Stephen Harrison (University of Oxford)
In 1987 David Lindley and Robin Sowerby published the first edition of a neo-Latin mini-epic in two books on the 1605 London Gunpowder Plot by the musician, physician and poet Thomas Campion (1567-1620), De Pulverea Coniuratione, probably written in 1612-13 and now extant in a single contemporary MS in the library of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Though it has been mentioned as one of the wide range of neo-Latin poems of the time about the Plot (in the UK and elsewhere in Europe), it has not since its publication received the kind of more detailed analysis given to the young Milton’s poem on the Plot (In Quintum Novembris) or that of Shakespeare’s collaborator Phineas Fletcher (Locustae), both dealt with admirably by Estelle Haan (1992, 1993, 1996).
This contribution seeks to show that Campion’s poem (in addition to its evident loyalist politics and anti-Catholic religious tendency) is a work of rich literary texture through its classical intertextualities. In particular, the poem in its descriptions of divine machinery makes use of a number of narrative sequences in Vergil’s Aeneid. It compares the nefarious Plot to the outbreak of war in Italy in Aeneid 7 as a similar product of infernal action stimulating what is effect a civil war; it presents the allegorical figure of True Religion as having links with the religious practices of Dido in Aeneid 4, recalling the earlier self-identification with Dido of the Protestant champion Queen Elizabeth; and its tendentious description of the Jesuits as spreading falsehoods about the world evidently echoes Aeneid 4’s famous depiction of Fama.
Campion’s poem thus takes its place in the history of neo-Latin epic, successfully combining subtle reworking of well-known classical texts in a form which could be consumed and enjoyed by a contemporary British and international elite readership.