Are Shakespeare’s works written in Old English?

Answer 1

Shakespeare's complex sentence structures and use of now obsolete words lead many students to think they are reading Old or Middle English. In fact, Shakespeare's works are written in Early Modern English. Once you see a text of Old or Middle English you'll really appreciate how easy Shakespeare is to understand (well, relatively speaking). Take, for example, this passage from the most famous of all Old English works, Beowulf:

Answer 2

No, he didn't. And neither was Beowulf written in Old English - it was written in Anglo Saxon which is something entirely different. In fact, in Shakespeare's time English was changing rapidly - so rapidly indeed, that it has been said that a person from Queen Elizabeth I's time would have difficulty in understanding a person from the time of he Grandfather, Henry VII. Shakespeare's plays were understood by the common people of the day - remember the theatre was looked down upon by the aristocracy as being full of rogues and vagabonds. So it is likely that his language reflected much of the way the ordinary common people spoke at the time.

Answer 3

Chaucer wrote in something like Old English. Sheakespeare used the dialect of his day, which was not long before the King James Version of the Bible was written. Both of these have tended to fix English style.

Answer 4

Believe it or not, the common person didn't speak like the charecters in his stories; everyone back then talked normally, close to as we do today.

Isn't old english hard to interpret though? I heard it sounded like jibberish