Mike Oettle

A fascinating, and highly amusing, exploration of the life of King James VI and !. It looks into the lives of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, and of Queen Elizabeth, whose death placed him on the English throne. Its examination of the process by which the King James Bible was created is extraordinarily interesting. James called for the translation to be made, but was not involved in its production (although he was fluent in Latin and Greek, and could have contributed). All the same he left the work to a select group of scholars, working in six teams. While making extensive use of the work of previous translators, especially Wycliffe and Tyndale, they produced a work that was ideally suited for reading aloud, and reflected the age in which James lived. While Shakespeare gave us drama in English, the King James Bible similarly lays the foundations of a new kind of English language, while being as faithful as its translators could be to the original texts from which it was translated.