a White House correspondent. In the five years with Westinghouse Shaw’s assignments included local and national urban affairs, and the struggles of Hispanics and Native Americans.

In 1971, Walter Cronkite helped Shaw land a job with CBS. Shaw started as a reporter for the CBS News Washington bureau and in three years became a correspondent. It was during this period that his career got a boost: he conducted an exclusive interview with then-attorney general John Mitchell. It was the height of the Watergate crisis and Mitchell, who was to be convicted for his role in the affair, was a major figure in the scandal. White House correspondent Shaw had pulled off a journalistic coup.

Hungry for International Experience

After nearly ten years of reporting from Capitol Hill, Shaw was restless. He was hungry for international experience. When ABC offered him the job of Miami bureau chief and Latin American correspondent, an impressive but less visible position, he grabbed it. “I pushed myself out the door,” Shaw told the New York Times.The three years he spent with ABC proved especially eventful.

Back at the bureau Shaw told a colleague that he felt very lucky to have gotten the Jonestown story, adding, as quoted in the Washington Post, “You always have luck when you hustle.” And, as if to confirm this philosophy, ABC chose Shaw to file special reports during the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis at the American embassy in Teheran. That led to Shaw’s return to Washington as ABC’s senior Capitol Hill correspondent.

1979 was a tumultuous year for personnel at ABC News. As a result, Shaw’s colleague, Washington bureau chief George Watson, left to help start CNN, a 24-hour, all-news cable network. Watson urged Shaw to follow him as the new network’s principal anchor. “I had been negotiating a new contract with ABC, but I was dissatisfied with the terms, so I started talking to [maverick broadcasting entrepreneur and CNN founder] Ted Turner,” Shaw told New York magazine. “The time period in which I was trying to decide, it seemed like agony to me. I’d only been married three years and our children were very small, and I couldn’t selfishly take that gamble by myself.” His worries were compounded by an economy in recession with double digit inflation. “It’s no exaggeration,” Shaw added, “I walked around the dining room for two weeks, talking to myself. My wife, Linda, would wake up around one in the morning and come downstairs. So, finally we just sat down at the dining room table and she said, ‘Okay, you should take the job, because if you don’t and CNN takes off, I won’t be able to live with you.’” Network bosses told Shaw it would ruin his career, but he disagreed. “I saw it as perhaps the last frontier on television,” he told the New York Times. “The first all-news TV network seemed like revolutionary stuff to me.”

“Chicken Noodle Network”

For three decades the rule of the Big Three had never been seriously challenged and, while they smugly claimed that no one else could pull together the resources to compete, Turner was telling Business Week, “The Turner broadcasting group is going to be the greatest business success story of all time.”

The so-called “Chicken Noodle Network” began broadcasting from its Atlanta headquarters on June 1, 1980. Using new satellite technology for live transmission, CNN’s staff of three hundred fresh faces drew on ceaseless energy to get the news out as it was happening, at any hour of the day or night. The cable network’s viewership rose and its presence began to be felt. But it wasn’t until 1987 that it achieved a contender’s rank. That status seemed to become official when Shaw’s became the fourth chair—joining those of CBS, NBC, and ABC—in a nationally televised interview with then U.S. president Ronald Reagan, held in the Oval Office on the eve of the summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. That event served to introduce CNN and Shaw to millions of non-cable viewers. Another nationally televised event only a few months later ingrained Shaw’s face and style into viewers’ minds. But not all liked what they saw.

In April of 1988 Shaw moderated the second presidential debate from Los Angeles. In his role, he seemed rough with the debate audience, warning them that he would tell them to keep quiet “only once.” And, in general, he was his usual serious self. But it was his opening questions to the two candidates that caused a stir. George Bush was asked if he would be worried about the country under President Dan Quayle’s leadership in the event Bush died before inauguration. Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was asked if he would still be against the death penalty if someone “raped and murdered” his wife Kitty Dukakis. “I’ve heard the questions called ghoulish and tasteless,” Shaw told the Washington Post, “I spent more than a day and a half working on those two questions. They were not asked with trivia in mind.” It’s difficult to accuse Shaw of being trivial. “I hope I didn’t seem severe,” he added, “1 took the job seriously.”

The next couple of years drew Shaw into international news. He covered the 1988 Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow Summit; Presicent Bush’s first visit to Eastern Europe, and his participation in the 1989 Economic Summit in Paris; Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s funeral; and the 40th-anniversary North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Brussels. In May of 1989, Shaw received his biggest story yet: he provided 30 hours of continuous live coverage, worldwide, on the historic student demonstrations in Beijing, China. He was one of only two American anchors in Tiananmen Square when the Chinese government’s tanks rolled in and crushed the pro-democracy movement.

From “The Center of Hell”

Although Shaw initially expressed doubts about the probability of war between the United States and Iraq, four months later he admitted in Gentlemen’s Quarterly that this had been a “prediction grounded in hope.” In January of 1991, he was in Baghdad to interview Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein when history took a turn. On the 16th, just one day after the aborted interview, Shaw found himself stranded—along with CNN colleagues, Peter Arnett and John Holliman—in the enemy capital as the allied bombing attack launched the Gulf War. Shaw was one of the first reporters to announce to the world that the United States and its allies had gone to war, and CNN went on to provide continuous coverage for the conflict’s duration. Even after even; major newspaper had pulled out, after the Big Three’s phone lines were cut, and after CNN lost its picture transmission, the network was able to make live reports rrorn Baghdad via its secure phone line.