The Domestic Bible: William Tyndale's Vernacular Translation

Abstract

This translation study of William Tyndale’s revised New Testament of 1534 identifies the translator’s motivations and strategies then explores the effect of the translation on the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) and Shakespeare’s plays. Tyndale’s primary motivation was to create a text for his would-be congregants during the Reformation and his strategy was largely one of domestication. However, his unique concern for his mother-tongue coupled with an insistence on his preferential theological material extends his domestication activity into an idiosyncratic attention to his lingua mater (English), resulting in a personalized translation project, a Tyndalian effect that influenced the production and literary use of biblical material for the next century. This kind of translation variegates biblical material so that its application in later literary traditions, like future Bible translations and Shakespeare’s biblical references, can take on a wide range of expressions not beholden to cultural stigmas associated with altering the Bible. The KJV, though often considered to have borrowed 85% of Tyndale, based on this study, only borrowed 55% of Tyndale’s Bible. Tyndale’s Bible is then used to explicate Shakespeare’s Macbeth, demonstrating how literary uses of the Bible can take on extensive and varied forms of expression.