This thesis surveys the impact of the Gunpowder Plot upon the Jacobean stage 1605-16. While historians have long dismissed the Plot as a failed attack undertaken by a group of disenfranchised radicals, its influence on the cultural imagination of English dramatists has largely been overlooked. By surveying details of the Plot itself, and the non-dramatic texts circulating in its immediate aftermath, it becomes clear that non-dramatic Protestant authors responded to the Powder Treason with fear and panic, writing alarmist and inflammatory texts designed to demonise Catholics. These texts include ballads, sermons, and poetry. This circulating Protestant discourse developed specific linguistic Gunpowder paradigms and motifs, which subsequently began to appear on the London stage from 1606. With close readings of a number of plays produced during this period, this thesis demonstrates that playwrights incorporated specific Gunpowder tropes into drama, leading to the creation of a number of Gunpowder plays in the years 1606-16. Gunpowder plays include motifs of undermining, witchcraft, possession, demonic activity, equivocation, treason, and sedition. They also often include depictions of the two women from Revelation, known respectively as the Woman Clothed with the Sun, and the Whore of Babylon. In addition, this thesis reveals that subsequent political events, such as the murder of Henry IV of France in 1610 and the Overbury Scandal of 1613-16, reinforced fear of Catholic terrorism, and were thus incorporated into drama during this period, often conflated with the Powder Plot by playwrights, and circumnavigated via the Gunpowder motifs established in 1606. Moreover, one Gunpowder play, Macbeth, emerges as the definitive dramatic response to the Powder Treason. This thesis seeks to establish that the Gunpowder Plot had such a profound effect on the Jacobean cultural imagination that it provoked a watershed in English drama.

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The dissertation takes the modern business technique/concept of brands and branding, applies them to a historic case study, the creation by James VI and I of Great Britain from 1603 to 1625, and by doing so throws new light on both. It compares two distinct approaches to branding, unidirectional and social interactionist, postulating that the latter would prove better at explaining the success of the brand Great Britain/British. The case study reveals that neither approach is supported by the evidence. Content analysis shows that there was a lack of awareness of the brand Great Britain/British and an inconsistency in its use, hence neither approach can be sustained. However, the same analysis does show that an alternative brand, England/English, existed in the same time and that this brand provides some limited support for the social interactionist view of brands and branding. The lack of success of the brand Great Britain/British during his reign does not appear to have prevented James VI and I from establishing himself as the legitimate King of England in addition to Scotland although the contribution of the brand to this was marginal at best.

Bibliography: leaves 315-363.

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