And when he thus had sayd he gave vp the goost. In his translation of Luke 23:46, Tyndale wrote,Īnd Iesus cryed with a greate voyce and sayd: Father into thy hondes I comende my sprete. Tyndale is remembered as the first person to translate and print the Bible in English. The phrase was most likely coined some 80 years earlier by William Tyndale. So Shakespeare said it first and this has led some to speculate that the KJV translators were inspired by the Bard. That stain’d their fetlocks in his smoking blood,
In Act 2 scene 3, Richard Plantagenet says: The gave-up-the-ghost phrase appeared in Shakespeare’s play King Henry VI, Part 3, which was written almost two decades before the KJV. The phrase appears several times in that Bible and most famously in the crucifixion scene of Luke 23:46:Īnd when Iesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: And hauing said thus, he gaue vp the ghost.īut that’s not where the phrase originated. So if you guessed the phrase came from the 1611 version of the King James Bible, you are correct. The expression refers to someone dying, as in “Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age” (Gen. Consider the phrase, “he gave up the ghost.” Heard that one? Did it come from Shakespeare or the King James Bible? “He gave up the ghost” While preparing the quiz, I made some interesting discoveries. (If you’re interested, here’s a link to the quiz. Recently, I gave my kids a quiz where they had to identify the source of classic English quotes.
Shakespeare and King James were responsible for some of the English language’s most memorable phrases and proverbs, including, “many are called, but few are chosen,” and “to thine own self be true.” Will Shakespeare was whacking out his best plays, while King James and Co. The early seventeenth century was a time of unbridled creativity for English writers.
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