The Vagabond

In January of 1604 there gathered under the roof of the magnificent royal residence of Hampton Court a convocation of clerymen to discuss "things pretended to be amiss in the church." James I, just down from Scotland, had not yet proclaimed to the English people his anti-Presbyterian notions, and the Conference was called to work out a compromise between High and Low Church parties.

The convocation accomplished nothing that it set out to do. For the King, scenting an attempt to undermine his god-given authority in a proposal that a synod be substituted for bishops, broke up the meeting in a huff, and threatened non-conformers to "harry them out of the land, or worse." Yet that Hampton Court Conference goes down in history as a high water mark for the English language, for before the King had sent the delegates packing, a plan had been drawn up for a new translation of the Bible.

If ever the stage was set for a masterpiece, it was at the start, of the Stuart rule. The Hebrew text of the Bible, with vocabulary "simple and sensuous", is itself supremely translatable. St. Jeronie's Vulgate formed a bridge into the Latin. Wycliffe, Tyndale, and Coverdale had blazed the English trail. And the forty seven scholars, the most learned that England could boast, carried in them the spirit of the age. It was the age "of Shakespeare's London and the ships of the Elizabethan voyagers-- of men whose language was as vivid and as virile as their lives." Small wonder that their efforts came to fruit in "the noblest monument of English prose".

"Of its unique significance in the field of English letters there can be no doubt. Its phraseology has become part and parcel of our common tongue--bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh. Its rhythms and cadences, its turns of speech, its familiar imagery, its very words, are woven into the texture of our literature, prose and poetry alike. Yet it is of the Orient, we of the West; it is a translation, not an original; and it has reached us by way, not of one language only, but of three. What is it, then, in this translation, which has made it a factor of such power in the development of our speech? What are the qualities which have stamped indelibly its very phraseology upon the literary master-pieces 300 years? What, in particular, is the nature of the deeply evolution through which the noble vehicle of a great and deeply significant literature called itself at last in English words?"

The answers to these questions the Vagabond will hear in Sever 11 at twelve o'clock today when John Livingston Lowes, Francis Lee Higinson Professor of English Literature, lectures on the King James Version of the Bible.