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Shakespeare & the KJV Bible
 shakespeare kjv bible




Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: cindy@lise.unit.no (Cynthia Kandolf)
Subject: Shakespeare revisited
Date: 21 Oct 93 21:16:58

*sigh* This will teach me to check the headers! My beautiful, well-written, and highly informative post on Shakespeare and the King James Version of the Bible was inadvertently only posted to sci.skeptic. (Because after all that typing i was too lazy to check the headers.) So here we go again, to a.f.u only this time....

Diane Kelly and/or Jim Cambias write(s): >|> In article <29qtph$g9l@panix.com> carlf@panix.com (Carl Fink)
>|> writes:
>|> > A friend of mind today told me about something which certainly
>|> sounds
>|> >like an urban legend. In the King James version of Psalm 46, the
>|> word
>|> >"Shake" is 46'th from the beginning, and "spear" 46'th from the
end.
>|> He
>|> >has heard that this was a deliberate decision by the translators
of
>|> the KJ
>|> >version as a 46'th birthday present to Will Shakespeare. Have any
>|> of you
>|> >heard of this? Do the dates even work?
>|> >
>I don't know about the hidden message, but Will was on the committee
>assembled by Big Jim himself to write the new edition. In the version
>of this story that I remember, old Will himself snuck in the secret
>message on his own.

You first, Carl: The King James Version of the Bible was published in 1611. Shakespeare was certainly alive then; it was in fact the year he began writing his last play, _The Tempest_. He lived from 1564 to 1616. So he would have celebrated his 47th birthday in 1611, not his 46th. However, the bulk of the work _was_ done in 1610. In other words, the dates do match up... but i have strong reasons to doubt that the "birthday present" story is true, and those reasons can be found in the next paragraph.

Now, Diane... er, Jim... you know what i mean. There is no evidence that Shakespeare was on the committee that made the new translation of the Bible, and reason to believe he wasn't. Many people now, including a distressing number of literature teachers, assume that Shakespeare must have enjoyed the same acclaim and respect during his life that he is given today. Not so. He was, apparently, a quite popular playwright. However, although the theater was widely enjoyed in Elizabethan England (and the time of King James, too, of course), it was hardly respected as one of the serious arts. There was still something disrespectable about the theater, a sense that it was "sinful" in some way. There were all kinds of laws against actors and theaters, which explains why all of the London theaters were across the Thames from the main part of the city (and in an area of, shall we say, ill-repute). A man so closely knit to this community would hardly be the person the King would ask to be on a committee to translate the Bible! Similarly, while his work was popular, it did not become respected as "serious art work" until after his death; therefore it is unlikely that the scholars who worked on the KJV (as it's known to us in the language biz) would want to "honor" him in any way.

Possibly interesting point: Shakespeare's plays and poems contain over 30,000 different words. The KJV contains only about 8000. They were written for entirely different purposes, of course, and each serves its purpose well.

Further information about the Elizabethan era and the English language can be found in many places, among them chapter 3 of _The Story of Enlgish_ by Robert McCrum, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil (ISBN 0-670-80467-3). Don't have a book with me that explains about the theater in this era; for that you'll actually have to figure out how to use the library's card catalog (another word fast becoming outdated).

-Cindy "long-winded fingers" Kandolf
cindy@lise.unit.no
Trondheim, Norway


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