www.byzcath.org Forums Faith & Christian Life Faith & Theology Elizabethan English in the Divine Liturgy

The English may be based on the Hapgood translation, but with just a page and a half, it's hard to tell. Hapgood's hieratic English is excellent. She grew up hearing it as an Anglican, and she knew how to write it.

Your missing my larger point, which is that they retained something relatively recent and familiar - if not commonplace - after a period of decades. Using the same thing 400 years later is unnecessary and what was understood by everyone in 1650 would sadly be less digestsble today.


The KJV will always be my go-to, and the best teachers of Shakespeare (be it literarily or dramatically) let students experience Hamlet before unraveling the words. You won't find a greater lover of Shakespeare than me.

But there were also terrible plays and poems in Elizabethan English. Even Shakespeare wrote a few duds. The beauty lies in the wordsmithing, not the words themselves.

Shakespeare's work is beautiful not because it is Elizabethan, but because it was written by Shakespeare.

Translating the Divine Liturgy into Elizabethan English won't be trancendant just because it has some thees or thous, unless you can enlist the Bard or one of his contemporaries to do the work.

Any further info on which issue? (to say nothing of where we could find it! - I'd imagine the only answer is "in a very good theology library")

I find HTM's Pentecostarion to have more odd language usage than their Menaion or Horologion (probably because it was their first, and probably part of the reason they're revising it). Otherwise, AFAIC, HTM's books (as well as the musical scores made from them by St Anthony's monastery) are the only game in town for Greek-usage Byzantine worship in English.

Except that the English is four hundred years old!

Given the fixed text and the relatively limited vocabulary involved, only a handful of words might need replacement or clarification. In truth, inverse snobbery is the only impediment to wider use of hieratic English.

If it be inverse snobbery to not trust our bishops with Elizabethan phrasing, I am the most snobbish soul alive.

I dunno. Father Joseph at Transfiguration has no trouble with it, and neither do most Orthodox bishops here.

At least it's not Chaucer's English! . How about resurrecting Old English, like Beowulf :p.

Well, I know that Elizabethan English is used along side the Latin Tridentine Mass, too, when it comes to having side-by-side translations. I've been to a Tridentine, and I do remember seeing this. So Orthodox aren't the only ones using this.

Chaucer is middle English, Shakespeare early modern English. Beowulf is Anglo-Saxon, or old English. My wife and daughter would be right at home. I would probably need a year or so to get up to speed. Got declensions and cases, and a few extra letters to learn, but it would be cool.

Thanks, everyone, for all the information. I think I could get used to Elizabethan English.We've not been there but will add it to our list. We're not sure where we are going to wind up. Need to check out as many places as possible that are fairly close to home.

Well, if you've been to St. Sergius, chances are, you probably did see St. Sava's heading there (assuming you went their from the north). Although I'm not sure of the Serbian Liturgy, whether that was Slavonic, Greek, or Serbian natively, and how that impacts the English translation.