ABSTRACT
Shakespeare left us no play set in an intelligence agency. Surely he had his reasons for missing such an opportunity, but had he seized it, he might well have written another tragedy. Certainly his characterizations of intelligence (good, strange, and drunk) would sound fresh to modern practitioners, familiar with concerns over the reliability of sources and complaints about warning dogs that failed to bark. Indeed, that familiarity points to a remarkable stability in this corner of English usage since Shakespeare’s time. The word ‘intelligence’ seems to mean roughly what it meant in 1600; we still use it to denote (among other things) a counselor to sovereign power, a type of privileged information, and the activity of acquiring, producing, and possibly acting on that information.
