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Shakespeare and the Book of Mormon
In 2 Nephi 1, Lehi uses verbiage from Shakespeare, refering to death as a place “… from whence no traveler can return.” Shakespeare (Hamlet’s soliloquy) reads: “From whose bourne no traveler returns.” Some claim that we cannot prove that JS Jr. had access to Shakespeare (!), but we know the phrase “…from whence no traveler returns” was republished in The Wonders of Nature and Providence Displayed, 1825, p.469.
We can prove that he did have access to people who had access to Shakespeare using the Book of Mormon itself (aside from the above):
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The word “worth” is used in the Bible 86 times, the word “worthless” zero times, because it is an adjective coined by Shakespeare, or, its first use can be traced to the Bard, according to The Shakesepeare Birthplace Trust. Then the word “worthless” traveled through the English-speaking world, and made its way across the pond to America, and into Mosiah 4: “If the knowledge of the goodness of God at this time has awakened you to a sense of your nothingness, and your worthless and fallen state.”
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Same with the use of the verb “dwindle/dwindling,” not found in the King James Bible, which occurs 27 times in the Book of Mormon, whose first documented use in print dates to 1606, The Tragedie of Macbeth.
As a speaker of the English language two centuries after some of these plays were published, how could JS Jr. not show us evidence of Shakespeare’s outsized influence? JS Jr. absolutely had access to people who had access to Shakespeare: namely, other speakers of English. But I won’t be surprised to hear all of the things we can’t prove JS Jr. had access to; perhaps we can barely prove that JS Jr. used the Bible, despite 9.2% of the chapters of the Book of Mormon being near verbatim copies of entire chapters of the Bible!
“The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC holds some 7,000 later editions of Shakespeare from the 18th century to present, in more than 70 different languages.” Shakespeare has been widely printed and performed and quoted since long before JS Jr. was born. Note that this is not a claim that Shakespeare is a source for the Book of Mormon, but rather a unilateral statement that Shakespeare was an influence on every piece of English literature written in the 1820s (if not much earlier), and to claim otherwise is pure madness, especially when we have at least three pieces of internal evidence that this is so, for the Book of Mormon.
Let’s not even bring up Shakespeare’s use of chiasmus.
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