By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
1. As a teenager, John Milton began writing an epic poem in Latin about the Gunpowder Plot.
John Milton (1608-74) wanted to write an epic poem from an early age. He left his first attempt, in quintum novembris (‘Remember, remember…’), unfinished, but this early work shows how much the idea of Paradise Lost had gestated over a period of some forty years. It is Satan – the villain (antihero?) of Paradise Lost – who suggests the idea of the Gunpowder Plot to the Pope, who then enlists the help of Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes, and the others.
Later on, in his early thirties, Milton announced his plan to write a great Arthurian epic in English – like Spenser’s The Faerie Queene but with more classical control over the subject and narrative – but he never got around to writing the poem.