Summary
On Tuesday 5 November 1616 Bishop Launcelot Andrewes preached his annual Gunpowder Treason sermon before the King at Whitehall, as he had done since the first anniversary of the discovery of the plot. Both the Bishop and King James himself, as well as many present, were among the intended victims of the plot and would not have been there at all in 1616 had it succeeded. On this occasion Andrewes took what seems on the face of it a capriciously remote text from Isaiah 37: ‘the children are come to the birth, and there is not strength to bring it forth’. His sermon is entirely built upon the conceit that the Gunpowder Plot was a failed birth, which he bears out wittily by the elaboration of correspondences between the two predicaments in the teeth of the apparent unlikenesses, and unlikeliness. This process is carried through quite openly and even (so to say) on the hoof, with a sense of real revelation as more and more points of likeness disclose themselves to his mind:
The more I think of it, the more points of correspondence do offer themselves to me, of a birth and coming to birth, and that in every degree: 1. The vessels first give forth themselves, as so many embryos; 2. the vault as the womb, wherein they lay so long; 3. they that conceived this device were the mothers, clear; […]
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- Metaphysical Wit , pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992
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