Fortune My Foe

The early 1600s might have been a period of pestilence and plotting, but they were also a golden age of music and drama. Using the wind and stringed instruments of the age and drawing on historical sources, long-established early music group The York Waits (who are based in the home city of Guy Fawkes) provide a soundtrack and narrative to the origins and aftermath of the notorious Gunpowder Plot of 1605. There are songs and dance tunes of Elizabethan and Jacobean England – many of which became popular throughout Europe – and Macbeth's witches make an appearance. Instruments include sackbuts, shawms, harp, recorders, curtal, the early forms of violin and guitar, plus bagpipes and hurdy gurdy.