Two years after the Coverdale Bible was printed and published another English work, known as “Matthew’s Bible,” appeared; it was named after the pseudonymous “translator” rather than the disciple, but it was essentially a conflation of Tyndale and Coverdale to which various marginal notes were appended. The steady pressure of inherited language continued unabated. Coverdale then in turn supervised the revision of “Matthew’s Bible,” in order to create what became known as the “Great Bible.” This reliance upon the translations of translations at least ensured a continuity of language in a period of perpetual change; it testifies also to a profound conservatism among biblical redactors which had a direct effect upon the English language itself. As one biblical scholar has put it, “the retention of older English ways of speaking in religious contexts” created “the impression that religious language was somehow necessarily archaic.” 7 By the slow and subtle process of the English imagination, the homely directness of Wycliff and the Lollards was replaced by the harmonious simplicity of the now “authorised” version of the “Great Bible” which had upon its title page an engraving of Henry VIII handing the volume in question to a grateful Archbishop of Canterbury and assorted clergy. The English Bible had at last become a central token of the national culture. William Strype declared that “Everybody that could bought the book, or busily read it, or got others to read it to them.” A contemporaneous pamphlet declared that “Englishmen have now in hand, in every church and place, the Holy Bible in their mother tongue, instead of the old fabulous and fantastical books of the Table Round, Lancelot du Lake, Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick etc. and such other, whose impure filth and vain fabulosity the light of God has abolished utterly.”
Another version, “Taverner’s Bible,” was disseminated in 1539 but it was overshadowed by the Great Bible, which was in turn supplanted by the Geneva Bible or “Breeches Bible”; Tyndale’s “aprons” had been succeeded, in other words, by “breeches.” It was the work of several hands but relied once more upon its precursors. Nevertheless it cleared up certain absurdities by direct reference to Hebrew originals and, with the more vigorous expression represented by the use of “breeches,” it revitalised the line of English music as it flowed through the various translations. The first line of its Genesis marks a new beginning in another sense—“In the beginning God created ye heaven and ye earth”—which has remained ever since the plangent introduction to sacred scripture. Other of its changes have entered the language. The translators altered the wording of the twenty-third psalm so that “leade me forth besyde the waters of comforte” became “& leadeth me by the stil waters,” for example, while “my cup shalbe full” was changed to “my cup runneth ouer.” The extraordinary significance of the English Bible, within the English imagination, is testified in phrases such as these which have entered the national consciousness.
Sixty editions of the Geneva Bible appeared during the reign of Elizabeth; by the middle of the seventeenth century 140 had been promulgated. It was produced in compact quarto size, rather than in cumbersome folio. It was the first to be printed in clear roman type, with italics to suggest the meaning of missing words, and was divided into discrete units of verse. More significantly it provided annotations and explanations of difficult passages or “hard places” for the edification of “the simple reader.” The Geneva Bible was employed directly by Shakespeare and by Marlowe, thus assuring its place in English cultural history. Here once more is evidence of that curious and powerful tendency within English letters to appropriate and to reformulate foreign texts so that they become thoroughly English in the process; the effect is heightened in the biblical context by the fact that the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were identified with the Hebrews as the “chosen race.”
Two other translations appeared at the close of the sixteenth century. A more orthodox “Bishops’ Bible” avoided the taint of Calvinist precepts, while the Catholic Douay Bible preserved a Latinate diction appropriate for the “old faith”; but these were mere milestones, as it were, to the great achievement of the King James Bible which has aptly been described as the supreme manifestation of the English language. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.” It is impossible to use the language without being influenced by the cadence and vocabulary of this translation; and it says much about the English imagination itself that it should be so moved and modified by a translation. It is significant, too, that this extraordinary work should have been produced out of compromise and the wholesale adaptation of different sources. It might act as a mirror of Englishness itself. With the eventual publication of the King James Bible, it could even be asserted that “God is an Englishman.”
James I had been so disturbed by the popularity of the Geneva Bible, which seemed in its annotations to deny the divine right of kings as well as to perpetrate other puritanical abuses of scripture, that he assembled a conference at Hampton Court “for the reformation of some things amiss in ecclesiastical matters.” In the course of this conference it was proposed that a company of translators be established in order to begin work upon a wholly new translation which would avoid the excesses of Puritanism, Presbyterianism and Roman Catholicism. Their standard text was to be the Bishops’ Bible but other versions were to be employed when they were closer to the sacred originals, in the sequence of “Tindoll’s, Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s, Geneva.” Here is one “line” of English music whereby each version harmonises with, and amplifies, its predecessor. There were fifty scholars whose “endeavour” or “mark” was “to make a good one better, or out of many good ones, one principal good one.” Their purpose was to redeploy the resources of an older English—Tyndale’s translation, which comprises some nine-tenths of the King James version, had been published almost a century before—so that it might reverberate in another era and, indeed, in subsequent centuries. It is a memorable fact of English continuity or conservatism that all the changes wrought in the language during the period of Shakespeare and Marlowe were set aside for the simplicity and directness of Tyndale’s vernacular.
The preface to the King James Bible is itself an epitome of the English genius for assimilation and adaptation, since translation “it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel . . . that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water.” Yet by that curious transformation, already observed in a variety of contexts, this translated work “played no small part in shaping English literary nationalism, by asserting the supremacy of the English language as means of conveying religious truths.”8 Indeed it became the touchstone of English literary culture itself. In his lectures “On Translating Homer,” Matthew Arnold declared that there is “an English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible.” Thus it had become known as an “English book.” Many phrases from Hebrew, Greek and Latin were internalised and domesticated so that they seem as much part of the language as any phrase out of Old English. Alister McGrath, in his erudite study of the King James Bible entitled In the Beginning, records many of these now idiomatic phrases taken out of the Hebrew; among them “sour grapes,” “rise and shine,” “a fly in the ointment,” “a drop in the bucket,” “to lick the dust,” “the land of the living,” “the skin of my teeth” and to “go from strength to strength.” From the Greek originals spring “the salt of the earth” and “a thorn in the flesh.” No one would now know that these were originally foreign phrases imported in the early seventeenth century; it is testimony to the plastic power of the English language, and of course the English imagination, that they have been so thoroughly absorbed that they are now an instinctive and intimate part of speech. As McGrath put it, the King James Bible demonst
rated the fact that English is “perhaps the global language which has been most welcoming to words whose origins lie elsewhere.”9 Perhaps this extraordinary adaptive ability is the very reason why the language has attained its contemporary global status, far surpassing the Latin tongues of the classical and medieval centuries.
The King James Bible was not simply a translated work but, as has been intimated, already an antiquated one. This in turn suggests the almost intuitive antiquarianism of the English imagination, since within this new version were perpetuated “thou” rather than “you” and “sayest” rather than “says.” Then, on a more general scale, the cadences and syntactical variations of an earlier language were also maintained. By remaining faithful to earlier English translations, the King James Bible did in fact preserve old forms of speech. Here lies another aspect of the fidelity to an older English tradition; the scholars read out their translations to one another, so that in a sense the native breath or breadth might enter their words. The spoken word is always a more conservative form than the written language; one of the secrets of the King James Bible’s success, and of its continuity, lies in its employment of this natural power.
It is perhaps appropriate that the King James Bible should have been published in 1611, the presumed date of Shakespeare’s retirement from the public theatre; in one sense it continued the dramatist’s tradition and, by inheriting the language from Chaucer as well as Genesis, from Spenser as well as from the Psalms, it continued the line of English music itself. The Coverdale Bible translated the phrase from I Kings 19 as “a styll softe hyssinge” but the Matthew Bible changed this to “a small styll voyce” until the King James Bible rewrote it memorably as “a still small voice.” Thus the line of biblical translations into English has been described as “both cumulative and progressive, like the course of a river” while the King James Bible itself has been characterised “by its smoothness, its even-flowing tempo, its ease and naturalness and harmony.” 10 As one biblical scholar has put it, “all previous versions . . . resonate somewhere in their text.” In translation, too, there is also a measure of self-effacement. As the Preface to the King James Bible stated of its contributors, “There were many chosen, that were greater in other men’s eyes than in their own, and that sought the truth rather than their own praise.”
We may look for its influence in the language itself or, as John Livingston Lowes puts it, “its phraseology has become part and parcel of our common language—bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh.” We can trace it in the work of Milton and Bunyan, Tennyson and Byron, Johnson and Gibbon, Walton and Thackeray, none of whom according to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch could resist “the rhythms of our Bible . . . it is everything we see, hear, feel because it is in us, in our blood.” More significantly for this study, perhaps, we may trace its effect in the immediate outpouring of religious literature in the vernacular. The King James Bible invigorated the consciousness of the nation, and prompted some of its most eloquent manifestations. The religious controversies of the seventeenth century were now conducted within an entirely national context, and the publication of the Bible heralded a vast outpouring of religious poetry, books of devotion, tracts and pamphlets of every kind; religious poetry had a political dimension, and political poetry wore a spiritual aspect. It has been estimated that, in the first forty years of the century, one half of the books printed were concerned wholly or partly with religious topics. The enthusiasm attendant upon the assorted creeds of Anabaptists, Laudians, Levellers, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Puritans and Anglicans, was itself directly related to the translation of the Bible; but even after the civil war and the Protectorate religious texts were at a premium. Volumes such as Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying and John Rawlet’s The Christian Monitor passed through innumerable editions; one optimistic publisher believed that Benjamin Keach’s War with the Devil and Travels of True Godliness would sell “till the end of time.” Volumes of sermons were also in great demand, while religious poetry flourished in the form of songs and emblems, odes and cantatas.
In this context both the new prominence of the hymn, in a church service set in the vernacular, and the popularity of the Psalms, newly translated into English, are instructive. They could now be sung by congregations, to readily recognisable tunes. The central principles of devotional writing had become those of simplicity and intelligibility; the central role afforded to the English Bible led naturally and ineluctably to a more profound attention to the word, written or spoken, rather than to the drama and gesture of the Mass. Multiple interpretations of the Bible, the scholastic equivalent of polyphony, were displaced by a plainer and more literal elucidation of the sacred texts. Thus the Westminster Directory of 1644 suggests that “in singing of Psalms the voice is to be tunably and gravely ordered, but the chief care must be to sing with understanding, and with grace in the heart, making melody unto the Lord.” In a sermon preached at Oxford in 1668 Robert South, the Public Orator to that university, disparaged pulpit eloquence which consisted in “difficult Nothings, Rabbinical Whimsies, and remote Allusions.” The sentiments are part of a general English aversion to florid discourse or openly expressed sentiment, but the tone and rigour of this return to “plain” and traditional English are a direct consequence of the publication of the King James Bible.
No more striking evidence of its influence can be found than in the pages of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, where the plain-speaking narrator weaves the words of the King James version within the texture of his prose. In this passage, “Safe for those for whom it is to be safe, but transgressors shall fall therein . . . for saith he, Concerning the works of men, by the word of thy lips, I have kept them from the paths of the destroyer. Thus they lay bewailing themselves in the Net,” the italicised words are taken from that version. It has been said of Bunyan himself that “some phrase or sentence from the English Bible suddenly speaks to him in an hour of crisis . . . the thought as it is incarnated in the familiar words of the Authorized Version.” 12 Bunyan emphasised the traditional plainness of King James when he declared that “I have not writ at a venture, nor borrowed my Doctrine from Libraries. I depend upon the sayings of no man: I found it in the Scriptures of Truth, among the true sayings of God.” The plain speaking of this plain man, inherited in one sense from William Langland and Piers the Plowman, is here given doctrinal authority from the example of the vernacular Bible. Thus at any point in the text passages may be selected which derive from the same source. “Ah thou sinful sleep! How for thy sake am I like to be benighted in my Journey! I must walk without the Sun, darkness must cover the path of my feet, and I must hear the noise of doleful Creatures, because of my sinful sleep!” None of this could have been written without the influence and example of the English Bible; its vocabulary and cadence are everywhere apparent and, if we concur that The Pilgrim’s Progress is “the first modern English novel,” 13 then the King James Bible has been influential indeed. In the nineteenth century, however, Southey made the essential point that Bunyan’s “homespun style” represented “a clear stream of current English.” So it may be inferred that the King James Bible helped to confirm and to emphasise an existing tradition within the language. That is why it has been suggested that The Pilgrim’s Progress represents “a bridge between two worlds, the medieval and the modern”14 in precisely the manner that the Authorised Version may be said to “bridge” that gap or transition between Wycliff and the seventeenth century.
The connection between English spirituality and the English imagination is in fact a continuous and permanent one. It is only necessary to note, in the eighteenth century, the unique popularity of the biblical oratorio. The success of Handel’s productions, in particular, rested partly on the identification of the English with the Israelites of the Old Testament and their especial rank as God’s “chosen people.” The oratorios, in the words of one musical historian, “made the history of the Hebrews into a kind of ‘national epic’ in which Englishmen could see themsel
ves.” 15 It is an ancient and well-worn theme; a century before, John Milton remarked that “God reveals himself to his servants and, as his manner is, first to his Englishmen.” It is the secret of Handel’s Messiah which, according to one commentator, “sums up to perfection and with the greatest eloquence the religious faith, ethical, congregational, and utterly unmystical, of the average Englishman.”16 Handel himself became a naturalised Englishman in 1727, after his art had been thoroughly assimilated. The power of place is once again manifested. We may call it placism, as an antidote to racism. The English oratorio was in fact a distinct and readily identifiable form; it was adapted from continental models and from its inception incorporated English, French, Italian and German elements to create a familiar mixed and “mungrell” style. It was part drama, part anthem, and part epic; it moved from the sublime to the tender, and thus amply fulfilled the English appetite for variety and theatricality. Just as the Elizabethan settlement of the sixteenth century afforded a practical “middle ground” for those of different political persuasions, so the eighteenth-century oratorio “established a common ground for expressing certain basic religious beliefs that reunited the English as no other area of the nation’s culture had done.” 17 A pragmatic instinct is at work, whereby the beliefs and practices of the Church are subtly united with the rituals of English social life.
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination Page 35