"Remember, remember...
the 5th of November?
Three score barrels of gunpowder below,
the English Parliament to overthrow..."
This day is not only the eve of the Battle of Lützen, but also the anniversary of another seventeenth-century happening, more than two decades before Gustavus died, and also orchestrated by the Counter-Reformation. And gunpowder played as relevant a role as at Lützen.
This evening, throughout the UK, Catholic traitors will be burned on effigy in public beneath skies splashed with bright-coloured fireworks.
If the conspirators had succeded, an Anglo-Saxon Catholic dictatorship instead of Protestant constitutional monarchy would have changed world history for good and forever.
Now Shakespeare was welcome at the royal court, and he must have been certainly aware of the Catholics' conspiracy, which was aborted and ended with the execution of the traitors four days after the first premiere of
Othello, a day like today in 1604.
To please a stirred King James Stuart, the Bard came up with a tragedy about the assassination of a Scottish ruler (like his liege) at the hands of a conflicted traitor (though his spouse and three pretty weird sisters were the real instigators). The usurper is defeated and slain by the heir to the throne in the grand finale.
Of course, who doesn't know the
Tragedy of M****th (mentioning it out loud is said to bring bad luck: please touch wood!)?
