Shakespeare's Globe Theatre To Read KJV Bible Over Holy Week

From the Religion News Service via the Huffington Post news wire:

William Shakespeare's Globe Theatre will mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible with a cover-to-cover reading between Palm Sunday and Easter Monday.

Twenty actors will take part in the reading, which is scheduled to take 69 hours over eight days. They will recite all 1,189 chapters of the historic Bible in the theater built as a replica of the place that saw many of Shakespeare's greatest plays.

More here.

"Easter Monday"? Gotta be a typo. Or maybe the Brits do things differently. Nah, gotta be a typo. Maybe they meant "the Monday after Easter;" I mean, this is supposed to take eight days starting on Palm Sunday.

Anyway, I like this for several reasons.

First, even though, as an agnostic, my Christian days are far behind me, I would be a fool to not acknowledge the Bible's importance, not only as perhaps the greatest work of Western literature, but also as one of the major philosophical seeds for the West, right alongside the Socratic dialogues, the Magna Carta, and the American Declaration of Independence. If you don't understand the Bible, you don't understand our civilization. I mean, you know, I hate all the smiting and condemnations to Hell and all that, but there's also some really great stuff in the Good Book, love your neighbor and all that.

Second, in the West, theater and religion have always been in the same family, sometimes like brothers, other times like third or fourth cousins, but from the ancient Greeks, for whom theater and religious worship were synonymous, to the passion plays of the Middle Ages, to today's televangelistic spectacle, as well as University of Delaware theater professor Sanford Robbins' notion that great (secular) theater ought to be about "invoking God on stage," theater and God have had intertwined destinies. A massive Bible reading at the Globe, or any other theater, is entirely appropriate.

But most importantly, there are more than a few historians and academics who have strongly speculated that Shakespeare was on King James' team of Bible translators. We can't really know one way or the other, but such speculation makes a great deal of sense. Shortly after James came to the throne after the death of Queen Elizabeth, the Bard left the Globe to found a new company, the Kingsmen (not to be confused with the band that had a hit with "Louie Louie" nearly five hundred years later), who worked directly for the new King. That is, Shakespeare, who was widely acknowledged at that point to be the greatest poet of the English language, was in the palace already, as an employee of the King: James would have been a fool not to use such in-house talent on such a grandiose project.

So this thing at the new Globe is just perfect. And I'm sure they're using a bunch of trained British Shakespeareans: all those "begats" in the Old Testament, I'm sure, will sound fucking great. Kind of like Patrick Stewart reading from the phone book. Kickass, even if it's boring.

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