I have a confession to make. I have a fondness for the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (BCP). Me, staunch defender of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and proponent of expanding our liturgies beyond even its confines. And if we are going to use Rite I, we might as well use the service from the 1928 BCP, thank you very much. I also enjoy (gasp!) the King James version (KJV) of the Bible. I love the poetry and the literary qualities often lacking in many of our modern translations. And I like William Shakespeare's (WS) plays and sonnets for much the same reason, as well as his wicked sense of humor and ability to capture the human condition in the space of a few spoken lines of iambic pentameter.
However, I was 18 before I came to appreciate Shakespeare. I had read Romeo and Juliet three times before I was a junior in high school--the first time when I was 12--Hamlet twice, and Macbeth at least once. I slogged through them each time, struggling to understand the vocabulary enough to figure out what was going on in the plays. It was almost like learning a foreign language. The second semester of my senior year in high school I took an elective class in Shakespeare taught by a member of the faculty who also happened to be an actor. Suddenly, Shakespeare came alive for the 25 of us in that classroom. Who knew that the opening scene of Romeo and Juliet was so funny, or that the characters were throwing insults at each other like we did in the hallways of our school? Why hadn't anyone told us exactly what Hamlet was saying when he told Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery?" It took someone to explain the first couple of plays we read that semester almost line by line before we started to see all of this. Once I had taken that Shakespeare class, the world of the King James Bible opened up to me as well.
And that is also the problem with the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and, for hard-core purists, even the 1662 edition. You need a professor to walk you through it line by line before you can fully understand and appreciate it. The more time that passes since 1600, 1611, 1662, and even 1928, the less accessible the language of the early prayer books, the works of William Shakespeare and the King James Bible becomes for us. And wasn't that a major reason for the Book of Common Prayer in the first place, to be accessible to worshippers in language they could understand? Even if the majority of the population in Reformation England could not read, they could understand the liturgy and the portions of the Bible read during the liturgy because the services were conducted in English--their English, not the English of Beowulf.
Language evolves, no matter what the purists (the Académie Française in France, for example) say or try to do to stop it. Proponents of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer will point out that it is not just the language, but the theology as well that changed when the 1979 Book of Common Prayer was written. I agree with them. The theology is different. As our understanding of God and of our relationship with God has changed, so, by necessity, has our theology, because if it did not, our faith and our church would stagnate. Nor did the Book of Common Prayer remain unchanged from it's first edition in 1549 until the Episcopal Church's 1979 revision. Even a quick comparison of the Lord's Supper (Eucharist) through the various versions will give you a feel for the changes.
Nor can we deny the fact that English politics also played a role in the development of the Book of Common Prayer from the very beginning. Just as they did in the creation of the King James Version of the Bible, which was first published on this day in 1611 (for a good look at the history of the King James Version, read Adam Nicolson's God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible).
So, while I can appreciate the 1928 prayer book and the King James Bible for many reasons, including their language, I do not really want to use them for worship on a regular basis. Just as I do not really want all of my recreational reading to be Canterbury Tales or Beowulf in their original English. I want to participate fully in the liturgy, and I cannot do that carrying a dictionary and translating every third word in my head!
Peace,
Jeffri
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