Gentle lords, let's part; / You see we have burnt our cheeks: strong Enobarb / Is weaker than the wine; and mine own tongue / Splits what it speaks: the wild disguise hath almost / Antick'd us all.

Even without hovering drones, a lurking assassin, a thumping score and a denouement, the real-life story of Edward Snowden, a rogue spy on the run, could be straight out of the cinema. But, as with Hollywood, the subplots and exotic locations may distract from the real message: America’s discomfort and its foes’ glee.

This ever-ready willingness not only to be raped but to like it too, is of course the wet-dream ideal of womanhood — that is to say, of all other women but one's own — remarked upon bitterly in Ruth Hersch- berger's Adam's Rib (1948) chap. 3, Is Rape A Myth? It represents a fantasy escape by men from the rigorous female chastity demanded by patriarchy. These jokes of female self-rape, by 'mistake,' may be lumped with the endless novelistic tales of adultery written by men in which the woman is always at fault.

They put all the little plate they had […] in the lumber, which is pawning it, till the ships came.