From: cindy@solan10.solan.unit.no (Cynthia Kandolf)
Subject: Shakespeare and the KJV

It seems i've been called upon again to drag out my books one more
time before the holidays... so here is a summary of what i was able to
find about the King James Version:

The only connection Shakespeare has to the KJV is that he was alive
when it was published in 1611.  (No connection to the KGB has ever
been proven.)  He had no part in the preparation of it.

Now for a surprise: the men who worked on the KJV depended more on
previous English translations of the Bible than on the texts those
translations had come from, despite the fact that most of them read
Latin and Greek.  Also, they were told to consider readability and
literary merit to be as important as scholarly accuracy, to make the
Bible accessible to the common man (a radical concept at the time).  I
find it somewhat humorous, based on this point, that some people
claim the KJV is the only "inspired" translation of the Bible into
English - but i digress.

Anyway, most of the English Bibles in existence then had been
published between 1535 and 1568, when no less than five versions were
first printed.  However, versions as early as William Tyndale's 1525
translation were used in the preparation of the KJV.  (Ironically,
Tyndale was put to death for translating the Bible.)

Tyndale's Bible in fact was extensively used as the pattern for the
KJV, and it is because of this that we say the KJV was written using
language that was old-fashioned already at the time.  Normally, one
century makes a noticeable though not large difference in a language
(provided you know what you're looking for, of course!)  At this time,
however, English was undergoing a period of rapid change, and much of
the change was grammatical.  So much of the language Tyndale used in
1525 already sounded old-fashioned in 1611 - not archaic, but somewhat
out of fashion.  The use of "thou", for instance, was common in 1525,
but by 1611 was falling out of use - but it was used in the KJV none
the less, mostly because it sounded good.

As far as the "archaicness" of Shakespeare vs. the KJV, i don't want
to sound snobby here but... you can't just take two pieces of
literature and say "they both sound equally archaic to me, therefore
they are equally archaic."  Scholars that work on this sort of thing
have to have a deep and broad knowledge of the history of the language
they're working on.  They look at individual words and grammatical
structures, to find ones that can be dated - either when they came
into use, or when they largely dropped out of use.  It's not the sort
of thing that can be done simply be reading them to see which one
sounds older.  

Sources used:
McCrum, Robert, William Cran, and Robert MacNeil.  The Story of
English (American Edition).  New York, NY, USA: Viking Penguin Inc.
(c) 1986.

Strang, Barbara M.H.  A History of English.  London, UK: Methuen & Co,
Ltd.  (c) 1970

-Cindy Kandolf
 cindy@solan.unit.no
 Trondheim, Norway