Bishops and ploughboys

The delectable drama student who served dinner beforehand in the Rooftop Restaurant told us she’d much enjoyed Written on the Heart but that it was a bit intellectual. As David Edgar’s new play is about the making of the King James Bible, this wasn’t altogether surprising. How do you make a play about the deliberations of some 54 bishops and scholars who fine-tuned William Tyndale’s English translation of c.1525–34 into the KJB of 1611? One place to start is to have the scholars haggle over ‘delectable’ or ‘very pleasant’ as alternatives for Na’ ameta li meod in II Samuel 1: 26, not that they’d glimpsed our waitress in the restaurant.

And of course that wasn’t the only translation dilemma thrown around the stage by George Abbot, Lancelot Andrewes, Laurence Chaderton, Sir Henry Savile and David Edgar’s other representatives of the different religious factions among King James’s panel of ‘grave divines’. Against all odds, it’s a miracle that the translators were able to agree the text of the greatest Bible in the English language, though one of little help to the dramatist.