Frank Mcguinness's Dark Masque: Speaking Like Magpies (2005)‪.‬

I Frank McGuinness's Speaking Like Magpies (2005) was commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and originally written as part of the 2005 Gunpowder Season (1) to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. (2) When he was asked to write a play about a failed attempt to blow up King James and his government by fanatical English Catholics, McGuinness, an Irish playwright, did not know much about it: 'I knew two things. Guy Fawkes was not the leader of the plotters, and King James I was one of your country's most fascinating monarchs'. (3) McGuinness was self-conscious about the fact that an Irish playwright had been commissioned to write a play about an incident of English history for the English stage. He answered in an interview that 'the logic of the commission ... was that fanaticism of the faith is something [he] grew up with'. (4)