This week, the second episode of the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall - a fictionalised account of the rise of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII - aired on BBC Two. During the programme, actor Mark Rylance who plays Cromwell secretly receives from Germany a copy of William Tyndale's New Testament - translated into English, not Latin - an act that was strictly forbidden at this time. Tyndale's New Testament was the first English Bible of the Protestant Reformation, and cost him his life when he was executed as a heretic in 1536.
Carcanet published Tyndale's Selected Writings in 2003, and here we have posted an extract from the introduction by the editor, David Daniell:
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536) has several different reputations. For lovers of the Bible, and for historians of the Bible translated into the vernaculars, he is being rediscovered as the founding father of the English Bible. He was a scholar of Greek and Hebrew at a time when such learning was unusual. He translated the New Testament, and much of the Old Testament, from their original languages of Greek and Hebrew into English for the first time. He printed them for everyone to read. He opened a door which has never again been shut up. Since his first complete English New Testament (1526), the Bible has been available to everyone in the world who can read or hear English. For this, with his work unfinished, he was condemned by the church as a heretic, and handed over to the civil authorities to be killed. His translations went on to be the basis of all English versions that followed. The New Testament of the ‘King James’ version of 1611 (the ‘Authorised Version’) is eighty-three per cent Tyndale. The most modern translations still show strong marks of his craft. Secondly, for lovers of the English language, Tyndale is the genius who, in those widely read Bible translations, gave England in the middle of the sixteenth century its first disseminated Plain Style, so that anyone who had anything to say had a simple model to follow. Later in the century, no longer did a man or woman need to be part of a refined élite, learned in the ancient classics and the literature of France and, particularly, Italy, in order to write well and be read. Decades before, at the start of that sixteenth century, while Tyndale was at Oxford, the English language had become a mess, quite lacking direction, muddling older Saxon and Norman French, with Latinist vocabulary and rambling syntax. In about 1505, John Skelton, a poet at the court of King Henry VIII, wrote verses to say so, beginning ‘Our naturall tong is rude’. Tyndale changed this. From the mid-1520s he wrote English in a register just above common speech, in short Saxon sentences with largely Saxon vocabulary, a manner like proverbs. The result was easily memorised, as the New Testament Gospels, for example, were intended to be. ‘Ask, and it shall be given you: seek, and ye shall find: knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ ‘For this my son was dead, and is alive again.’ Very many phrases of his are still in everyday use, such as ‘Let there be light’, or ‘The spirit is willing’.
TYNDALE'S LEGACY
The bed-rock of the Bible in English is a language of great clarity and accuracy, which always speaks directly to the heart. Tyndale set the standard in the 1520s and 1530s against which all later versions, now amounting to several thousands, have to be measured. His Greek was excellent. Hebrew scholars find his Old Testament translations remarkable for their understanding of the original. His craftsmanship with the English language amounted to genius.
© David Daniell, 2003
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