(Palo Alto) I recommend Healey’s 2023 history of 17th-century England as an important and enjoyable work.

I grew up thinking about this topic, since my Dad was a scholar of English intellectual life in the 1600s and he regularly taught British political history.

In that century, England was on a path toward global power and influence and was already forming the colonial societies that later became the USA, the Irish Republic, and the Anglophone Caribbean. England also experienced the ferment of revolution, radical political and religious ideas, and the Scientific Revolution. Key interpretive questions, such as the causes of the Civil War and the originality of the early Enlightenment, have long been contested; and the rival interpretations of Whig liberals, Marxists, evangelical Christians, and others have implications for the present. The events of 1640-1690 cast long shadows, and I wanted to get one current interpretation of them.

Healey meets my criteria for good historical writing. First, he makes broad points but is not locked onto a few reductive theses. He tends to emphasize the cultural aspects of the Civil War, particularly the clash between radical puritanism and traditional forms of recreation and worship that the Puritans sought to ban. This explanation may compete with political or economic accounts, but Healey doesn’t exclude a range of evidence as he makes a case for what he calls a “culture war.”

I was left thinking that it was unfortunate that a culture war coincided with the effervescence of republican ideas, because the backlash to puritans’ religious reforms may have prevented them from building a durable republic with a broad base of support. However, perhaps 17th-century political radicalism needed religious inspiration.

Second, Healey chooses stories with vivid protagonists to make serious points. For example, his title comes from a science-fiction novella of the same name that Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, published in 1666. Cavendish is a fascinating character, and Healey relates her life for several pages. But he chooses his stories to illustrate general patterns, not to entertain with zany anecdotes or to present historical figures as strange and colorful (as popular historians often do).

Finally, Healey documents facts, quotes, interpretations, and stories by citing a large number of primary and secondary sources. Although he wears his learning lightly, I felt in safe hands, since he has obviously read widely and carefully. This period is very well documented, compared to earlier times, and Healey takes advantage of the evidence. (For example, weekly and daily publications devoted to political news originated during the year 1641 and then proliferated manically.)

I learned much from The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, but a few larger points stand out for me.

I was surprised by the scale and cruel destructiveness of the Civil War. I knew about the set-piece battles but not the massacres.

I see more clearly how the intense political debates of the 1650s morphed into the intellectual debates and innovations of the Restoration period–the English Revolution shifting into the Scientific Revolution once many thinkers became disillusioned with political conflict.

I hadn’t realized the extent to which England developed economically from 1600 to 1700–with slavery serving an essential role in the nation’s substantial growth and development.

Healey doesn’t dwell on the following point, but he provides support for it. I would describe England in 1600 as a country with a monarch but very little national government. The government could not field a standing army or collect taxes from a broad spectrum of the society; it didn’t even have a rough idea how many people, farms, and businesses lay within its borders. One reason for high rates of violence was a lack of capacity for social control. Each Stuart monarch struggled with parliaments because the only way to obtain enough revenue to project power was to persuade the big landowners and towns to provide it by consent, although sometimes a king would amass enough money to rule for a time without the legislature.

In contrast, the England of 1700 had a government with considerable capacity. As Healey notes, it occupied the former location of the royal palace at Whitehall, while the monarchs moved west to St. James and Kensington. The government had officers, employees, and statistics. This is the fundamental reason that the monarchy was now much less significant and on it way to irrelevance.

See also: civility as equality; introducing republicanism; the Dutch secret; the oscillation between dictatorship and parliamentary institutions (a game theory model)

The post Jonathan Healey, The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 appeared first on Peter Levine.

Last week I wrote about my copy of the Rheims-Douai Bible, an English translation made by Catholics in 1582 and smuggled into Protestant England for Catholic laypeople to read. One of the translators, Edmund Campion, is now a saint, tortured to death for his secret work in England.

This Bible refutes the widespread myth that Catholics opposed translating and disseminating scripture. I think the myth sticks as a result of Protestant propaganda plus a desire to believe that religious bodies typically seek to control knowledge whereas technology (in this case, the printing press) liberates it.

I mentioned in passing that this Bible was printed in Douai, now a city in France, which then belonged to Philip II. I also inherited from my father a 1552 volume that describes some possessions of that monarch, who later became King of Spain, King of Portugal, King of Naples and Sicily, officially the King of England and Ireland for a few years, Duke of Milan, Lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, and the colonial ruler of the Americas from New Mexico to Peru. In my translation from the Spanish, it’s entitled The Most Happy Journey of the Highest and Most Powerful Prince, Don Philip, Son of the Emperor Charles V the Great, Through Spain and His Lands in Lower Germany, With a Description of All the Estates of Brabant and Flanders.

Douay is presented on pp. 161-3. It is a “very good and well-favored [suerte] town of Gallic Flanders on the banks of the River Scarpe.” It is the site of a “good monastery” that has produced several saints. Its jurisdiction extends over many nearby villages. In mid-paragraph, the text then launches into a description of the visit by the young Philip with his father, Charles V, “who came to eat at Orchies [now in France], which was made very fresh and special with fruits and bouquets, strewn in the streets as a sign of welcome, and there the prince first ate before entering Douay. … Out of the town came the burgomasters, knights, and counselors, very well accompanied, and in the field beyond was a flag with [pisaros – ?] and drums, and there were three hundred soldiers very well ordered in colorful arms and clothing, yellow and white, and at the gate of the city the clergy processed …” — and so on for a couple more pages.

The aim is evidently propagandistic, which doesn’t imply that the authors were insincere. Perhaps they thought that Philip was a “most happy” prince of a happy empire. He did, however, face a massive uprising in his Low Country dominions.

This book was written three decades before the English Bible was printed in Douai/Rheims, but it gives a flavor of the times, which were still feudal and chivalric.

See also: A 1582 Catholic translation of the Bible into English (note #3 from the Levine library)

Many people seem to believe that the medieval Church forbade translating the Bible into modern languages–in order to monopolize access to scripture–until a technological innovation (moveable type) and/or the Reformation liberated people to read the Bible in their own tongues.

This story is false: translations were regularly made during the Middle Ages. It also neglects a real obstacle to translating, which is the need to coin many new words and turns-of-phrase to render an ancient book into a new language–a task that often lags behind the emergence of the language itself.

I think it’s worth correcting this history because too many people are in the grip of technological determinism and don’t appreciate the cultural work involved in a task like translation.

I have inherited from my father a 1582 English Bible that was published in Rheims and Douai by exiled English Catholics, including St. Edmund Campion, who was later hanged, drawn, and quartered for his faith. They published this Bible to be smuggled into Protestant England for the secret and illegal use of Catholic recusants. (This is almost the opposite of the idea that Catholics were against translation.)

In the preface, the translators explicitly note that the Catholic Church had, “neither of old nor of late, ever wholly condemned all vulgar versions of Scripture, nor have at any time generally forbidden the faithful to read the same.” They promise to translate more accurately than the Protestants, who have worked out of “pride and disobedience.” They seek the “preservation of this divine worke from abuse and profanation” by rendering it better in English.

The title page says “cum privilegio.” Usually, the permission of the Church is designated with the phrases imprimatur and nihil obstat (“let it be printed” and “nothing stands in the way”). As far as I can tell–and I could easily be wrong about this–cum privilegio generally refers to the permission of a sovereign. France encompassed Rheims, and Douai was a Spanish Habsburg possession, so I wonder whether one of those governments authorized this Bible. Or does the phrase “cum privilegio” imply–falsely–that the book will be legal in Elizabeth’s realm?

For a flavor of the translation, consider Luke 2:8-10:

⁸ And there were in the same countrie shepheards watching, and keeping the night watches over their flocke.

⁹ And behold, an Angel of our Lord stood by them, and the brightnes of God did shine round about them; and they feared with a great feare.

¹⁰ And the Angel said to them: Feare not; for, behold, I evangelize to you great joy, that shal be to all the people…

The King James Version of this passage (1611) may be more familiar from Christmas celebrations:

⁸ And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

⁹ And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

¹⁰ And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

In the KJV, the Angel “bring[s] good tidings.” The Catholic 1582 version renders this phrase as “evangelize.” Perhaps the Douay–Rheims translators noticed that when St. Jerome had translated the New Testament from Greek into Latin, he left the Greek word evangelizo in his Latin text. They may have decided that they should import this word into their English Bible as well, for maximum accuracy. (And the English verb “evangelize” was already available in 1582.) In contrast, the proto-Protestant John Wykliffe had translated the Greek verb as “preach to you.” He saw the Angel in Luke as a preacher. The KJV’s “I bring good tidings” is more poetic than either alternative, in my opinion; and it’s justifiable, since the Greek verb means to bear a good message.

Here is Tintoretto’s painting of the shepherds, completed the same year:

See also: Coryat’s Crudities (note #1 from the Levine library); Reformation propaganda (note #2 from the Levine library); innovation in technology and the humanities; twenty-five thousand books to Bosnia.

This post is one of a series about books that my father left to me and that now line my office shelves at Tufts. More on how that happened is here.

In a folio volume of almost 2,000 dense pages, informally known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, John Foxe describes the persecutions of true-believing Christians since Roman times. Most of the book is devoted to its own period, when the persecutors were Catholics. This narrative helped create a sense of Protestantism as distinct from Roman Catholicism, and of England as a Protestant nation. It influenced and supplied some illustrations for my book The Anachronist.

Foxe’s Booke was a massive undertaking. It required the vast collaborative labor of collecting the names and stories of tortured and executed Protestants from across Europe. Foxe published numerous editions as new names arrived, and many copies were sold.

I have the 1576 edition, a great block of Gothic text with numerous engravings, most of which depict Protestants being tried or killed by Catholics. Here, for example, is the image on p. 1468, which shows “The talk between M[r] Bradford, and two Spanish Friers.”

John Bradford (1510–1555) was a Protestant clergyman who was burned by the government of Mary Tudor. The image shows him in his cell in the Tower of London, being interrogated by Spaniards. Queen Mary–“Bloody Mary” to Protestants–had married King Phillip II of Spain and brought England back into the Roman Church. However, by the time Foxe published an edition of his Booke in England, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth was “our gracious Lady now reigning,” and Spain was the hated enemy. This is an image of foreign treachery as well as Roman Catholic intolerance.

I thought of it last spring when I saw a painting in the Carthusian monastery of Granada, Spain. Painted in the early 1600s, it shows Thomas Cromwell condemning four Catholic clergy to death for their faith. He is likely sitting in an imagined Tower of London. That is where John Bradford met the Spanish friars under Queen Mary and where Cromwell had his own head chopped off (meriting a heroic account in Foxe’s book).

This painting hangs in the refectory, where the monks would dine, as part of a series entitled “The History of the Martyrs of England” by Juan Sánchez Cotán. Its didactic purpose was to remind the Spanish friars of Granada that Protestant Englishmen were their persecutors and foes.

The two images have some iconographic and stylistic similarities, although the “Gaoler” in the English print looks Mannerist (with his elongated body), and the Spanish painting is baroque.

Most of the specific stories that both sides collected were probably true. Each side interpreted the persecutions of their own co-religionists as clear evidence that their enemy was cruel. There is perhaps a lesson here about selection bias …

See also Coryat’s Crudities (note #1 from the Levine library); twenty-five thousand books to Bosnia; and my father’s books are going to James Madison’s desk at Montpelier.

For reasons that Angela Nelson describes in this article, my office at Tufts contains about 2,000 books printed before 1800 that my late father collected. Recently, I brought a ladder to campus so that I can see what’s on the upper shelves. I’m planning to pull down a book or two at a time and blog occasionally about what I find.

For instance, I found a 1611 edition of Coryat’s Crudities. It is in characteristically poor condition, split into two parts along its spine, with its cover loose. As a result, its market value is just about zero. However, the split reveals some considerably older, Gothic printed text that was used to repair it.

A previous owner has hand-written a kind of index on five blank pages at the front. I am not certain, but I think this owner was the Obadiah Cookson who signed his name on the title page in 1754. If that’s true, it’s fascinating, because the Obadiah Cookson known to Google lived nearby in the Massachusetts Colony. My Dad bought most of his books in London, so possibly this one has made three Atlantic crossings.

As for the book: Thomas Coryat or Coryate was an eccentric, a courtier who seems to have been more laughed at than laughed with–most popular as a butt of jokes. In 1608, during a period of peace, he traveled in Continental Europe and published his Crudities as an anthology of notes, letters, anecdotes, and poems that he ostensibly collected along the way. It was the first work in English to tell the story of William Tell and the first to describe the implement that we call a fork:

The Italian and also most strangers that are commorant in Italy, doe alwaies at their meales use a little Forks when they cut their meat. … so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the company of any others at meale, should unadvisedly touch the dish of meate with his fingers from which all at the table doe cut, he will give occasion of offence unto the company, as having transgressed the lawes of good manners, insomuch that for his error he shall be at the least brow-beaten, if not reprehended in wordes.

Coryat adds that he still uses a fork in England, and a friend has nicknamed him “Furcifer”–fork-bearer.

The first pages of the book are headed, “Certain opening and drawing dystiches [two-line poems] to be applyed as mollifying Cataplasmes [poultices] to the Tumours, Carnosities, or difficult Pimples full of matter appearing in the Author’s front …”

In other words, if the author’s main text offends, you can apply his rhyming couplets for relief. For example:

Our Author in France rode on horse without stirrup
And in Italie bathed himself in their syrrop. 

These lyric gems are all attributed–falsely–to B[en] Jonson, who is also credited with an introductory poem in honor of Coryat. A different “charitable friend” purportedly wrote the character-sketch that comes next in the volume. This text describes the “famous … Traveler and Gentleman Author of these … Crudities” thus:

He is an Engine, wholly consisting of extremes, a Head, Fingers, and Toes. For what his industrious Toes have trod, his ready Fingers have written, his subtle head dictating. He was set a-going for Venice the fourteenth of May Anno 1608 and returned home (of himself) the third of October following.

We’re told that he absolutely loves to travel:

The mere superscription of a letter from Zurich sets him up like a top: Basil or Heidelberg makes him spin. And at seeing the word Frankford, or Venice, though but on the title of a Booke, he is readie to break doublet, cracke elbowes, and overflowe the roome with his murmure. Hee is a mad Greeke, no lesse then a merry, and will buy his Egges, his Puddings, his Ginger-bread, yea, cobble his shoes in the Atticke dialect …

This fellow seems to have been a sort of Yorick, or a Jacobean Edward Lear, or a bit like Anthony Bourdain in his enthusiasm for travel and food and his self-deprecating humor. I think I would have liked him, although at times he may have talked too much about himself.

See also: a seventeenth-century Englishman inside the Great Pyramid

In The Reckoning (1994), Charles Nicholl carefully investigated the 1593 murder of Christopher Marlowe, arguing that it resulted from a struggle between the rival spy networks of Walter Raleigh and Robert Devereux (the 2nd Earl of Essex). It’s a compelling read and a brilliant use of scattered historical records to reveal hidden connections. But The Reckoning predated the current enthusiasm for actually mapping networks and crowd-sourcing the data. Now we have Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, a network map of documented figures from English history, 1500-1700. Using that tool, one can quickly create a map that shows the networks of Christopher Marlowe and Essex, with Raleigh appearing as an intermediary.

The diagram is by no means complete. For instance, Thomas Kyd is in the database but not linked to his former housemate, Marlowe; and the man who probably stabbed Marlowe, Ingram Frizer, isn’t on the map at all. But that isn’t a criticism, for the organizers ask visitors to add data. How many more stories will come to light as the map grows and historians use it?

(See also the murder of Marlowe and my version of “come with me.”)

“Kids today don’t appreciate Shakespeare.” That is a tired, perennial complaint. It is not the point that the eminent Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt makes in “Teaching a Different Shakespeare From the One I Love.” In fact, he admires the way his students approach and use Shakespeare, but he notes two important differences from his own response when he was their age. First, his students are less likely than he was to identify with Shakespeare, to claim his works as part of their inheritance. And second, they are less likely to be moved by the language itself, “touched by the subtle magic of his words.”

Both observations resonate with my own experience. My father was, like Greenblatt, a Jewish-American academic who claimed the English 16th century as his birthright. Dad was perfectly well aware that his ancestors lived in Eastern Europe in Shakespeare’s time and that people like them were banned from–and hated in–England. But if someone had said that Shakespeare wasn’t really my father’s because he belonged to the English (or to gentiles), Dad would have taken those as fighting words. Like Greenblatt, he might have said that the renaissance heritage “was mine as if by birthright, for the simple reason that English was my native tongue. All that I needed to do was to immerse myself in it passionately.” And just as the literature of renaissance England was ours by virtue of our language, so the political heritage of the English revolution (especially its radical wing) was ours because of its influence on the American liberal tradition. In fact, I may have grown up with the shadow of an unspoken idea that Shakespeare and his age belonged most authentically to people like my father, because he had chosen to devote sophisticated critical attention to the texts. Someone with an English name and an English accent who operated an olde tea shoppe in Stratford-on-Avon was, by comparison, an interloper.

Although I recognize huge differences of context and circumstances, I would suggest a rough analogy to the special affection that many African-American Christians feel for the King James’ Version (KJV) of the Bible, which was the other great literary achievement of Shakespeare’s era. As Adelle Banks writes:

The Rev. Cheryl Sanders, an ordained minister and professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, said the KJV’s soaring language can uplift listeners, especially those who have been oppressed.

“It’s a loftiness to the language that I believe appealed to people who are constantly being told, ‘You don’t count. You’re nobody. You’re at the bottom rung of the ladder,'” said Sanders, who has written about black Christians’ use of the KJV. “If I can memorize a verse of Scripture, it gives me a certain sense of dignity.” …

“Although I think young black people are using other translations and finding them useful, we’ll always have a sentimental attachment to King James,” said [Rev. Joseph] Lowery, a retired United Methodist minister who marched with the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

I would add that the KJV echoes throughout the great canon of African American writing, including, of course, the works of Dr. King: “Let justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” (Cf. Amos 5:24.)

Rev. Lowery notes a generational shift when he observes that “young black people are using other translations.” Greenblatt suggests two causes for the similar shift that he observes: a growing tendency to treat authors as alien if they are not demographically similar to the reader, and a shrinking sense of direct, affective awe in response to written poetry.

In assessing these changes, I would avoid polemic. Everyone can decide for herself whether to identify with–and claim–long-dead authors and how to respond to written words. Greenblatt’s students are responding to Shakespeare in creative ways that enrich the culture. I am not saying they are wrong. But I would offer two suggestions:

First, you can claim Shakespeare as yours if you speak English, whether it is a mother tongue or a second language. That is an authentic choice, even if your religion, gender, race, and national origin are very different from his. When presented with the Bard as a model, one political response is to say, “Shakespeare was an old white Christian man from the colonial power, and I am not.” A different political response is: “Shakespeare’s words are mine as much as yours, and if you deny my right to them, I will challenge you.” The latter is no less radical or potentially subversive. Which response to choose is a complex and personal matter, and I don’t object to either. I just want to suggest that the second option is available to anyone. And it may be the path less taken today.

Second, I worry that it is becoming increasingly difficult to hear the power and resonances of very fine written language. Culture is increasingly visual and oral, which expands our capacities in some respects but possibly weakens our ability to absorb the special power of the written word.

We are living at a time of incessant communication. By one estimate, more words were recorded in 2002 alone than in all of human history up through 1999. The increase since then has been exponential. Even the older formats are exploding in scale. About half a million new book titles are published every year in English, whereas about 147 books were licensed annually in England in Shakespeare’s day: a 3,400-fold increase. When communications arrive in a ceaseless deluge, it may require crude and explosive language to capture attention.

One source of literary depth and power is allusion. But in order for an allusion to work, the writer and the reader must know the same referents. An excellent reason to study Shakespeare and the KJV is that they have echoed so pervasively through such diverse texts. There are still millions who can hear those echoes, as others can hear Quranic references in classical Arabic or the Shijing reverberating in modern East Asian verse. But when new text is piped around the world by the terabyte, the chances fall that an audience will recognize any given referent. The most widely shared references are from contemporary mass culture, which tends itself to have thin resonances.

I was pretty absorbed and awestruck when I saw live Shakespeare as a child and as a teenager. The words themselves could bedimm the noontide sun and call forth the mutinous winds. I think that response is less likely today, not because the language has evolved so much further from Elizabethan English, nor because there is anything wrong with today’s kids, but because a child is exposed to a much larger quantity of professionally produced, highly emotional drama: constantly streaming videos of all kinds. A play has much more to compete with.

We also live at a time of manic linguistic invention and expansion, when new words and phrases seem to enter the language daily, often duplicating existing choices and overriding traditional grammatical constraints. (Witness the constant turning of nouns into verbs in business English.) Shakespeare’s time offers certain parallels. The volume of public speech and printed communication was expanding rapidly then as well, and English vocabulary was growing. It is often claimed that Shakespeare personally added 1,500 or 2,000 words to English. Those numbers may be exaggerated because older sources have been lost, and scholars search Shakespeare’s works for alleged coinages without always consulting other surviving texts that might use the same words. But there is no doubt that Shakespeare and his contemporaries shared our predilection for inventing words, mixing sources, bending genres, and breaking all putative grammatical rules.

But they had to expand their language. English wasn’t very old, and it needed a much larger store of words, phrases, and tropes to rival Latin. You can often sense a writer of Shakespeare’s day struggling to convey an idea that now seems very straightforward, just because we have more resources. Today we don’t lack words and phrases, but we struggle to hear the resonances of the ones we have. We turn the noun “impact” into a verb without exploring the possibilities of verbs that have histories, like “affect,” “change,” “influence,” “modify,” “transform” (and many more).

I am not committed to linguistic conservatism as a principle; languages change as a result of wonderful human inventiveness. I agree with Greenblatt that multimedia adaptations and mashups of Shakespeare can be fantastic contributions. Yet we can perhaps profit more than usual by slowing down and hearing the depths of our linguistic inheritance.

[See also “signal” (a poem on this theme) and the political advantages of organized religion, in which I note the political power of “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones” and its roots in the KJV.]

“Kids today don’t appreciate Shakespeare.” That is a tired, perennial complaint. It is not the point that the eminent Shakespearean Stephen Greenblatt makes in “Teaching a Different Shakespeare From the One I Love.” In fact, he admires the way his students approach and use Shakespeare, but he notes two important differences from his own response when he was their age. First, his students are less likely than he was to identify with Shakespeare, to claim his works as part of their inheritance. And second, they are less likely to be moved by the language itself, “touched by the subtle magic of his words.”

Both observations resonate with my own experience. My father was, like Greenblatt, a Jewish-American academic who claimed the English 16th century as his birthright. Dad was perfectly well aware that his ancestors lived in Eastern Europe in Shakespeare’s time and that people like them were banned from–and hated in–England. But if someone had said that Shakespeare wasn’t really my father’s because he belonged to the English (or to gentiles), Dad would have taken those as fighting words. Like Greenblatt, he might have said that the renaissance heritage “was mine as if by birthright, for the simple reason that English was my native tongue. All that I needed to do was to immerse myself in it passionately.” And just as the literature of renaissance England was ours by virtue of our language, so the political heritage of the English revolution (especially its radical wing) was ours because of its influence on the American liberal tradition. In fact, I may have grown up with the shadow of an unspoken idea that Shakespeare and his age belonged most authentically to people like my father, because he had chosen to devote sophisticated critical attention to the texts. Someone with an English name and an English accent who operated an olde tea shoppe in Stratford-on-Avon was, by comparison, an interloper.

Although I recognize huge differences of context and circumstances, I would suggest a rough analogy to the special affection that many African-American Christians feel for the King James’ Version (KJV) of the Bible, which was the other great literary achievement of Shakespeare’s era. As Adelle Banks writes:

The Rev. Cheryl Sanders, an ordained minister and professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity, said the KJV’s soaring language can uplift listeners, especially those who have been oppressed.

“It’s a loftiness to the language that I believe appealed to people who are constantly being told, ‘You don’t count. You’re nobody. You’re at the bottom rung of the ladder,'” said Sanders, who has written about black Christians’ use of the KJV. “If I can memorize a verse of Scripture, it gives me a certain sense of dignity.” …

“Although I think young black people are using other translations and finding them useful, we’ll always have a sentimental attachment to King James,” said [Rev. Joseph] Lowery, a retired United Methodist minister who marched with the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

I would add that the KJV echoes throughout the great canon of African American writing, including, of course, the works of Dr. King: “Let justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” (Cf. Amos 5:24.)

Rev. Lowery notes a generational shift when he observes that “young black people are using other translations.” Greenblatt suggests two causes for the similar shift that he observes: a growing tendency to treat authors as alien if they are not demographically similar to the reader, and a shrinking sense of direct, affective awe in response to written poetry.

In assessing these changes, I would avoid polemic. Everyone can decide for herself whether to identify with–and claim–long-dead authors and how to respond to written words. Greenblatt’s students are responding to Shakespeare in creative ways that enrich the culture. I am not saying they are wrong. But I would offer two suggestions:

First, you can claim Shakespeare as yours if you speak English, whether it is a mother tongue or a second language. That is an authentic choice, even if your religion, gender, race, and national origin are very different from his. When presented with the Bard as a model, one political response is to say, “Shakespeare was an old white Christian man from the colonial power, and I am not.” A different political response is: “Shakespeare’s words are mine as much as yours, and if you deny my right to them, I will challenge you.” The latter is no less radical or potentially subversive. Which response to choose is a complex and personal matter, and I don’t object to either. I just want to suggest that the second option is available to anyone. And it may be the path less taken today.

Second, I worry that it is becoming increasingly difficult to hear the power and resonances of very fine written language. Culture is increasingly visual and oral, which expands our capacities in some respects but possibly weakens our ability to absorb the special power of the written word.

We are living at a time of incessant communication. By one estimate, more words were recorded in 2002 alone than in all of human history up through 1999. The increase since then has been exponential. Even the older formats are exploding in scale. About half a million new book titles are published every year in English, whereas about 147 books were licensed annually in England in Shakespeare’s day: a 3,400-fold increase. When communications arrive in a ceaseless deluge, it may require crude and explosive language to capture attention.

One source of literary depth and power is allusion. But in order for an allusion to work, the writer and the reader must know the same referents. An excellent reason to study Shakespeare and the KJV is that they have echoed so pervasively through such diverse texts. There are still millions who can hear those echoes, as others can hear Quranic references in classical Arabic or the Shijing reverberating in modern East Asian verse. But when new text is piped around the world by the terabyte, the chances fall that an audience will recognize any given referent. The most widely shared references are from contemporary mass culture, which tends itself to have thin resonances.

I was pretty absorbed and awestruck when I saw live Shakespeare as a child and as a teenager. The words themselves could bedimm the noontide sun and call forth the mutinous winds. I think that response is less likely today, not because the language has evolved so much further from Elizabethan English, nor because there is anything wrong with today’s kids, but because a child is exposed to a much larger quantity of professionally produced, highly emotional drama: constantly streaming videos of all kinds. A play has much more to compete with.

We also live at a time of manic linguistic invention and expansion, when new words and phrases seem to enter the language daily, often duplicating existing choices and overriding traditional grammatical constraints. (Witness the constant turning of nouns into verbs in business English.) Shakespeare’s time offers certain parallels. The volume of public speech and printed communication was expanding rapidly then as well, and English vocabulary was growing. It is often claimed that Shakespeare personally added 1,500 or 2,000 words to English. Those numbers may be exaggerated because older sources have been lost, and scholars search Shakespeare’s works for alleged coinages without always consulting other surviving texts that might use the same words. But there is no doubt that Shakespeare and his contemporaries shared our predilection for inventing words, mixing sources, bending genres, and breaking all putative grammatical rules.

But they had to expand their language. English wasn’t very old, and it needed a much larger store of words, phrases, and tropes to rival Latin. You can often sense a writer of Shakespeare’s day struggling to convey an idea that now seems very straightforward, just because we have more resources. Today we don’t lack words and phrases, but we struggle to hear the resonances of the ones we have. We turn the noun “impact” into a verb without exploring the possibilities of verbs that have histories, like “affect,” “change,” “influence,” “modify,” “transform” (and many more).

I am not committed to linguistic conservatism as a principle; languages change as a result of wonderful human inventiveness. I agree with Greenblatt that multimedia adaptations and mashups of Shakespeare can be fantastic contributions. Yet we can perhaps profit more than usual by slowing down and hearing the depths of our linguistic inheritance.

[See also “signal” (a poem on this theme) and the political advantages of organized religion, in which I note the political power of “Ezekiel connected dem dry bones” and its roots in the KJV.]