Espionage definition dictionary
Obviously, my book goes into pre-Ukrainian dabblings by Putin-not just closing down Memorial International, but actually banning certain textbooks in schools and colleges and then demanding that people use government textbooks, so that he’s earned millions from that particular decree. RC: In November, we had President Xi Jinping saying that he’s going to rewrite China’s history to make it more favorable to China. Has this scene gained new force for you this year? You show Putin as a young KGB guy, hand-shredding evidence of Soviet espionage.
WM: Your chapter on Russian revisionism reminds me of Vladimir Putin’s “denazification” line on Ukraine. After its performance in Puerto Rico, there was a huge amount of press there about colonialism and statehood and the rest. But I think the most obvious example would be the musical Hamilton, which had a very plain political argument to it.
Still, sticking with drama, David Hare’s Stuff Happens was deeply a political play, but it wasn’t as if he was choosing a period in the past and then using it as an analog for making a political point about the present. That was a nonfiction work and, in that sense, didn’t have what we would call imaginative or fictional subjects. RC: Relatively recently, in the 1990s, Judy Chang’s Wild Swans was published and banned in China. He did this with historical allegory-with Lear, for instance. WM: You note the fascinating truth that Shakespeare is not just a Tudor playwright he’s just as much a Stuart playwright, and it was under King James that he came to his most biting critique of monarchy. And when you are talking about imaginative literature, including drama, of course he twisted facts and made things up, got facts totally wrong, in the pursuit of the tale he wanted to tell. RC: Over half of Shakespeare’s plays either are histories- The Tragedy of King John is a history play-or were based on real events: King Lear, Macbeth. WM: Shakespeare wasn’t writing history per se, but Richard III led to centuries of mistaken beliefs about that monarch.