The Book of Books (18 page)

From these and other examples offered by Ronald Mansbridge, the total comes to 83.4 per cent Tyndale in the Geneva Bible and 81.6 per cent in the King James Bible. He writes: ‘I believe this sample is statistically valid of the whole New Testament and the books of the Old Testament within a margin of possible error of 2 or 3 per cent.'

No wonder that Stephen Greenblatt, in his
Will in the World:
How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
, wrote: ‘without Tyndale's New Testament and Cranmer's Prayer Book, it is difficult to imagine William Shakespeare the playwright.' Shakespeare quotes hundreds of times from the Geneva translation and because of the overlap between the Geneva and the King James it is possible to claim that Shakespeare was influenced by most of what would become the King James Bible. Shakespeare quotes from the Bible about 1,350 times.

The Geneva Bible was the Bible first taken to America, and although it soon became supplanted by the King James Version, the same argument can be applied to its early influence there as has been applied to its influence on Shakespeare.

Professor A.L. Rowse did a masterful study of the influence on Shakespeare of the Bible and the Prayer Book. He points out that ‘there are definite allusions to 42 books of the bible.' He notes that ‘the story of Cain is referred to twenty-five times, Jeptha . . . in at least seven passages, Samson . . . nine, David . . . six, Goliath . . . three, Solomon . . . nine, Job . . . twenty-five, Judas . . . perhaps twenty-three, Peter . . . seven, Pilate . . . seven, the Prodigal Son . . . nine, Dives and Lazarus . . . seven, the Whore of Babylon . . . seven.' To take one example from so many: in
Richard II
, the lines ‘Edward's seven sons, whereof thyself art one/Were as seven vials of his sacred blood' are from Revelation: ‘And there came one of the seven Angels, which had the seven vials and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither: I will shew unto thee the judgement of the great whore that sitteth upon the many waters'.

More importantly, Rowse stresses the effect of an unconscious education. ‘He was grounded at church . . . the Bible provided the bed of popular culture . . . it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this grounding.'

We read of Thomas Hardy as a boy walking two miles to and from school through the woods every day and noting those minute
transformations in nature which texture his work; he became a man who ‘noticed such things'. That daily trudge in all seasons had become as a university and a bedding for the imagination which would always be expressed through that particular rural landscape. And Dickens, as a boy, on his trek from Camden Town to the blacking factory in central London, and then all over London as a man, unconsciously storing the booming, varied, fractured metropolis deep in his mind. Mark Twain up and down the Mississippi, Balzac in Paris, Joyce deep-dipped in Dublin – on they go, the procession of writers and other artists whose most enduring and most nuanced education came from what they learned unconsciously, from what was absorbed through the curiosity of their own selection rather than being implanted or hammered in by others.

How much more so in the case of a boy, and a youth, who became the greatest master man of words? And ‘the greatest mind' as Harold Bloom, the American critic, wrote, ‘we shall ever know'. The words of the Bible must have made their own library in the mind of the young Shakespeare; and the rhythms, the abrupt switches of narrative, the contradictions, the high drama, the tenderness and the brutality – all there, read by priests whose chief skill might have lain in reading aloud. And these stories, very likely to be read again alone in his house, one of the few books to which he would have had access and therefore, for that reason, to such a boy, a magnet.

Here are three specific ‘borrowings':

As a postscript to Shakespeare and the Bible, there is in circulation one of those many claims in which, by esoteric numerological calculations, Shakespeare is ‘proved' to have been someone else entirely, or his works to have cabbalistic properties. In McAfee's
The Greatest English Classic
, he examines the claim that the scholars who put together the final version of the King James Bible called on Shakespeare's help with the Psalms. Not entirely unlikely. His reputation as a poet was very high, higher, in refined circles, than his popular fame as a playwright. Psalm 46 is the most frequently quoted as revealing the master's voice.

The argument is that Shakespeare worked on this when he was 46 years old – that would be 1606. If 46 words are counted from the start of the Psalms you will find the word ‘shake'. If 46 words are counted from the end (excluding the word ‘Selah' which is considered to have no meaning but be merely a form of punctuation), you come across the word ‘spear'.

There is more. Take the number 10. This is 4 and 6 added together. 46 once again! Ten verses into the psalm, you count in 6
words and get ‘I am'. Count 4 words on and you get ‘will'. If you reverse the 6 and the 4, you get 46 and ‘William'! Who could doubt it?

 

Since 1611, the King James Version has fed quantities of the writing in English of prose and poetry. As the twentieth century developed, other cultures, using English, came into the fold with their own influences – based in India or Africa, for instance, but even in the latter the Bible's influence is often present. But from the beginning of the seventeenth to the middle of the twentieth century, the Bible can be claimed to be unarguably the most pervasive presence in the language and in the literature. And although its religious grip has slackened in some countries, the force of its stories, its imagery, its vocabulary, its moral teaching, its acts of cruelty and villains, and its verses of wisdom even now remain uniquely important.

John Donne, poet and essayist, began work at about the same time as the Bible was published. He shares a Tyndale overlap with Shakespeare. He wrote: ‘there are not so eloquent books in the world as the Scriptures . . . we may be bold to say that, in all their Authors, Greek and Latin, we cannot find so high and so lively examples of those Tropes, and those figures as we may in Scriptures . . . The style of the Scriptures is a diligent and artificial style; and a great part thereof is a musical, is a metrical, is a measured composition, in verse.'

His preferences were for the Psalms and the Epistles of St Paul: ‘because they are Scriptures, written in such form as I have been most accustomed to; St Paul's being letters and David's being poems.' He believed that ‘God's own finger had written the scriptures'.

It will be impossible here to give more than a taste of the total immersion of Donne and other supreme poets in the faith and the language of the Bible. At times it seems everything they write is
connected to it. Even an illness is described in high biblical terms. In ‘Hymne to God my God, in my Sicknesse', Donne writes:

He finds in the Christian story, strata of tenderness and meaning which could seem to outsoar the original save that they are so anchored in it.

In the ‘Divine Poems, Nativitie' he begins with Christ in the womb and the holy birth:

Among so much else, the idea of the Christ Child making himself ‘weak enough' to come into the world is a marvellous
insight into the faith which John Donne, later in his life, would preach from the pulpit.

John Milton, from his adolescence until his death just before the last quarter of the seventeenth century, devoted himself to biblical subjects. He had the King James Version of 1612, and also a Geneva Bible, but his scholar's mind made him familiar with other versions – in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic. Yet his chief work builds on the King James Version. At times he threatens to rewrite it.

Milton came out of a classical education into a world of religious and political ferment in which he played his part as a rousing pamphleteer, a champion of liberty and a defender of what he saw as the true, Puritan faith. His greatest works –
Paradise Lost
,
Paradise Regained
and
Samson Agonistes
– are so lavishly doused in the embroidery of a great vocabulary, so much a tapestry of poetic show that they can appear, to our palates, to be over-rich. The high style, I think, was partly to out-bible the Bible, the Authorised Version, to show what an inspired poet could really do. Despite his standing as the second great poet in English after Shakespeare, there can be – a blasphemous suggestion to Milton scholars – a sense that the ornate language and the embossed imagery load it too heavily.

Yet Milton's genius has been too long celebrated by fine poets and scholars to be doubted here and his place, following Shakespeare, is authoritatively sealed. The story of God's work obsessed him. It was as if he wanted to re-imagine the whole of it.

Writing of the beginning, in Genesis chapters 1 and 2, his lines include:

There are those who would prefer the direct words of Tyndale but Milton is undoubtedly magnificent.

He wrote about time, about his blindness, about destiny and character especially in
Samson Agonistes
; he personified Satan in a way so vivid and memorable that famously he made him the most attractive of the heavenly host, and hell more popular than heaven. He wrote political and social pamphlets. But it was the Bible that was the keystone of a body of work so loaded with quotations from it that it can seem not only a commentary but at times practically a parallel universe.

He elaborated continually. For instance the line ‘the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters' became:

Milton's work showed how inspirational the Bible could be, and how deeply you could read into it. His life and dedication confirmed the biblical association. That such a superior poetic and philosophical mind as that of Milton could so passionately take up
the Bible was an example which was to be followed. He was a master on whom to model oneself, at least in part, as Wordsworth, among others, was to do. More beloved today of scholars, perhaps, than of general readers, Milton still, in this history, plays a major role. His total acceptance of the faith and his mighty efforts to reimagine and rework what had already been written so memorably were an immense tribute to the power of the Scriptures.

John Bunyan is the first lower-class hero to appear in this story.
The Pilgrim's Progress
, one of his sixty books, has, since its publication, outsold every other book except the Bible. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and been praised by Ruskin, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw. It describes the journey of an ordinary, sinful, frail Christian towards salvation. Its storytelling and landscape could be seen as an original compound of religious ecstasy and magical realism. I remember being enthralled by it first in a pictorial edition and later in full print. Bunyan has the great gift of provoking empathy and though his subject matter and the characters might seem to some now to be quaint and outdated, the book remains and will keep. Who knows, as times change again, it may regain its place in the canon of imaginative faith-literature. And he touches the common nerve.

‘ “Pilgrim's Progress” seems to be a complete reflection of Scripture,' wrote Matthew Arnold. Bunyan wrote: ‘I was then never out of the bible either by reading or meditation.' His education was basic. ‘My parents . . . put me to school to learn me to both read and write . . . though to my shame I did soon lose that little I learned.'