ABSTRACT
More than any other of Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth involves intelligence. Other plays of course mention it. King John famously asks, ‘O, where hath our intelligence been drunk? Where hath it slept?’ In Richard II, Bolingbroke, the usurping future Henry IV, uses the term in its military sense when he says ‘So that by this intelligence we learn/e Welshmen are dispersed…’ A courtier in Henry V refers to another kind of information when he says that ‘e king hath note of all that they intend/By interception which they dream not of.’
