Well, the summer movie season is rapidly coming into full swing, and I have my list of big-budget, computer-generated-special-effects-loaded, blockbuster mind candy all set. Topping my must-see list are X-Men: First Class (I am willing to give the franchise another shot after the disaster that was X-Men 3) and, of course, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (I am waiting for Molly Weasely’s line, “NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!”)
However, there is one film that I am dreading on a professional, academic, and, yes, personal level, Anonymous. What Roland Emmerich did to climatology with The Day After Tomorrow (2004) he is now doing to Shakespearean criticism. Here’s the trailer for the film:
(It seems that Emmerich is adopting Edward de Vere’s candidancy for authorship.)
I am going to blog about this film when it comes out. But just to give a little bit of insight into this whole question about the authorship of the plays and poems we, i.e. scholars, ascribe to William Shakespeare, the controversy boils down to this: those anti-Shakespeare proponents don’t feel that someone with Shakespeare’s rustic background could have the knowledge to write his works. In other words, his plays and poetry reflect the mind of a person incredibly widely read in classical literature, familiar with nautical terms, an initimate knowledge of British history, and exposure to the world at court. The skeptics of Shakespeare’s authorship don’t believe that someone with his limited education and family background could write such literary masterpieces. The underlying motivation here is elitism.
To offer a relevant ancedote, I once was teaching Merchant of Venice at a Yeshiva, a private Jewish school. (Yes, the irony did not escape me at all.) Well, everyday, one of my students would always derail the discussion I was trying to get going by proclaiming, “You know, Shakespeare probably didn’t even write this play.” Years later, as I thought about this incredibly annoying student, I realized one of the reasons for people constantly bringing up this question again and again: it is an easy way to sound intelligent. As with the 9/11 conspiracists or the Birthers, to claim that Shakespeare didn’t write these plays and we have all been hoodwinked by a 400-year-old hoax makes one seem like s/he is in the know, has figured it all out.
Allow me to say something to those Shakespeare conspiracy theory devotees: who cares! They are still great plays and poems!
So presumably if you are reading this blog post, you were not one of the Chosen to be raptured away before the time of tribulations begins. (This is unless the ethereal plane has WiFi.) Yes, the prediction made by Harold Camping, 89-year-old civil engineer-turned-radio evangelist, has gone the way of so many other apocalyptic predictions.
According to an article in the New York Times, Camping confessed to being “flabbergasted” that May 21st came and went without some eschatological event: “I was truly wondering what is going on. In my mind, I went back through all of the promises God has made, all of the proofs, all of the signs and everything was fitting perfectly, so what in the world happened? I really was praying and praying and praying, oh Lord, what happened?”
Yet, like many other prophets of the End of Days, Camping has revised his predictions in light of the fact that we are all still here. As Camping now tells it, May 21st was an “invisible Judgement Day” (I guess you needed special 3-D Revelations glasses to see it) and that all the horrific events of the Apocalypse will now happen on Oct0ber 21st. If you find this to be a confusing bit of illogical gymnastics, consider Camping’s method for arriving at the May 21st date. In his piece for Salon.com, David S. Renyolds summarizes succinctly Camping’s numerological calculations (he’s an engineer after all). From what I can glean, part of Camping’s “Bible-based math” involves multiplying a set of arbitrary numbers to arrive at 722,500, supposedly the number of days between the Crucifixion and the Rapture.
(Here’s Letterman’s Top 10 Camping excuses for why the world didn’t end.)
All of this talk of eschatology, the branch of Christian theology devoted to understanding the end of the world, over the past few days has prompted me to write this post about the most prominent apocalyptic sect of Christians in England during the 17th-century, the Fifth Monarchists. Dating from the early 1640s, the Fifth Monarchists (FMs), a.k.a. the Fifth Monarchy Men, based their belief that they were living through the end of times on Daniel 2:44: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, [but] it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” Here’s how their interpretation went: the Kingdom of Christ would come after the fall of four other earthly kingdoms, each representing one of the four horns of the Beast described in Revelations. The FMs identified the other four kingdoms as the Persian, Greek, Egyptian, and Roman – now Roman meant for them the Roman Catholic Church, of which they saw the Anglican Church as part. Their eschatological belief informed how they understood the monumental upheaval of the English Civil War (ECW). For them, the Parliamentary forces in seeking to overthrow Charles I were actually participating in apocalyptic events. That is, the defeat of the King would bring about a new age, or millennium, which, for some, included Christ’s Second Coming. (This is what historians mean when they refer to Puritan millenarian beliefs.)
Before continuing on to explain how the FMs had to revise their apocalyptic predictions, I should contextualize this sect within the religious turbulence of 1640s/1650s England. Part of the motivation for the ECW was religious. As I mentioned in earlier posts, the Puritans wished to abolish the episcopacy, partly because they saw it as a leftover from the Catholic Church and also due to their desire for religious freedom. Once the Puritans essentially did get rid of the college of bishops, the floodgates were open for many different sects, or cults depending on your view, of Christianity to practice freely. Such groups as the Ranters, so called for their tendency to break out into spontaneous preaching; the Quakers, a derogatory term referring to the group’s habit of “quaking” during their services; and the Seekers, those who believed God’s will trumped human law and sought it through prayer, emerged into prominence. (Thomas Edwards actually published a tract, Gangreana [1646], cataloguing all of the different sects that sprung up during this period. Edwards’ thesis is that these sects were the result of the confusion of the war.)
So back to the FMs. So how did they deal with the fact that Christ’s kingdom didn’t follow the beheading of Charles I? Well, they went back and reinterpreted the Bible to see where they went wrong. And surprise, surprise, they found “new” evidence that they had overlooked before. In Daniel 7: 2-8 there is described a little horn growing out of the fourth. This “little horn” turned out to be none other than Oliver Cromwell. (While prominent FMs, like John Simpsons and John Rogers, would denounce the Lord Protector, it was Anna Trapnell, a prophetess who gained notoriety during the 1640s/50s, who first identified Cromwell as the “little horn.”) Andrew Marvell derides the FMs denunciation of Cromwell in his poem “The First Anniversary.” Marvell describes how the FMs are waiting for Cromwell’s reign to crumble so that their “new king the fifth scepter might shake.”(ln. 263) (Interestingly, Marvell equates the tendency of members of these radical Christian sects to “fall” during their services to the Prophet Mahomet’s epilepsy, saying that Simpson would read volumes into his “sacred foam.”)
Incredibly, Cromwell showed a remarkable, for him at least, amount of tolerance towards the FMs. He did include 12 FMs in his “Bare Bones” Parliament. Also, Cromwell partly shared their millenarian beliefs. For example, Cromwell initiated actions during the Interregnum to allow Jews to be legally permitted back into England. (They had been expelled formally in 1290 under Edward I.) Cromwell, however, did so due to the belief that the conversion of the Jews would be one of the events that would lead to the end of days. In this way, Cromwell anticipated the support for the country of Israel by some modern day Christian sects who likewise see the conversion of the Jews as part of the Apocalypse.
So to wrap things up for this week, we can see Harold Camping as participating in the long line of eschatological prophets who have overlooked one of the most important passages in the Bible: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in Heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36)
Works Referred to
Bennet, Martyn. The Civil Wars in Britain and Ireland: 1638-1651 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997)
The Cambridge Companion to Writing the English Revolution. ed. N.H.Keeble (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
Fraser, Antonia. Cromwell. (New York: Grover Press, 1973)
For those who might not know, May 16th through May 22nd marks American Craft Brew Week. So definitely go out and have a pint of your favorite non-macro brew, i.e. any beer that does not have a TV commercial spot running nationally. Personally, I am going to find a Rogue Shakespeare Stout, even though this is not the season for it at all. Or, if possible, I will enjoy a Victory Hop Devil IPA.
I actually came to the craft beer world in a roundabout way. My wife is a sales rep for a large Mid-Western alcohol distributor and a beer enthusiast/blogger. (Not to shill too much, but I highly recommend checking out her blog kimandtonic.com.) While we were still dating, she told me that I passed her initial test by not ordering what she terms “yellow fizzy water” when we went to the bar. I can honestly claim that I married into a beer family. Not only does my wife have a near encyclopedic knowledge of all things beer (she can explain the difference between the IBU and ABV of a beer), but my father-in-law is a home brewer. Currently he has a home brewed bourbon porter on tap that is excellent.
So in keeping with the theme of this blog, tying what is happening today to some aspect of Renaissance England, I am devoting this post to the 17th century’s most controversial brewer, Oliver Cromwell. Yes, a little known fact about the Lord Protector is that he came from a family of brewers.
In her in-depth tome of a biography of Cromwell, Antonia Fraser briefly touches on Cromwell’s brewing activities and how it became a source of satire for his critics. As Dame Fraser tells it, Cromwell’s father, Robert, certainly enjoyed the use of his brew-house and most likely the family kept up the practice. (It should be noted that beer was the most consumed beverage, even above water. This is not due to a high rate of alcoholism but since water was not purified as it is today. In a way, brewing was a means of purification.) At any rate, Cromwell’s detractors used the term “brewer” as an insult, remarking on his common background. Fraser cites a poem, entitled “The Protecting Brewer” that picks up this theme used to attack Cromwell:
A brewer may be as bold as Hector
When as he had drunk his cup of nectar
And as a brewer may be a Lord Protector
As nobody can deny.
Now historians/biographers are divided on how to understand Oliver Cromwell. On the one hand, there is the picture of probably one of the greatest military leaders that England has ever had, and one of his greatest contributions to the modern military was the New Model Army. In 1645 the Parliamentary forces were losing the English Civil war to the Royalist army. It was thought, particularly by Cromwell, that Parliamentarians’ failure in the battle field was due to the fact that MPs could actually serve as army officers. As he stated to Parliament: “I do conceive if the Army be put into another method, and the War more vigorously prosecuted, the People can bear the War no longer, and will enforce you to dishonorable peace.” For Cromwell, there was a conflict of interest between those in Parliament who wished to prolong the war and those in the army who wanted a swift victory. So out of this controversy came the Self-Denying Ordinance, which prohibited any MPs from serving as army commanders. In addition, this legislation allowed for the formation of a new type of army, one that would be better disciplined, drilled, and paid. Most importantly, though, this new army stressed uniformity. Prior, English armies had been a hodge-podge of armed militias from various parts of the country, and often local affiliation trumped national identity. The New Model Army stressed uniformity, having its members dress in the same uniform, the red coat being the predominant feature of the attire. (This is where the nickname ”Red Coats” came for the British Army.) At any rate, Cromwell served as the Lieutant-General of the cavalry. At the battle of Naseby on June 13th 1645 the New Model Army proved its mettle, delivering a disastrous blow to Charles I’s forces.
(This battle became the decisive turning point in the war.)
While a great military leader, Cromwell proved to be impatient with due political process. Having defeated Charles I in the first part of the English Civil War, the army was once again growing restless with Parliament. Here’s what happened: in 1646, Charles I had been captured by Parliamentary forces. For the next three years he would be imprisoned, during which time he nearly escaped once, was moved to the Isle of Wight (pronounced “wait”), and held secret correspondence with the Scots. Many army officers wanted a speedier resolution to the matter, so in 1648, Col. Thomas Pride staged essentially a military coup d’état and purged Parliament of those unwilling to move forward with actions against the King, all done under the approval of Henry Ireton (Cromwell’s son-in-law) and Cromwell himself. This would not be the last time that Cromwell would use the military to exert his will on Parliament when they did not move fast enough for him. In 1653 he would actually force out of Westminster those MPs who still remained from Pride’s Purge (these MPs made up what is known as the Rump Parliament), telling them they had sat too long. To give the pretense of a representative form of government, Cromwell formed the “Bare Bones” Parliament, essentially his cronies. In this year, Cromwell took the title of Lord Protector, which was the name for the position of the one who governed in the monarch’s stead when s/he was not of age. Historians and biographers debate whether this is evidence of his own ambitions to be king.
(Here’s a clip from Cromwell (1970) starring Richard Harris as Cromwell and Alec Guinness as Charles I. In the scene Cromwell forcibly expells the Rump Parliament. The movie, in my opinion, paints way too favorable of a picture of Cromwell as the reluctant savior of his country.)
The last thing I want to discuss is Cromwell’s massacring of the Irish at Drogheda and Wexford in September and October 1649. Back in 1641, there was an Irish uprising against the English plantation owners. (What a surprise, when you systematically push people of their homeland they don’t take it well.) Anyway, the reports of the uprising where greatly exaggerated in England – the Irish rebels were said to have killed pregnant women and put English babies on pikes!
(Here’s a woodcut of the uprising depicting what the English public thought happened.)
Well, when Cromwell had the opportunity to take the army over to Ireland to suppress the rebellion, he was merciless. In taking Drogheda, his men killed soldier and civilian alike. (The total death count is estimated between 2,000 to 4,000.) As the Parliamentary army progressed southward, Cromwell would continue his tactic of frightening other pockets of Irish resistance by not preventing his men from savagely killing around one thousand five hundred Irish at Wexford. Some reports, Irish and English, remark that women were not spared either. (See Fraser, 345 and Martyn Bennett’s The Civil War in Britain and Ireland, 1638-1651, 330)
As you might tell, my own opinion of Cromwell is rather condemnatory. His government was essentially a military dictatorship. In his rule was combined the lethal ingredients of military impatience, religious ideology, and personal ambition. I think I will leave you with Monty Python’s song to Oliver Cromwell. The Pythons capture the enigmatic quality of the Lord Protector, particularly when they mention how the only sound you could hear after Charles I is beheaded is the “solitary giggle from Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector.”
I love May! April may be the “crulest month of the year” (Thank you, Mr. Eliot), but May rocks. May is the month of outdoor festivals, corn dogs, funnel cake, and gin-and-tonics. I say good-bye to my students, turn in my grades, and go sit out on the porch of some bar. I love May! I start thinking again about planting herbs and tomatoes but never actually follow through with it. Living in Kansas, I am always hoping for a truly epic late afternoon thunderstorm. May is about grilling! Forget the hot dogs. I marinade meats for days in sauces that I looked up on epicurious.com. (Tuesday night’s dinner was pork kebabs in a molasses-serrano chile marinade.)
So diving back down into and swmming through all of my books in storage, I tried to find something that would speak to my May craze. I came across my copy of the Norton Anthony of English Literature: 16th Century and early 17th Century. So paging through it, I thought I’d dedicated this post to another May-enthusiast, Robert Herrick.
Most people remember him for his carpe diem poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.” (Here’s the most famous reading of the poem from Dead Poets Society BTW, Keating gives a complete misreading of it.) Despite being an Anglican priest, he wrote about giving up drinking and then falling back off the wagon (“His Farewell to Sack,” “The Welcome to Sack”), gawking at a woman from behind (“Upon Julia’s Clothes”), and wet dreams (“The Vine”). However, his poem that is most on my mind right now is “Corinna’s Gone A-Maying.” What Herrick describes is not a group of children dancing around the Maypole.
Herrick writes about something more akin to Burning Man.
Rather Herrick depicts a pagan fertility rite, so to speak. The poem opens with the speaker telling Corinna to wake less she miss the May Day festivities. Herrick goes on to recount a world in which the line between nature and civilization is blurred: Corinna should forget finding jewels for her gown or hair since the forest will deck her out in leaves (lines 17-20); the fields will turn into streets and streets into parks (line 30); and branches of trees will decorate every porch. Just as Corinna’s village appears to return to a more natural state, so do the inhabitants.
Many a green gown has been given,
Many a kiss, both odd and even;
Many a glance, too, has been sent
From out the eye, love’s firmament;
Many a jest told of the keys betraying
This night, and locks picked; yet we’re not a-Maying.
Corrina gets her green dress from rolling in grass amorously with a young lover. “Odds and evens” was a kissing game, kind of like blind man’s bluff or our modern equivalent of spin-the-bottle. The “keys betraying locks” suggest people sneaking into each other’s rooms at night. So when the speaker urges Corinna to come out and “go a-Maying,” he is really expressing his own impatience to join in this orgiastic festival.
Don’t think that the poem was simply just about a priest getting a young girl out for quicky to celebrate May. You have to understand that Herrick was living through an incredibly turbulent period in English history. He was a cavalier, a person who drank, had random sex, led a hedonistic life, and wrote poetry celebrating all of it.
However, being a cavalier was a political choice in a way. In the first few decades of the 16th century, the Puritans were gaining more power. Now, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the Puritans wanted to purify the English Church, hence get rid of anything that was not strictly mentioned in the Bible. While they had their sights mostly on the institution of bishops, there were other parts of English culture they wanted to get rid of, particularly the May festivals. (The May Festivals had been a significant aspect of English village culture. In 1617, James I’s government issued the Declaration of Sports, that listed May games as the activities that were permitted on Holy Days. His son Charles I reissued it in 1633. Some saw it as a way for Charles to gain control over those Puritan preachers, who resisted his attempts to stress uniformity within the Anglican Church.)Parliament, mainly controlled by the Puritan factions, actually banned May festivals and Christmas in 1644. Yes, the Puritans cancelled Christmas!
(Their primary reasoning was two-fold: Christmas has the word “mass” in it [hence, Catholic] and it really is not in the Bible but is pagan at its roots, which it is.) Okay, back to Herrick. Well, in writing a poem celebrating a pagan fertility rite, especially what was endorsed by the Episcopal Church, Herrick was participating in a larger social, political, religious fight. Who knew that drinking and living a lascivious life could be so meaningful?
As I mentioned in my opening post to this blog, a film adaptation of Paradise Lost is currently in pre-production. I am still very ambivalent about this cinematic endeavor: while there is evidence to suggest that Milton originally thought his work meant for the stage (the original version was in 10 books, easily translated into a 5 act play), much of the poem is concerned with how the celestrial cannot be communicated through refernece to the senses. As Raphael responds to Adam’s request for him to recount events otherworldly:
High matter thou enjoin’st me, O prime of men,
Sad task and hard; for how shall I relate
To the human sense th’invisible exploits
Of warring spirits? (V. 563-66)
Raphael is conveying here the difficutly in communicating that which is immaterial to a being whose thoughts are materially based. Milton subtly communicates to us a warning not to read the poem literally but appreciate the metaphors used to describe the heavenly war, which even fall short. (Makes the decision to shoot the film in 3-D even more egregious.)
At any rate, according to an article on Salon.com, there is a tentative frontrunner for the part of Satan, Bradely Cooper. Regarding Cooper’s physical attributes, this is actually a great choice: while being ripped, Copper has rather an impish quality about his good looks.
Acting-wsie, though, I am not sure that he is ready to pull off the tragic hero role. His body of work so far has been comedic – I remember him first as the stereoptyped misogynist jock who loses the girl in “Wedding Crashers” (2005). In his breakout role as Phil in “The Hangover” (2009), I saw a bit of the tempter figure. But I am concerned if he will be able to pull off the grandiose, baroque arch-rebel to deliver Miltonic verse such as “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven” or “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” (I.254-55 and 262).
Yesterday, May 2nd, 2011, saw the 400th anniversary of arguably the most influential piece of literature in the English canon, the King James Bible (KJB). In USA Today Henry G. Brinton, the pastor of Fairfax Presbyterian Church in Virginia and author of Balancing Acts: Obligations, Liberation, and Contemporary Christian Conflicts(2006), wrote a fascinating piece entitled “America, the biblical.” Brinton complicates the question of whether the U.S. is a Christian nation or not. While noting that none of our founding documents actually reference God or Christ/Jesus, Brinton reminds us that much of our political rhetoric draws on the KJB: “But our use of the King James Version has made us a biblical nation, and we will be such a country as long as we turn to this book for inspiration and guidance.” In being a “biblical nation,” according to Brinton, many of our defining political speeches, from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to President Obama’s reference to being our “brother’s keeper,” have been inspired by the language of the KJB. Brinton further remarks on how that in being a “biblical nation” the U.S. is decidedly not a Christian nation. (I particularly enjoyed his pointing out that only 3 of the 10 Commandments would be applicable to civil law – “thou shall not kill,” “thou shall not steal,” and “thou shall not bear false witness” – while one would be utterly unenforceable – “thou shall honor thy mother and father” – and one would actually be unconstitutional – “thou shall have no other gods before me.”) In a way, Brinton touches on a central tension out which was born the KJB, that between politics and religion.
The KJB comes out of period in English history marked by great religious/political contention. Adam Nicolson does a superb job in chronicling the production of the KJB in God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (2003). For Nicolson the KJB was meant primarily to unite an increasingly polarized kingdom. In 1603 James VI of Scotland became James I of England, ascending the throne of a nation caught up in religious conflict.
Essentially, the English religious views could be broken down into three camps: the Anglicans, Puritans/Non-Conformists/Congregationalists, and the recusant English Catholics. James I’s ascension brought with it a sense that a new era was about to begin. Those who felt that the English Church had not gone far enough in reforming itself from the Roman Catholic Church saw an opportunity to call for the changes to the state church they longed for. This group that further wished to purify the Anglican Church, hence the name Puritans, finally on January 1st, 1603 got an audience with the King. At this meeting, James brought together voices from the Anglican and Puritan camps to hear their sides. Essentially, the Puritans, represented by John Reynolds, John Knewstub, and Laurence Chaderton, asked for two changes: 1) a dismantling of the episcopacy and 2) a new translation of the Bible. These two requests were actually intertwined: the Puritan thinking was that more accurate translation of the Bible would reveal that the institution of bishops was not biblically sanctioned. What these petitioners failed to realize was that James saw the episcopacy as vital to maintaining the monarchy: the dismantling of the episcopacy would mean a decentralizing of the English Church. Ironically, James would comply with the Puritan wish for a new translation of the Bible, but in such a way that would run contrary to their intended goal of greater religious freedom. As Nicolson succinctly sums up James’ reaction to Reynold’s request:
Reynolds had wanted, when all the code was stripped away, a strict Puritan Bible, non-episcopal, the naked work of God, truly transmitted. And to that request James had said in effect, “Yes; I will give you the very opposite of what you ask.” (60)
The KJB, from beginning to end, was a state produced text, “a translation that was to be uniform. . . to be revised by the bishops. . . then given, for goodness’ sake, to the Privy Council, in effect a central censorship committee with which the government would ensure that its stamp was on the text” (Nicolson 60). Where the Puritans hoped for greater religious freedom through being allowed to have a new translation of the Bible, James I saw to it that the new translation would be entirely within the state’s purview by handing the project over to the bishops. The KJB was intended to strengthen the state’s control over religion.
It should be noted here that the KJB translators were not starting from scratch. Far from it. There had been a tradition of translating the Bible into English. One of the earliest attempts at translating parts of the Bible into English dates back to the early part of the 11th century. Ælfric, who served as Abbot of Eynsham from 1005 to his death, translated the Old Testament into English. Here’s an excerpt of Ælfric’s translation of Genesis 3:1-3:
Éac swelċe sēo nǣdre wæs ġeappre þonne ealle þa ođre nietenu þe God ġeworhte ofer eorđan; and sēo nǣdre cwæđ to þam wife: “Hwy forbead God eow þaet ge ne ǣten of ælcum treowe binnan Paradisum?” (Yes, this is English, only a very old form of it.)
Here’s the KJB version of the same verse:
Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
The KJB translators did have more recent translations to refer to, such as William Tyndale’s English version of the Old and New Testaments. Interesting when considering the spirit of state control under which the KJB was produced, Tyndale’s was the one that they drew the most on.
Tyndale was a political/religious refugee, who had fled Henry VIII’s England to avoid state censorship. The Tyndale translation was printed over a period of nine years, from 1525 through to 1534. While citing Tyndale enthusiasts’ estimate that 94% of the KJB comes from Tyndale’s translation, Nicolson points out that these two translations reflect different intents: “[Tyndale] was. . . a straight Lutheran, looking for immediacy and clarity in scripture which would shake off the thick layers of medieval scholasticism and centuries of accumulated ecclesiastical dust. The Jacobean Translators had a different commission: to evolve a scriptural rhetoric which could be both as plain and dignified as Tyndale’s and as rich and resonant as any book in the language” (222). When looking over the history of the KJB, the tension between state and church becomes central to understanding its production and legacy, a point that Nicolson helps modern readers of the KJB understand.
Anthony Funari
