Manifold Greatness Comes to the Folger Shakespeare Library

Washington, DC—Through materials from the year 1000 to 2011, Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible offers a "biography" of one of the world's most famous books, the King James Bible of 1611, which marks its 400th anniversary this year. Given the interest in the King James Bible this anniversary year, the Folger is adding Sunday viewing hours from noon to 5pm. Manifold Greatness can also be seen Monday-Saturday, 10am to 5pm and one hour before performances and readings. 
 
A blockbuster, NEH-funded exhibition, Manifold Greatness: The Creation and Afterlife of the King James Bible tells the story of this landmark book through a remarkable assemblage of rare books, manuscripts, and works of art, including the Folger's own first edition of the 1611 King James Bible. Through these materials, curators Hannibal Hamlin of The Ohio State University and Folger curator of rare books Steven Galbraith trace the centuries-long narrative of the King James Bible and the English Bibles that came before it. The exhibition also shows how its words have played out over the centuries since 1611, from Handel's Messiah and countless works of literature to the Apollo 8 astronauts' reading of Genesis as they orbited the Moon.
 
“The legacy of the King James Bible is actually too huge to articulate in a brief sentence or two, because its influence is sort of astronomical," notes exhibition curator Steven Galbraith. Fellow curator Hannibal Hamlin adds, "It influenced English-speaking writers, not just in Britain and America, but all over the world, everybody from John Milton in Paradise Lost to Charles Schultz in A Charlie Brown Christmas."
 
First printed in 1611, the King James Bible remains a towering landmark—a shared point of reference across the cultural landscape, from The Simpsons to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell to the most traditional Anglican hymn.
 
Its familiar words and cadences have influenced writers from Milton to Melville, T.S. Eliot to Toni Morrison. The words of the King James Bible ring out in Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and, every holiday season, in performances of Handel’s Messiah.
 
The story behind this influential book, however, is less well known. It includes earlier Bible translators who worked at the risk of their lives; meticulous seventeenth-century scholars; and generations of King James Bible owners—among them, families who recorded births, marriages, and deaths in treasured copies.
 
The Folger’s Manifold Greatness exhibition is part of a major collaboration between the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford, which recently produced a related exhibition, Manifold Greatness: Oxford and the Making of the King James Bible. The project also includes a website and blog, a Bodleian Library publication, Manifold Greatness: The Making of the King James Bible, and a traveling panel exhibition, inspired by the Folger exhibition and produced by the Folger in partnership with the American Library Association (ALA), which will tour to 40 libraries around the country over the next two years. After the Folger exhibition closes in January 2012, a version of it will be on exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

Beginning with tenth-century Anglo-Saxon biblical poems, the exhibition moves swiftly to the dramatic story of the early English Bibles, for which translators sometimes risked and even lost their lives. Rare books, manuscripts, and portraits then tell the stories of the tense conference at which James I agreed to a new Bible, and the four dozen or more top English scholars who created it over several years. A look at the centuries-long "afterlife" of their famous text in public life, literature, entertainment, and the arts takes up the second half of the display. Some of the not-to-be-missed items on exhibition include:

• The ‘Caedmon manuscript,’ an Anglo-Saxon manuscript (c. 1000 CE), that retells biblical stories in epic verse; the manuscript's drawing of Noah's Ark looks like a Viking ship
• A rare Wycliffite Bible from the 1380s; such manuscripts, linked to the reformer John Wyclif, were the first full English Bible
• Two leaves from William Tyndale's contraband translation, 1520s to early 1530s: Tyndale was executed in 1536 for his attempts at translating the Bible into English
• Queen Elizabeth's copy of the Bishops' Bible, 1568
• The Bodleian copy of the Bishops' Bible annotated by translators at Oxford with their changes
• The Folger’s copy of the first edition of the King James Bible
• Prince Henry Bible, an elaborately-bound copy of the King James Bible owned by James I's son
• A copy of the "Wicked" Bible (1631) in which the printer omits a key word from the Seventh Commandment on adultery
• The John Alden Bible, a copy of the King James Bible which came to America on the Mayflower
• Copies of the King James Bible owned by Frederick Douglass and Elvis Presley

ABOUT THE CURATORS
 
Steve Galbraith, the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Rare Books (2007-2011) and now Curator of the Cary Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology, is an expert on the history of the book. Before coming to the Folger, he was Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts as well as a Visiting Professor of English at The Ohio State University. His publications include The Undergraduate's Companion to English Renaissance Writers and Their Web Sites (Libraries Unlimited, 2004) and articles in Reformation and Spenser Studies. He is currently working on a critical edition of Thomas Drue’s Duchess of Suffolk, a book on Edmund Spenser’s printing history, and a textbook on rare book librarianship. He earned his MLS from the University of Buffalo and his PhD in English Renaissance Literature from the Ohio State University.

Hannibal Hamlin, Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University, studied English at the University of Toronto and completed his doctorate in Renaissance Studies at Yale University. Renaissance literature and culture, especially Shakespeare, Donne, the Sidneys, and Milton, the Bible as/and/in literature, metrical psalms, and lyric poetry are among his scholarly interests. His publications include Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge, 2004), The Sidney Psalter: Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney, co-editor (Oxford World Classics, 2009), The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural Influences, co-editor (Cambridge, 2011), along with numerous journal articles, book chapters, and reviews. A book on the Bible in Shakespeare is Hamlin’s major current project, in support of which he has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies (a Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship), and the National Humanities Center, among other grants. He is editor of the journal Reformation and guest editor of a forthcoming forum on Poetry and Devotion for Religion and Literature.