Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1504875
44 C I N E M O N T A G E B O O K R E V I E W Shakespeare's plays. "Richard III" (1592) is the first to use the word "intelligence" to mean secret information, and at some point, every character in "Hamlet" (1607) is spying on someone else. In the last painting made of Elizabeth, the "Rainbow Portrait," she is wearing a cloak with a lining covered in images of eyes and ears, "symbolizing the members of her supposedly all-seeing and all-hearing intelligence service." The Queen's Men, a traveling theatrical troupe, were among this network; the advantages of using men who could move about the country without suspicion and who had mastered disguise was obvious. The level of detail and documentation that the authors bring to this first 32-page chapter continues throughout the book, creating a fascinating cornucopia of information. From its decidedly British upper-class view, the book's chronology continues through 2021. The earliest years of the 20th century saw a wave of panic in England known as the German spy scare. The fear was caused by the sudden and enormous popularity of lurid spy novels and news- paper serials such as "Spies of the Kaiser: Plotting the Downfall of Britain" (1909). Such fictions caused an alarm so fierce that the War Office issued a special committee report stating, "The evidence which was produced left no doubt in the minds of the subcommittee that an extensive system of German espionage exists…" There was no significant network of German spies, nor were there any German plans to invade England. The scare did, however, lead to the establishment of what became the Security Service (MI5) for internal operations and the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), which collected foreign intelligence. Espionage activity naturally flourishes during war and political upheaval, and the Boer War (1899-1902) saw the making of the first British spy film, "Shooting the Spy," shot on a golf course and advertised with the claim that it was filmed "under the supervision of a military officer from the Front." This one-minute entertainment was described in filmmaker Robert Paul's catalogue as, "Scene outside a guardroom, with sentry on duty. An escort comes up, with the captured Boer spy, who is even- tually shot." This kind of film parallels Thomas Edison's and the American Mu- toscope and Biograph Company's staged efforts to "document" the Spanish Ameri- can War (1898-1901). "Stars and Spies" offers several exam- ples of women who spied or whose names I SPY: Pierce Brosnan as James Bond in "GoldenEye." P H OT O : P H OT O F E S T