I don’t think I’ve got much to say about patriotic festivals of anti-Catholic bigotry invovling fireworks this year, except to report that I recently flipped through Garry Wills’s Witches and Jesuits — his reading of Macbeth as a gunpowder play — and it’s splendid.
Oh, that is interesting. I recently read Claire Asquith’s Shadowplay (see my LibraryThing review!), and she saw Macbeth as a direct appeal to James on the subject of Catholic persecution. In fact, there’s a substantial section in that book about Coriolanus being a Gunpowder play, the protagonist representing the plotters in various obvious respects. Can’t say it had occured to me.
I’d say that November the fifth has gone the way of Christmas, Easter and Halloween, i.e. it’s now mainly a hedonistic festival that only keeps the ideological aspect as a fig-leaf justification for its own existence.
What’s meant to be the ideological aspect of Hallowe’en?
Satanism, probably.
Isn’t it the eve of All Souls’ Day or All Saints’ Day, one of the two?From my particular pagan perspective, the whole point is getting to wear a ridiculous black-and-orange striped witch-hat (apparently it offends cockatoos. Who knew?) and eating huge amounts of chocolate.
As far as I know the ‘Gunpowder Play’ is a bit vieux chapeau, the Porter’s disquisition on equivocation having been long linked by commentators to supposed contemporary Jesuit doctrine. That said, I’ll certainly have a look at the book.