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Poets, Players, and Preachers

Poets, Players, and Preachers

Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seventeenth-Century England

by Anne James

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

424 Pages, 165.00 × 229.00 × 25.00 mm, 9 b&w illustrations

Hardcover
9781442649378
Published: July 2016

£64.00

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Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

On the night of November 4^th 1605, the English authorities uncovered an alleged plot by a group of discontented Catholics to blow up the Houses of Parliament with the lords, princes, queen and king in attendance. The failure of the plot is celebrated to this day and is known as Guy Fawkes Day.

In Poets, Players and Preachers, Anne James explores the literary responses to the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in poetry, drama, and sermons. This book is the first full-length study of the literary repercussions of the conspiracy. By analyzing the genres of poems, plays, and sermons produced between 1605 and 1688, the author argues that not only did the continuous reinterpretation of the conspiracy serve religious and political purposes but that such literary reinterpretations produced generic changes.

1.Introduction: Writing the Gunpowder Plot

2."like Sampson’s foxes": Creating a Jacobean Myth of Deliverance

3."And no religion beinds men to be traitors": The Plot on Stage

4."In marble records fit to be inrold": Epic Monuments for a Protestant Nation

5"fit audience find, though few": Militant Protestants and Forgotten Monuments

6."For God and the King": Preaching on the Plot Anniversary

7.Conclusion: Echoes and Reverberations

Works Cited

Anne James is an instructor in the Department of English at the University of Regina.

‘Masterful, nuanced, and at times almost overwhelming treatment of Gunpowder Plot.’
- Leah Knight (Renaissance and Reformation vol 40:04:2017)
"Poets, Players and Preachers is an ambitious book, as rewarding as it is challenging, covering a wide range of genres stretching across a hundred years of history and drawing on a wide range of scholarship and theory."
- Brent Nelson (Seventeenth Century News)
"[This book] is a fine example of the iterative relationship between literary and historical inquiry, as well as a complex account of how the memory of a single (and ultimately failed) historical event can come to serve widely divergent ends."
- Todd Butler (Seventeenth Century News)
"Poets, Players and Preachers offers a captivating study of the literary repercussions of the Gunpowder Plot. James makes it clear that this is very much a historicist approach to literary studies and demonstrates the importance and advantages that a greater interdisciplinary relationship between literary and historical studies can bring to enrich our understanding of intention, transmission, and reception of early modern literature."
- Tatyana Zhukova, University of Nottingham (The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol xlix, no 2, Summer 2018)