Gunpowder Plot in popular culture
The Gunpowder Plot was a failed assassination attempt against King James VI of Scotland and I of England by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby.
The conspirators' aim was to blow up the House of Lords at the State Opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605, while the king and many other important members of the aristocracy and nobility were inside.
The conspirator who became most closely associated with the plot in the popular imagination was Guy Fawkes, who had been assigned the task of lighting the fuse to the explosives.
The young John Milton, in 1626 at the age of 17, wrote what one commentator has called a "critically vexing poem", In Quintum Novembris.
[1] In the published editions of 1645 and 1673, the poem is preceded by five epigrams on the subject of the Gunpowder Plot, apparently written by Milton in preparation for the larger work.
[2] Milton's imagination continued to be "haunted" by the Gunpowder Plot throughout his life, and critics have argued that it strongly influenced his later and more well-known poem, Paradise Lost.
[5] With the phrase "A penny for the Old Guy", Anglo-American poet T. S. Eliot acknowledges Fawkes (and the straw-man effigy burned every year on 5 November) in an epigraph to his 1925 poem "The Hollow Men".
The main character in the comic book series V for Vendetta, which started in 1982, and its 2006 film adaptation, wore a Guy Fawkes mask.
The Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory Williams also become involved in the Plot in the Doctor Who: The Adventure Games computer game, where the Plot was manipulated by rival aliens the Sontarans and the Rutans to recover a Rutan spaceship that had crash-landed underneath the location where Parliament would be built in the thirteenth century, as the ship contained weapons that could wipe out the Sontarans.
Before the TARDIS crew depart, the Doctor pays one last visit to Fawkes, and tells him that the world will remember what he did this day without revealing that he is destined to fail.
"[10] Two recent novels apply to the Gunpowder Plot the conventions of the modern Spy thriller, adapted to the 17th Century conditions.
Both broadly stick to known historical facts, only slightly altering them to accommodate fictional characters, and creatively fill in many details which remain unknown in the official records of the Gunpowder Plot.
The opening scene shows an argument between Catesby and Fawkes over the fate of Lord Monteagle, the man who raised the alarm after receiving an anonymous letter warning him not to attend Parliament on 5 November 1605.
[15] The play Guido Fawkes: or, the Prophetess of Ordsall Cave was based on early episodes of the serialised version of Ainsworth's 1841 novel.
Performed at the Queen's Theatre, Manchester, in June 1840, it portrayed Fawkes as a "politically motivated sympathiser with the common people's cause".
[17] In August 2005, a play called 5/11 which (slightly inaccurately) explains the social and political climate up to, and including, the attempt to blow up Parliament was launched at the Chichester Festival Theatre.
Its cast included Hugh Ross as Cecil, Stephen Noonan as Catesby and Alistair McGowan as King James.
It considers a scenario in which the British government commissions William Shakespeare to write a definitive history of the plot in the form of a play.
[21] As William Hunt points out, "major and minor harmonies are hurled into dissonant collision in cadences that border occasionally on musical hysteria, to express both the horror and the relief of carnage narrowly avoided.
"Blow It Up, Start Again" is an orchestral piece composed by Jonathan Newman, premiered by the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras in 2012.
[23] On 5 November 1945, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce starred as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in an episode of The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes entitled "The Gunpowder Plot", in which their client James Stuart (who claims to be a descendant of King James I) is terrified that his cousin Guy Fawkenby is planning to kill him on Guy Fawkes Day by recreating the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
[24] On 6 November 2005, to mark the 400th anniversary of the plot, BBC Radio 3 broadcast The Gunpowder Plot written by Jonathan Davidson and directed by David Hunter, with David Calder as Cecil, Sean Arnold as Lord Popham, Cal Macaninch as King James I, John Henshaw as Father Henry Garnet, Hugh Dickson as Father Oldcorn and Helen Longworth as Anne Vaux.
Sherlock and Dr. Watson must stop a planned terrorist attack against the House of Lords on 5 November, where a late-night hearing on an anti-terrorist bill is being held.
In October/November 2017, the BBC broadcast the 3-part drama Gunpowder, starring Kit Harington as Robert Catesby and Tom Cullen as Fawkes.
Guy Fawkes Night plays a huge part in the episode, as it provokes chaos while the villains of the series, VILE, are running a heist.
In more common use the "bonfire cry" is occasionally altered with the last three lines (after "burning match") supplanted by the following; A traitor to the Crown by his action, No Parli'ment mercy from any faction, His just end should'st be grim, What should we do?
It's little Mary Ann with a candle in her hand And she's going down the cellar for some coal The following is a South Lancashire song sung when knocking on doors asking for money to buy fireworks, or combustibles for a bonfire (known as "Cob-coaling").
The next house we come to is an old tinker's shop, And up in one rook there's an old pepper-box- An old pepper-box from morning till night- If you'll give us owt, we'll steal nowt, but bid you good-night.
The illustrator of the comic books on which the film was based, David Lloyd, has stated that the character V decided "to adopt the persona and mission of Guy Fawkes – our great historical revolutionary".
