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.

David Edgar must therefore play up such differences as did occur, as well as calling in episcopalian conservatives and radical reformers to spice up the plot. Thus in Gregory Doran’s excellent production a scene in which a puritanical archdeacon, chaplain and clerk, checking up that a church has complied with a ‘no images’ directive, are confronted by an appalled church-warden and local squire who’ve hidden their chalice but stopped short of smashing their stained glass.

This scene is crucial in laying the foundation for what’s really the heart of Edgar’s play, namely how the moderation of one principal translator was rooted in remorse and repentance for his youthful intolerance and greed.