Early Modern English

• 1. Introduction

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  Early Modern English is the form of English that gave the world Shakespeare's plays, the King James Bible, and the first permanent English colony in the Americas. It spans roughly from the late 15th century to the mid-to-late 17th century, bridging the gap between the medieval tongue of Geoffrey Chaucer and the language we speak today. The period opens with William Caxton setting up his printing press in Westminster in 1476 and closes as England settles into a new era of stability after civil war and a royal restoration. Along the way, it asks a question that turns out to matter enormously: how does a language decide what it is? What forces push a chaotic, regionally fractured set of dialects toward a single recognisable standard? And why can a modern reader still follow a Shakespeare sonnet, when Chaucer, writing only two centuries earlier, reads almost like a foreign language?

• 2. The Press and the Printed Word

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  William Caxton's Westminster press did not immediately create a unified language. He printed in whatever styles and dialects the authors he worked with had already used, so the early printed word was as varied as the manuscripts it replaced. Real standardisation came gradually, through the choices made by those who followed him. Richard Pynson began printing in London in 1491 or 1492, and his preference was for Chancery Standard, the form of English the government used. Around 1509, Pynson became the king's official printer, giving government-favoured English a direct line into published books.

  The most powerful force for standardisation, though, was religious. William Tyndale's Bible translation began appearing from 1525, initially banned, but its language was already spreading. The Great Bible of 1539, edited by Myles Coverdale and largely drawn from Tyndale's work, was the first officially authorised English Bible, and it was read aloud to congregations in churches across England. Repeated public reading of the same text, week after week, trained millions of ears to a common standard. The first Book of Common Prayer followed in 1549, supervised by Thomas Cranmer. Church attendance at prayer-book services was legally required for many years, and some scholars argue that the sheer repetition of its language shaped Modern English more decisively than the King James Bible did.

• 3. The Bible Wars

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  The Geneva Bible of 1560 was produced by English Protestant exiles on the continent during the reign of Mary. The New Testament portion had been completed three years earlier, in 1557, and the full Bible appeared after Elizabeth came to the throne. Its language was described as more vigorous and forceful, and it was the version favoured by the Puritans and Pilgrims. Its popularity, driven in large part by its extensive commentary notes, directly prompted the creation of what became the most famous book in the English language.

  The King James Version was published in 1611, largely drawing on the Bishops' Bible translation and revision of 1602. It was begun in 1604, as Shakespeare was at the height of his career. Its translators made a deliberate grammatical choice that would shape how English speakers understood the word "thou" for centuries. They kept the singular informal pronoun specifically to match the distinction between singular and plural second person in Hebrew and Ancient Greek. It had nothing to do with reverence. In the King James Version, God addresses even Satan as "thou". Only later, as "thou" faded from everyday speech, did it acquire a devotional weight the translators never intended.

  The Rheims and Douai Bible, the first complete English Catholic translation, had its New Testament released in France in 1582. The Old Testament, though already complete, was not published until 1609-1610. Its impact on the language at large was limited, but it mattered in heavily Catholic English-speaking communities.

• 4. Shakespeare and the Stage

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  Christopher Marlowe was active from around 1586 to 1593, and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy appeared in 1592. Shakespeare's plays were being written from around 1590. Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, and the partnership of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher all wrote during the same period, yet it is Shakespeare whose name became synonymous with the era's language itself.

  The reason Shakespeare achieved this towering stature over his contemporaries was not purely a matter of quality at the time of writing. His reception during the 17th and 18th centuries was what secured his place, and that reception directly fed the development of Standard English. His plays remained familiar and comprehensible four centuries after they were written, while the works of Chaucer and William Langland, written only two centuries earlier, had become considerably harder for the average reader to follow. Shakespeare's First Folio was published in 1623. Seven years after his death, his collected plays were already a monument.

  One small linguistic footnote embedded in his work points to the era's contact with the wider world. At least as early as 1600, the word "steppe" first appeared in English in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, believed to be an indirect borrowing from Russian via either German or French.

• 5. Spelling in Flux

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  Early Modern English spelling was close enough to today's that a modern reader can usually guess at meaning, but it was not yet fixed. In Shakespeare's plays, the word "he" could be spelled both "he" and "hee" within the same sentence, without any apparent intention. The instability was systematic rather than careless.

  Several features of the writing system had not yet resolved into their modern forms. The letter that we now write as "v" was often written as "u" at the start of words: "vnmoued" for unmoved, "loue" for love. The "u" and "v" forms were treated as variants of a single letter rather than two distinct ones. The modern convention of using "v" for the consonant and "u" for the vowel sounds seems to have arrived in the 1630s. The same story applies to "i" and "j": "ioy" for joy, "iust" for just, with the split between consonant and vowel use also settling in the 1630s.

  The letter thorn, the old symbol for the "th" sound, was still in use but was being squeezed out of print. In Early Modern printing, thorn looked similar to the Latin letter "y" in blackletter typeface, which gave rise to the famous "Ye Olde" construction that still appears on English pub signs. Thorn lingered in occasional shorthand in the 1611 King James Version and in Shakespeare's Folios as ligatures: "ye" for "thee", "yt" for "that", "yu" for "thou".

  Some spelling changes of this period introduced letters that have no phonetic value. The silent "b" added to "debt", "doubt", and "subtle" came not from pronunciation but from etymology, a deliberate nod to the Latin roots of those words.

• 6. How the Sounds Changed

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  Early Modern English was rhotic: the "r" after a vowel, in words like "car" or "bird", was pronounced. It was not lost until the late 1700s. For much of the early modern period it was a trill or tap at the start of words, shifting to an approximant at the end.

  Consonant clusters that have since disappeared were still fully pronounced. The "wr" in "write" was the first to go, merging into a plain "r" in the first half of the 17th century. The "kn" in "knife" persisted in various forms into the 18th century before settling as a bare "n". The "hw" cluster in words like "what", "where", and "whale" meant that "wine" and "whine" were still distinct sounds. A merger into plain "w" had begun by 1700 but did not become common until the late 18th century.

  The vowel system was substantially different and still in motion. Shakespeare rhymed "haste", "taste", and "waste" with "last", and "shade" with "sad", because the vowel in words like "name" and "case" had not yet shifted to where it sits today. "Doom" and "come" rhyme in Shakespeare's writing because the vowel in "doom" had, in some pronunciations, undergone early shortening. The sound that became modern "vision" was pronounced with three separate sounds, something close to "vizyon", before the middle syllable coalesced into the modern "zh" sound in the mid-17th century.

• 7. Grammar in Transition

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  The two second-person pronouns, "thou" for the informal singular and "ye" for the plural and formal singular, were both in common use in the early 16th century. They appear side by side in the debates over Tyndale's Bible translation in the 1520s and 1530s. By 1650, "thou" already sounded old-fashioned or literary. Its grammatical forms carried through: "thee" as the object, "thy" and "thine" as possessives, "thyself" as reflexive. "Mine" and "thine" were kept before words beginning with a vowel or an h, giving "mine eyes" and "thine hand", while "my" and "thy" appeared before consonants.

  Verb endings were also simplifying. The third-person singular present had two competing endings, "-eth" and "-s", and both appear in Shakespeare: "that hateth thee and hates us all" is a single line with both forms. The "-eth" form did not survive into Modern English. The second-person singular had been marked with "-st" or "-est" in both present and past tenses, but once "thou" vanished, those endings had nothing to attach to.

  The progressive construction "I am walking" became dominant by the end of the period, but older alternatives were still common: "I am a-walking" with the prefix "a-", or "I do walk" with an infinitive paired with "do". Strikingly, "The house is building" could mean "The house is being built", with no additional passive marker needed. The perfect tense had not yet settled on "to have" as its sole auxiliary; some verbs still took "to be", as in the King James example from Luke: "when he is come from the field".

• 8. The Road to Modern English

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  From around the 1690s, a new period of internal peace and relative stability in England encouraged literature and the arts. Port towns and their forms of speech had been gaining influence over the old county towns throughout the century. Modern English can be taken to have fully emerged by the beginning of the Georgian era in 1714, but spelling remained somewhat fluid until Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755.

  The law eventually caught up with the language. The Proceedings in Courts of Justice Act of 1730 made English, rather than Law French or Latin, the obligatory language for use in the courts of England and in the court of exchequer in Scotland. The act was later extended to Wales. Seven years after that, a parallel measure, the Administration of Justice (Language) Act (Ireland) 1737, did the same in Ireland.

  Early Modern English also crossed the Atlantic. Jamestown, the first successful permanent English colony in the New World, was established in Virginia in 1607. New words entered English from indigenous languages: moose and racoon are examples from that early vocabulary. William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony, wrote his journal between 1630 and 1651; it would later become Of Plymouth Plantation, one of the earliest texts written in the American Colonies. The early American settlements kept some pronunciations longer than England did, including postvocalic "r" and possibly the "l" in "would" and "should", which had begun to drop in England by the 1640s. The divergence that eventually produced two recognisable varieties of English was already underway before the early modern period ended.