What happened to the Shakespeare English language?
Shakespeare spoke “early modern English”. It’s a simple case of language changing over time, and since he lived 400 years ago it’s had plenty of time to change since then. Think about how much our language has changed since our grandparents were young, and imagine that on a large scale. Having said that, Shakespeare wouldn’t have actually spoken in the same way that he wrote, as he wrote in a very stylistic way for the sake of his poetry… if that was the norm, then everyone would have been doing it! Of course, everyone still would have spoken very differently to the way we do today. But, if you think about it, the difference isn’t that big considering it was 400 years ago. After all, we can still read it. That’s because Shakespeare’s era was the beginning of standardisation in the English language so the rate at which our language changes has gradually slowed down. So, we can read what was written 400 years ago, but 200 years before Shakespeare we spoke “Middle English” (what Chaucer
