Stuart Sillars
When the group of editors of the King James Bible had concluded their initial yet monumental work of producing a translation to replace the Elizabethan “Bishops’ Bible” for use throughout the realm, they assembled in Stationers’ Hall. Each of the group in turn read aloud his edited text, after which the body of editors discussed the sounds and rhythms of each passage. It was a remarkable occasion, and most likely unparalleled in the history of translation practice in taking into account the major purpose of the volume, to be read aloud to a public still largely illiterate. The meeting revealed a central dimension of its conception: the aim of conveying moral and narrative elements within the frame of the language in performance—what might well be termed the rhythms of devotion. The full title reveals the purpose, as well as the process, of the book, as well as revealing a little something of the rhythmic fall of the work itself:
THE HOLY BIBLE, Conteyning, the Old Testament, and the New: Newly Translated out of the Originall tongues: & with the former Translations diligently compared and revised, by his Majesties Speciall Comandement. Appointed to be read in Churches. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, Printer to the Kings most Excellent Majestie. ANNO DOM. 1611.
That such a process should be undertaken—and at the end of a long editing mechanism that had begun in 1604—is rich in suggestiveness about the state of the language. At a time when the move towards a print culture for the educated minority was already strong, the event reveals an awareness of the sounds of words and sentences when read aloud that, while involving elements of political control of the liturgy that to some are uncomfortable, is still remarkable in revealing a sensitivity to the way the movement of words may convey things above their literal, commonly accepted meanings. This is something that goes far beyond the rules of classical rhetoric taught in Elizabethan grammar schools, which rarely appear in the Bible. Instead, the translation rests on more immediately accessible variations of stress, syllable length, word order, and sentence pattern. What is also remarkable is that, in private performance at Stationers’ Hall, it resembles in no small measure—in setting, in alternation of readers, and, indeed, in physical proximity of speaker and auditors—the performance of plays at the Inns of Court, of which the best known is Twelfth Night, first performed in the hall of the Middle Temple on Candlemasday 1602.
The event in Stationers’ Hall is the most visible manifestation of something that has in general escaped the concern of most Shakespeare scholars, although readers and playgoers would surely have caught and valued, if unconsciously, the resonances of the language when read or recited. The identification of biblical quotations, allusions, and references within the plays has been a much larger concern, part of the greater endeavor to identify sources and, in some cases, explore the critical and conceptual value of such resonances in the plays. Shakespeare was not, of course, present at the reading, and the King James Bible came late in his career. But the other Bibles of the time—the Bishops’ Bible; the Geneva Bible, printed in Switzerland to avoid prosecution and perhaps best known among serious readers who were Shakespeare’s contemporaries; and the Great Bible, composed at the command of Thomas Cromwell, for use in the Church of England under the rule of Queen Elizabeth—were an insistent and recurrent part of the verbal culture and weekly experience of the nation. The King James built on the translation practice of these versions, all of which were similarly concerned, if anything to a greater extent because of the lower literacy levels, with the effect when read aloud: it is the sound of the words and the rhythm of the sentences on which much of the import rests. We should also remember that, even at the start of the seventeenth century, the Bible was a compendious source of stories; battles, feuds, romances, parables—all of the forms that underlay the drama and prose writing of the period available to the literate elite—were now made available through the medium of scriptural readings. Hence the importance of sounds and rhythms, and hence the gatherings in Stationers’ Hall.
How, then, does this quality, of meaning above lexis within sacred text, manifest itself in Shakespeare’s plays? At a time when critics are concerned more with issues of politics, gender, and exchanges with event or popular writings, and performers with character, ensemble, or ideology, the texts themselves, save in editorial searches for the chimerical ideal original, have largely fallen out of concern. But exploring the plays more closely can reveal some tantalizing parallels between the ways in which the sounds and rhythms of liturgical prose—the Elizabethan Great Bible, and Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, which Shakespeare knew, and on which the readings in Stationers’ Hall built—find resonance in form and function within some of their most striking moments.
In the long first scene of the fourth act of Henry V, the king embarks on a lengthy, discursive speech to Michael Williams. Its import is that a soldier who dies bravely in battle, even if the battle has been caused wrongly by the king, has still died bravely, and bears no blame. It is a long speech, a speech of justification, working by argument and example. Editors point out that it contains three allusions to the Old Testament. The phrase “War is His beadle, war is His vengeance” (4.1.152-53) is likened to Amos.ix.2-4; “Where they feared the death they have borne life away, and where they would be safe they perish” (4.1.155-56) echoes Matthew xvi.25; “dying so, death is to him advantage; or, not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained” (4.1.162-64) extends Philippians i.21. Such resemblances should not surprise us: the speech is, after all, something of a sermon, and the presence of biblical allusions in such an explanatory frame is much to be expected in the work of any who has attended the services of the Church of England, according to law, and heard the Bible read in his native tongue at least once every Sunday. Yet there are many things about this speech that relate to the language of the Church that do surprise and are, perhaps, much more revealing about the relation between Shakespeare’s plays and the language of the Bible and the Elizabethan prayer book.
Two elements stand out in this passage and offer us pause for thought about its relation to the language of the Elizabethan church. One is that it is written in prose, not verse; the other is that editors have commented on resemblances of idea, not specific utterance, to biblical passages. Together, the two suggest a larger quality in the passage, and in the many others of which it is representative: it is in the rhythms of the passage that it reveals the influence of the cadence of the Book of Common Prayer, which are as powerful a force as the mature iambic line inherited from Marlowe. If Shakespeare gained from his predecessor a form of contrapuntal richness and vigor, in which the natural patterns of the language are balanced against a structure of metrical restraint, he also gained from Cranmer’s Prayer Book in its slightly modified Elizabethan form an instrument of at least equal energy but much greater flexibility. This is one dimension of the rhythms of devotion that are my concern: the ways in which the sounds and movements of the Prayer Book, as much as its contents or its implications of the life of the spirit, and still less the controversy over Shakespeare’s Catholicism, are resonant in the plays.
Look again at the speech from Henry V. Or, better, read it aloud:
So if a son that is by his father sent about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the imputation of his wickedness, by your rule, should be imposed upon his father that sent him. Or if a servant, under his master’s command transporting a sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the business of the master the author of the servant’s damnation. But this is not so. (4.1.134-40)
The two long first sentences, each formed of balanced, progressive clauses presenting event and consequence, show a variation of rhythm in which short, direct nouns or pronouns alternate with longer abstract substantives. The directness of “So if a son that is by his father sent” is balanced against “about merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea,” and, in the second sentence, the opening “or if a servant” is matched with the vigorous pulse of “be assailed by robbers and die in many irreconciled iniquities.” As entireties, the two sentences balance each other, the running events and the flatter, more stable rhythms of the personal relationships producing a kind of aural mirror effect. After this reflection, the falsity of the equation both offer is presented directly in forthright, monosyllabic hammerstrokes: “But this is not so.” The logic of the whole is conveyed in similar strokes: “So if . . . ”; “Or if . . . ”; “But this is not so.”
Now look at one of the New Testament lessons, the Gospel, for the fifth Sunday after Epiphany, Matthew 13.24-30, as it appears in the Boke of Common Prayer published by the Church of England under the Act of Uniformity for use in all the churches in the land. This was the Prayer Book that Shakespeare would have known and that remained in use until the minor revisions of 1928 and the far larger reforms of the 1970s. The text is taken from the Elizabethan Great Bible:
The kyngdome of heaven is like unto a man which sowed good seede in his fielde: but while men slept, his enemy came, and sowed tares among the wheat and went his way. But when the blade was sprong up, and had brought forth fruite, there appeared the tares also. So the seruauntes of the housholder came, and sayd unto him: Sir, didst not thou sowe good seede in thy field? from whence then hath it tares? He said unto them: the enuious man hath done this. The seruantes sayde unto hym: wylt thou then that we go and weede them up? But he sayd: nay, lest whyle ye gather up the tares ye plucke up also the wheate with them: let both growe together untyll the harvest, and in the time of harvest, I will say to the reapers: gather ye first the tares, and bind them together in sheaves to be brent, but gather the wheate into my barne.
Here there is the same pattern of balanced clauses, and the same precise pointing of event: But . . . So . . . He said . . . They said . . . But. This is, if you like, a rhythm of argument; but what is striking is the same alternation of long and short words, of strong monosyllables that work as single hammerstrokes, and lighter unstressed words that move in a freer, more dynamic pattern. In this passage, for example, the short syllables present a far quicker movement towards the emphases at the end of each element, giving energy to each part and symmetry to the whole: “when the blade was sprung up, and had brought forth fruit.” Compare this with Henry’s “do sinfully miscarry upon the sea” and “imposed upon his father that sent him”: the movement, in both balance and in alternation of fast and slow, stressed and unstressed, dynamic and static, is the same.
It would, of course, be possible to discuss and analyze this in terms of spondees and dactyls, of anapaestic, iambic, and trochaic feet; but this would be to locate it within a completely different setting and show it as an academic exercise rather than the immediate statement of a pattern of thought and feeling in which one order is mysteriously transformed into another, the result of prolonged acquaintance with the first at a level beneath analysis. The rhythms of the changing language, assimilated at a level different from that of meaning, are at work in Henry’s speech and in a manner that, freed from the productive constraints of the iambic pentameter, reveal the continuity of the pulse of feeling and idea from the church to the theater.
What is particularly striking about this individual parallel is that it occurs in a passage of prose, delivered in what would then have been regarded as a low or intimate style. While tautly structured, it lacks the extreme balances of clause-within-clause complexity of the kind found in prose of a generation before, the much derided structures of John Lyly’s Euphues his England. There, the balances are ends in themselves, the ideas contorted to fit within them. In the two passages cited above, the rhythms follow from those of thought and idea, a language naturally fit for the parable that is the identity of Henry’s speech and the Gospel. The effect is one of considerable power for readers and listeners who have shared the experience of reading and hearing the Epistles, the Gospels, and the Collects Sunday after Sunday, and in some cases every day. It is achieved regardless of the words’ meaning, or the argument borne along by rhythmic structure: it is the music that carries the language and that, in this case, within the dramatic current of the action, conveys security through similarity. Looking at the play in terms of a fictive actuality, it would be easy to argue that the simplicity has a persuasive effect upon the listeners onstage, to judge by the compliant response given by Williams: “’Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head; the king is not to answer it” (4.1.167-68)
Yet this is only a part of the effect. What also makes the response powerful is that the language follows the same pattern of simple alternation of weak and strong and offers a summary of the king’s speech by using the same rhythmic forms, but in a shorter and more compressed way. The line is, in fact, equivalent to a verse of a psalm, the second part reinforcing the first in one of the common patterns of Hebraic poetry translated into English by Myles Coverdale in 1531 and retained for use in Cranmer’s Prayer Book of a decade later. In its relation to the preceding lines, it reveals the influence of Henry upon Williams through the latter’s adoption of the former’s speech patterns, adding psychological truth to aesthetic completion.
Contrast that with the language of Henry’s great speech beginning “Upon the king!” (4.1.203). It is constructed quite differently, through the ordering processes of the pentameter. What is striking here, of course, is that in its form it directly inscribes the very separation from the rest of humanity that is its apparent concern. In moving from the immediacy of the language of the earlier speech, it reveals the separateness of the monarch that Henry feels so acutely. In moving from the rhythms of the Prayer Book and the Bible to the language of the stage and the study, it betrays the isolation of the monarch—but, more important, it reveals in the earlier speech the shared resonance of the English Bible, a language that conveys a corporate understanding at a level far above that of ideas of loyalty, duty, patriotism, and perhaps also of belief, instead growing from repeated, shared hearing in chapels and churches across the land. Shakespeare heard it; his audience heard it; and in the exchange between the king and Williams is presented a microcosm of this shared aural experience, the rhythm of devotion that is a pulse running way beneath the burden of the ideas it carries.
Rhythms of language are matched by longer rhythms of action and event in the plays, and while these rest on patterns established in earlier English and European dramatic forms, they also owe much to the rhythms of the church. To these, the movements of the Book of Common Prayer are central. The work of Thomas Cranmer in the 1540s, the book was given limited revision after its rejection in the years of Marian Catholicism and became the fundamental document by which the ritual observances of the Anglican communion were followed. It defined the orders for Matins and evensong, the morning and evening services of the church, and also the order for Holy Communion, devised in place of the Catholic Mass at the time of the Reformation. It prescribed which biblical readings would be given at each service throughout the year, bringing together the language and narratives of the Great Bible and the observance of the everyday services; doubtless, this tradition made the reading aloud of the King James Bible such an essential part of the editing process. But it also did something else: by inscribing the movements of clergy and congregation throughout each service, it established a pattern of act and position. Its rhythms ensured a corporate act of worship, all standing, kneeling, or remaining silent at appropriate times. Repeated over weeks and months, in many cases every day, these movements became themselves an act of observance, something of infinitely deeper significance than simple corporeal instructions. In many of the plays, their resonances are clear—in the moments when stage actions, revealed through speech or stage directions, become part of an exploration of spirituality and the moral basis of action.
One of the most striking such events, the significance of which is lost to most audiences of the twenty-first century, occurs in Hamlet. What makes this especially significant is the way in which the moment engages with issues central to the play from the perspectives of performance, editing, and criticism. First, it poses a simple dilemma of what physical posture is adopted and when; secondly, it engages with the stage directions present in one version but not in others; finally, it allows further philosophical exploration of the character of Hamlet and the question of his identity and inactivity. All of these are given a degree of illumination by seeing the scene within the wider aura of spiritual experience by which for the contemporary audience it would have been surrounded.
The scene in question is 3.3. In the preceding scene, Claudius has revealed his guilt by rising sharply when the player king is killed by the player murderer. Hamlet has completely outwitted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but the king then talks to them in terms that make clear a darker purpose within its apparent simplicity:
I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range. Therefore prepare you:
I your commission will forthwith dispatch,
And he to England shall along with you.
The terms of our estate may not endure
Hazard so near’s as doth hourly grow
Out of his brows. (3.3.1-7)
At the start of 3.3, Polonius advises the king that he will conceal himself in the queen’s chamber to overhear what Hamlet tells her. All this suggests a turning point. Hamlet has shown that he knows that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are being used by the king to spy on him; the king knows that he has revealed his guilt and is prepared to have Hamlet removed in language that hints heavily at murder—“dispatch” and “may not endure / Hazard” hint at something more permanent that escorting Hamlet away as the basis of the “commission.” Hamlet’s visit to his mother suggests a final turn, perhaps to reveal her innocence or involvement in Old Hamlet’s murder. Presented in a much later murder mystery, the sequence would suggest that something violent will happen, and soon: either Hamlet will wreak his revenge, in the approved revenge tragedy manner, or Claudius will engineer his death before this may happen. All these elements make what actually occurs next especially important in the play’s growth.
After a short exchange with Polonius, Claudius begins his lengthy, tortuous soliloquy “Oh my offence is rank” (3.3.36). It presents a complex thought process that twists back on itself after finding its conclusions blocked off, when repentance is defeated by guilt and when prayer is denied him by the absence of true repentance. After the feverish appeal “Help, angels!—Make assay,” he ends, lamely, “All may be well” (3.3.69, 72). At this point, many modern editions add the stage direction “Kneels” before the entry of Hamlet. The direction appears only in the First Quarto, until recently known as the “Bad Quarto” and thought to have been reconstructed from the memories of two of the original actors. Later Quartos and the Folio have no such direction, and thus many modern editions omit it. Hamlet’s first sentence, “Now might I do it pat, now a is a-praying” (3.3.73), would have been thought indication enough that Claudius was on his knees—and it is this that makes the passage so significant when seen within the rhythmic frame of the Prayer Book.
Cranmer’s “Order for Holy Communion” is a carefully constructed movement towards the administration of the sacraments, which goes through a series of stages to ensure that only those who are in a fit spiritual state may receive them. After the prayer for “the whole state of Christes Church militant here in earth,” there follows a prayer in which the priest urges the congregation to “consider what St. Paule wryteth to the Corinthians, how he exhorteth all persons diligently to trye and examine them selues before they presume to eate of that breade, and drinke of that cuppe.” If as a result they approach “with a truly penitent heart and lively faith,” the prayer continues, “we be one with Christ.” But it also warns “So is the daunger great, if we receyve the same unworthyly.” The succeeding sentences advise those who are guilty of “any other greeuous cryme, bewayle your sinnes and come not to this holy Table.” The advice given and the consequences pondered and resolved by the congregation are followed by the direct invitation:
You that doe truly and earnestly repent you of your synnes, and be in love and charitie with your neighbours, and entende to leade a newe lyfe, folowyng the commaundments of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy waies: Drawe nere, and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort: make your humble confession to almightie God before this congregacion here gathered together in his holy name, mekely knelyng upon your knees. (Harrison 386)
There follows the general confession, with its consequent act of absolution, and the service continues with the comfortable words and proper prefaces for feast days. Then the bread and wine is prepared, given and received—or, more simply put, the service proceeds to the sacraments that give forgiveness, absolution, and oneness with God.
The sequence of events in Hamlet is briefer but fundamentally similar, and it rests on the same foundations: the diligent examination, the desire for forgiveness while the guilt is still strong. Yet the key point comes when Claudius kneels. Hamlet, watching him, assumes that he is at prayer and has thus completed his examination of his own conscience. Meekly kneeling upon his knees, as Hamlet sees him, Claudius is in the physical and, by implication, the spiritual condition to approach the throne of God and enter a state of forgiveness. For this reason, Hamlet cannot kill him, since he assumes that he has received absolution and is one of “you that doe truly and earnestly repent you of your synnes.” It is thus a direct consequence that, should he then be killed, his soul will fly up to heaven. For this reason, Hamlet refuses to kill him and so send him to everlasting peace. The logic of all the speeches in the play is corrupt and tortured, a dark parody of the sequence of the prayer book: but only if it is seen within the frame of the move to the communion table after self-examination does its full force reveal itself. No audience in 1601 would have failed to realize this: the movement in this scene is a somber reinvention of the spiritual rhythm of the communion service, and, in an age of universal observation, if not necessarily universal belief, this would have been deeply shocking.
Put into words, especially words of academic analysis, this series of associations sounds intricate and tendentious; it is always hard to explain things that, in an earlier age and different culture, were self-evident at a level deep beneath argument. The processes, and the rhythms, that I have explored here will appear strange and distant to those who have not grown up within anything like the religious community of Shakespeare’s own time—or, for that matter, of the Anglican church even as recently as the 1960s, before the displacement of services still fundamentally those devised by Cranmer, and the Bible heard by the committee of translators in Stationers’ Hall. But the resonances are powerfully there, and the attempt to hear them today enriches not only the texts of the plays but the wider, larger, and deeper experience, sensory and spiritual, world within word, of those who originally heard them in and around Shakespeare’s plays.
Edwards, Philip, ed. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, updated ed. By William Shakespeare. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Gurr, Andrew, ed. King Henry V, updated ed. By William Shakespeare. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Harrison, Douglas, ed. The First and Second Prayer Books of King Edward VI. London: Dent, 1968.
Parker, Matthew. The. holie. Bible conteynyng the olde Testament and the newe. Imprynted at London: in powles Churchyarde by Richarde Jugge, printer to the Queenes Maiestie, [1568].
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, updated ed. Ed. Philip Edwards. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
———. King Henry V, updated ed. Ed. Andrew Gurr. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.