THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

Protestant historians and propagandists exploited avidly.
The religious and political negatives of Mary’s reign were assiduously reversed by Henry VIII’s third surviving
child, Elizabeth. Largely devoid of particular conviction, though never short of forcefully expressed opinions,
Elizabeth chose religious and political expediency, striving throughout her reign to shape and consolidate a national
Church which eschewed both Roman excess and Genevan severity. The second Prayer Book of Edward VI’s reign was
reissued in 1559, with some significantly ‘Protestant’ nuances removed, and in 1562 the often ambiguous set of
doctrinal formulas, known subsequently as the ‘Thirty-Nine Articles’, was approved by Convocation after Elizabeth
had personally interfered with the wording and expression of two of them. The via media, the middle way of the
Church of England, became the established norm of Elizabethan religious life, imposed by law and generally accepted
by the mass of the population. The Anglican settlement was, however, anathematized both by recusant Catholics
(especially after Pope Pius V’s excommunication of the Queen in 1570) and by an influential number of extreme
Protestants who viewed an episcopal Church with a fixed liturgy, calendar, ceremonies, and vestments as unscriptural
and corrupt. ‘Puritanism’, often
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allied to and inspired by the radical Presbyterian example of John Knox’s Scotland, became increasingly vociferous
and contentious from the 1570s onwards. It also left its own distinctive mark on the religious and literary history of
Britain.
The Reformers of the English Church placed a consistent stress on the use of the vernacular in worship and on the
importance of the Holy Scriptures in a scholarly translation which freed them from the distortions and inaccuracies of
the Latin Vulgate. The twenty-fourth of Elizabeth’s Articles of Religion insisted that ‘it is a thing plainly repugnant to
the Word of God, and the custom of the Primitive Church’ that services should be conducted ‘in a tongue not
understanded of the people’. Before the principle of a vernacular liturgy had been established, it was already felt, in
both conservative and radical circles, that there was a need for an English Bible translated directly from its Hebrew
and Greek originals. When Cranmer instructed all parish priests to provide and display an English Bible in their
churches in 1538, the text sponsored by the Archbishop and by Thomas Cromwell was that of the lavishly printed
‘Great Bible’, revised and reissued, under Cromwell’s patronage, in 1540. This ‘Great Bible’ was a revision of the
work of several distinct translators, the most important of whom was William Tyndale (?1494-1536). Tyndale’s
influence on the text of the volume was both covert and posthumous. Having failed to gain official support for his
work, he had gone into exile in Germany in 1524. When copies of his translation of the New Testament arrived in
England two years later, the Bishop of London, Thomas More’s friend and ally, Cuthbert Tunstall, made desperate
attempts both to suppress and to discredit them as Lutheran infections. From his new base in Antwerp Tyndale issued
translations of the Pentateuch in 1530 and of the Book of Jonah in 1531; he also left a text of the Books of Joshua,
Judges, Ruth, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles in manuscript when he was arrested in 1535. He was executed as a
heretic by strangling and burning near Brussels in the October of the following year.
Tyndale expressed a steady confidence both in the ‘grace’ of the English language and in the potential propriety
of, as he put it, a ploughboy’s knowing the Scriptures better than a learned bishop. He pre-empted the charge that his
native tongue was an unfit vehicle for a translation of the Bible by insisting in his tract The Obedience of a Christen
man of 1528 that not only did the Greek language agree ‘more with the englysh then with the latyne’, but the
properties of Hebrew agreed ‘a thousande tymes moare’. The Hebrew texts, he claimed, could be translated word for
word into English ‘when thou must seke a compasse in the latyne and yet shalt have moch worke to translate in
welfaveredly’. Tyndale’s English version is straightforward, homely, unsolemn, and often monosyllabic. His serpent
assures Eve with the words ‘Tush ye shall not dye’ rather than with the more formal ‘Ye shall not surely die’ of the
now familiar 1611 version. He speaks of ‘shyre-towns’ in Roman Palestine and translates ‘centurion’ as ‘undercaptain’,
but to him are due the coinings of such significant Hebrew-based terms as ‘passover’ and ‘scapegoat’. When
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Tyndale renders the Greek words ‘ekklesia’ and ‘presbyteros’ into English he opts, however, for the fresh, but
accurate, translations ‘congregation’ and ‘senior’ rather than for ‘church’ and ‘priest’ in order to avoid terms which
might have implied that the modern ecclesiastical hierarchy was continuous with that of the age of St Paul. A great
deal of Tyndale’s pioneer translation survived largely intact, but unacknowledged, as the base from which the English
texts of the so-called ‘Geneva Bible’ of 1560 and of the ‘Authorized Version’ of 1611 were developed.
The first complete printed English Bible of 1535 was the work of a translator who appears to have been the master
of little Greek and distinctly less Hebrew. Miles Coverdale (1488-1568) who, like most of his sixteenth-century
successors, took over those books already translated by Tyndale for his edition, added versions of others derived
mostly from the Latin text of the Vulgate supplemented by reference to Martin Luther’s German Bible. His most