Henry VIII had himself painted as King David the Psalmist; Edward VI had psalms sung to him as he relaxed in his chamber; Elizabeth I attached her own version of Psalm 14 to her translation of Marguerite de Navarre; and Lady Jane Grey recited Psalm 51 before her execution. On roughly the same spot almost twenty years earlier, Thomas More recited the same psalm before he went to the block. Philip Sidney ranked David chief among poets, and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, compared Thomas Wyatt’s Penitential Psalms to Homer’s epics. The ‘Hebrew Psalter’ was among the magic books of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, and William Shakespeare’s Falstaff died with Psalm 23—‘and ’a babbled of green fields’—on his lips in Henry V. The Psalms were simply the most popular poems in sixteenth-century England,52 known to the literate and illiterate, from reading and singing in church, at home, or at informal gatherings that sprang up after English translations became available.
Psalm-translating was also among the most popular exercises for English writers, in verse and prose. Metrical psalms, cast into English (or classical) metres, rhyme
Schemes, and stanza forms, were one of the most important literary ‘kinds’ in sixteenth-century England, no less than Petrarchan love lyrics. Both genres were imported from other languages, both depended upon translation, and the English history of both begins in the same decade (1530s), and includes some of the same poets, not least among them Wyatt, Surrey, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.53 Complete psalters in verse were also produced for public worship and private devotional singing by Robert Crowley and the contributors to ‘Sternhold and Hopkins’ Prose translations were written by George Joye, Arthur Golding, and Miles Coverdale.
It is often possible to distinguish versions sung communally or read in church or domestic worship from those written as private devotional exercises (which often survive in manuscript),54 and both of these from versions written primarily as literary works—as poems. One can also distinguish more broadly between singing psalms, provided with tunes for use in church and at home, and psalms intended to be read, silently or aloud (Quitslund 2005). Yet, it is also true that such categories overlap the more closely one looks at specific writers and translations. For example, church psalms were sometimes translated into English with the intention of capturing the literary greatness of the Hebrew originals, while the writing of even the most ‘literary’ of translations may yet have involved some measure of devotion. Furthermore, sung psalms were also read in private, while some translations intended for reading were later set to music. Nevertheless, keeping in mind such limitations, this chapter describes sixteenth-century psalms in roughly these categories, which developed more or less chronologically: Tudor psalm translation began with efforts to produce English versions for public worship; devout Protestants then began producing metrical translations for personal use; increasingly, throughout the century, accomplished poets wrote psalm translations in their endeavours to produce an English literature matching both Continental rivals and classical models.
World History
