Gunpowder plots: how Guy Fawkes ignited an explosive literary legacy

The gunpowder plot’s literary legacy began almost immediately and is remarkably stellar. In 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear, James Shapiro identifies oblique references to the foiled plot in Macbeth and King Lear, which mentions the bad omen of a double eclipse – there had been one in autumn 1605 - foreshadowing evils including “in palaces treason”. He also sees traces in Volpone by Ben Jonson, and points to poems by the teenage John Milton, notably the virulently anti-Catholic “On the Fifth of November” (1626), in which Satan and the Pope conspire to destroy Britain’s leaders. And that poem, he suggests, “anticipates so much of what, decades later, Milton explores in Paradise Lost ... where Satan invents gunpowder as a weapon to challenge God’s powers”.

For 300 years major writers then largely ignored 1605. It eventually returned to literature, not through another portrayal of Jacobean terrorism or recusants’ internal exile, but via the annual custom of scarecrow-like versions of the captured Guy Fawkes. For TS Eliot, these effigies embodied zombie-like humanity in the post-1918 waste land. After the epigraphs “Mistah Kurtz he dead” and “A penny for the Old Guy” (a pairing intriguingly equating Conrad’s Kurtz and Fawkes), “The Hollow Men” (1925) opens: “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw.”

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There were significant nods to the gunpowder plot in the intervening years – notably Dumbledore’s gutsy and talismanic phoenix Fawkes in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter saga, who inspires the Order of the Phoenix and appears on the jacket of the eponymous novel. But it was around its 400th anniversary in 2005 that the failed bomber became a meme again. Jimmy McGovern wrote the BBC1 series Gunpowder, Treason & Plot. Paul Staines used the monicker Guido Fawkes in 2004 in launching his subversive political blog. Boris Johnson’s novel Seventy-Two Virgins (bumbling, bicycling MP saves parliament from massacre) updated the threat to James I by positing an Islamist suicide bomber aiming to blow up Westminster.

The quatercentenary use of the plot with most cultural repercussions, though, was the 2005 movie version of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s late-80s dystopian graphic novel V for Vendetta, in which the titular V, an anarchist revolutionary, wears a Guy Fawkes mask. The disguise was then adopted by Anonymous hacktivists and was frequently worn by protesters in the global Occupy movement of 2011-13. Fawkes’s new resonance for the radical left is also seen in the current BBC drama Gunpowder, by the Booker-longlisted novelist Ronan Bennett. But it also remains a name to conjure with for Guido Fawkes and the libertarian right.