A Little History of Literature (8 page)

Shakespeare's drama moves through identifiable phases, although exact dates of composition and performance of individual plays are uncertain; as are the texts of his plays – none was printed
under his supervision in his lifetime. Earliest in his artistic career are the history plays, concerned primarily with the so-called ‘Wars of the Roses’, the previous century's conflict for the English throne that was finally won by Elizabeth's Tudor forebears.

Shakespeare, in making brilliant drama (still in his twenties), falsifies history outrageously. His magnificent Macchiavellian Richard III, for example, is nothing like the actual historical monarch. ‘Good drama, bad history’ is the motto of the Shakespeare package. He was always aware, too, of pleasing the monarch: a Scottish king comes to the throne, on Elizabeth's death, in 1603? Soon after, Shakespeare produces a fine play about Scottish kings,
Macbeth
, pandering, at the same time, to James I's known fascination with witchery.

Shakespeare's mid-career comedies are, all of them, set outside England. Italy and the imaginary Illyria are typical locations. They are, among much else, noteworthy for the space they give powerful women (Beatrice in
Much Ado About Nothing
comes to mind). On the other hand there are things, even in the sprightly early comedies, which the modern audience finds hard to swallow. Along with feisty Beatrice there is Kate, in
The Taming of the Shrew
, who is humiliated and brutalised into wifely subservience (forced, publicly, once ‘tamed’, to be willing to place her hand beneath her husband's foot). Quite literally, trampled on.

It's hard, too, to be entirely comfortable with the ‘happy ending’ of
The Merchant of Venice
in which the Jew, Shylock, finds his daughter abducted (by a gentile lover) and his wealth forfeited, and is forced to convert – in the face of losing everything – to Christianity. It takes some very fine poetry indeed to make us happy with those resolutions as good ones.

Shakespeare was fascinated by the Roman Republic – a state without kings or queens. That particular issue (touching on his unceasing interest in monarchy) is chewed over – without easy solution – in
Julius Caesar
. Caesar seems likely to become ruler: to protect the republic, is Brutus (‘the noblest Roman of them all’) morally right to assassinate him?
Coriolanus
sets up a similar problem: would the warrior-hero be right to invade Rome in order to
save Rome? Is rebellion right or wrong? Shakespeare never quite decided (it's right in
Richard II
, for example, but wrong in
Henry IV
). In
Antony and Cleopatra
Marc Antony gives up a world empire for love: is ‘the world well lost’, or is he a lovesick fool?

So wonderful are Shakespeare's middle- and late-period plays – such as
Much Ado About Nothing
and
Measure for Measure
, in which he seems to be redefining drama as well as writing it – that sceptics have wondered how a man who left school in his early teens (not a famous school, at that) could possibly have written them. Other candidates have been suggested, drawing on the little we know about Shakespeare's life. None of the ‘alternative Shakespeares’ is, however, plausible. The balance of proof remains in favour of the glove-maker's son from Stratford. The genres Shakespeare cultivated in his maturity – comedies, tragedies, problem plays, Roman plays and romances – show a gradual progression in language and plot complexity. And, in the comedies particularly, a darkening of mood.

In 1610, at the height of his career (and still in his forties) Shakespeare, now wealthy, retired from London to live as a gentleman in his native Stratford, proudly displaying his family coat of arms. Alas, he did not live long. He died in 1616, probably of typhus – although a popular (and improbable) legend suggests alcohol as the cause of his premature demise.

The towering achievement of Shakespeare's art are the four tragedies:
Macbeth
,
King Lear
,
Hamlet
and
Othello
. Their greatness, too, is coloured by the ever darkening cloud of gloom that hangs over Shakespeare's late period, possibly the effect of having lost his only son, Hamnet, in 1596. Take, for example, Macbeth's final soliloquy, as he realises he faces his final battle:

It's wonderfully complicated. Here is an actor telling us – as Shakespeare says elsewhere – that the world is a stage: just like the Globe. That bleak negativity of the last word (‘nothing’), which hits the ear like a door slamming, is echoed in the most tragic of the tragedies when the aged Lear – himself on the brink of death – comes on stage carrying the corpse of his beloved daughter, Cordelia, in his arms:

The five-times repeated word would, in other contexts, be wholly banal, banal, banal, banal, banal. The dreadful climax of
King Lear
it is so powerful that the greatest Shakespearian critic we have had, Samuel Johnson, could not bear to watch the scene in the theatre nor read it on the page.

Is Shakespeare the greatest writer of the English-speaking world? Indubitably. But he is not, taken in the round, the easiest, or the most comfortable. That, of course, is part of the greatness.

CHAPTER
8

The Book of Books

T
HE
K
ING
J
AMES
B
IBLE

Although we do not automatically think of it as literature, nor is it normally read in that spirit, the King James Bible is the most-read work in the English literary canon. (The word ‘canon’, incidentally, comes from the Roman Catholic Church's catalogue of ‘works which ought to be read’. The Church also drew up a stricter catalogue of books which must
not
be read – the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum
.)

The King James Bible (KJB) is still, worldwide, the most popular version of the Bible. Every American motel has one, in the bedside drawer, thanks to the indefatigable Gideons Society. But it's not simply the fact that it is so easily come by. What has made the KJB a Bible of first choice is that it is so wonderfully written. It was first published in 1611 – around the same time as Shakespeare's great tragedies. It, like them, stands as an example of the English language at its highest pitch of eloquence, subtlety and beauty. It can be admired for that reason, even by those who are not religious, or even atheists. There have been many other translations of the Bible – some, admittedly, are more accurate
than the KJB and more up-to-date in their vocabulary. But the KJB, uniquely, is the one version that has universally been valued for its expression. And that expression – even more than Shakespeare's – has soaked into our own expression and, it could be argued, even our ways of thinking.

What is meant by the ‘literary quality’ of the KJB is easier shown than described. Compare the following lines – they are among the best known in the New Testament and come from the Lord's Prayer, as set down by Matthew. The first is from the KJB, the second from one of the most recent American translations of the Gospels.

There are clear differences of meaning here. Is ‘doing wrong’ the same as ‘debts’? Legally, they are not. You can be in debt (with a mortgage, for example) but doing no wrong. Obviously it is a personal judgement as to which translation works best for you. But no one with any ‘ear’ for literary quality would deny that the first quotation is the more beautiful of the two, by any standard of literary judgement. Moreover, it evokes images: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ is ‘visual’ in a way that ‘Give us our food for today’ just isn't.

One reason we may find it hard to think of the KJB as literature is because it was produced by what we would call a committee. The KJB is known as the ‘authorised’ version, but it was not ‘authored’. Nonetheless, as a little investigation makes clear, there was a single genius behind it – what Shakespeare would call ‘an onlie begetter’.
And it was not, despite the title of the book, King James. Who that author was we shall come to in a moment.

The publication of the King James Bible in English was motivated principally by politics. It would, James hoped, consolidate the Reformation – England's break-away from the Roman Catholic Church – by supplying a core text for Protestant worship that was starkly different from Rome's Latin Bible and religious service. It would stabilise the country while asserting its independence from the Pope. It would be the ‘English’ Bible, and in the best English that England could manage.

Before the sixteenth century, the Bible was only available in Latin. Most Christians had to take what they were told on trust. Martin Luther, who published the first reliable vernacular (meaning in the language of the people) version of the New Testament in Germany in 1522, believed that the Bible should be the property of all men and women. Trust God, not the self-appointed ‘interpreters’ of God, he argued. It was revolutionary stuff.

English translations followed Luther's initiative. The most significant, and by far the most literary, was that of William Tyndale (
c
. 1491–1536) from 1525 onwards. ‘Tyndale's Bible’ comprised the New Testament and the first five books of the Old Testament (the so-called Pentateuch). God's word, Tyndale believed, like Luther, should be understandable by every English man and woman. It was, at the time, as radical an idea in England as it had been in Germany.

Who was this man, William Tyndale? Little is known of his early life. Even his surname is uncertain; he sometimes appears in documents as ‘Hichens’. He attended Oxford University and, on graduating in 1512, enrolled to do advanced study in religious studies, supporting himself as a private tutor. But from the outset of his career William Tyndale was driven by two much higher aspirations – both mortally dangerous at the time. In the 1520s, England was still a Catholic country, with Henry VIII at its head. But Tyndale was committed to defying Rome, and everything associated with Roman Catholicism: ‘papistry’, as it was called. He yearned to translate the scriptures into English, his native tongue.
His aim, he said, was that even the ploughman should have access to God's word in ploughman's English.

In 1524, Tyndale went to Germany. He may have met his mentor, Luther – it's nice to think he did. Over the next few years, in Flanders, he worked on his translation of the Bible direct from the Hebrew and Greek sources. Copies of his New Testament were the first to be shipped to England, and circulated widely despite the authorities' attempts to destroy them. He fell out with Henry VIII on the issue of the King's divorce, but returning to his home country was never advisable – it would probably endanger his life. In Europe, his activities drew the attention of the fiercely anti-Protestant Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Never one to make things easy for himself, he also fell out with the local authorities in Flanders. He was betrayed, arrested, and imprisoned in the castle of Vilvoorde, north of Brussels, on vague charges of heresy. The account of his trial and death is given in the propagandistic, but nearly contemporary,
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
(1563). It is extraordinarily moving, and powerful evidence of how an author, like Tyndale, would go to the stake for what he believed in and what he had written.

What John Foxe tells us is that ‘Master Tyndale’ was offered a lawyer to defend him. He refused, saying he would defend himself, in his own language. Those of his captors who had conversed with him and heard him pray were of the belief ‘that if he were not a good Christian man, they knew not whom they might take to be one’. He is said to have converted not merely his keeper, but his keeper's wife and daughter, to his new idea of what religion was, and should be.