ABSTRACT
King James’s desire to control the meaning of the Bible, a vital source of political as well as spiritual authority, was one he shared with his royal predecessors. Elizabeth, for example, supported the production of a new official version of the Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, in 1568.1 What was distinctive in James’s case, however, was the extent to which he used not only his political authority but also textual authority to achieve this end. His long and varied publishing career began in 1584 with a collection of his poetry, The Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie, but his next two publications were interpretations of Scripture: Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun, Contening ane Plane and Facil Exposicioun, a commentary on Revelation 20:8-10 in 1588 (hereafter referred to as Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun); and Ane Meditatioun on I Chronicles, 15: 25-9 in 1589 (hereafter referred to as Ane Meditatioun). Both meditations were republished in London in 1603, the year of James’s accession to the English throne. In the 1580s James also wrote A Paraphrase upon the Revelation of the Apostle St. John, though this would not be published until 1616 (hereafter referred to as A Paraphrase upon the Revelation). He also embarked upon a major project, never completed, of translating the psalms. Throughout his English reign, he showed a continuing desire to represent himself through interpretation and translation of the Bible: he authorised a new translation of the Bible, a project which began after the Hampton Court Conference of 1604 and was completed in 1611; he included his three early scriptural exegeses in his folio collection of Workes (1616); and he wrote A Meditation vpon the Lords Prayer (1619) and A Meditation vpon Saint Matthew or a Paterne for a Kings Inavgvration (1620), both of which were printed separately and added to the 1619 and 1620 editions of his Workes.2 These scriptural exegeses
continue to receive little critical analysis and have been excluded from the canon of James’s ‘political works’.3 Yet this was an age in which, as scholars such as Kevin Sharpe have emphasised, ‘language represented power’ and ‘rhetoric and governance could not be dissociated’.4 More specifically, ‘the authority of Protestant exegesis was ever more widely being appropriated by the public’ and ‘questions of textual exegesis and the issue of political power were inextricably entwined’.5 Scriptural exegeses written by a king crystallise and extend these complex inter-relations between political authority, exegesis and rhetoric: far from existing outside the realm of politics, they were inevitably politically engaged and potentially powerful texts, and James sought to exploit them as such.
