When people ask what my thesis is in and I say 'Middle English,' there are two types of response (discounting the blank stare which is far and away the most common):
1. "Oh... Shakespeare!"
2. "Oh... really old English!"
Not quite. Middle English is neither Shakespearean English nor Old English. Middle English is... well, somewhere in the middle!
This is my own rough guide to the development of English over the last thousand years or so. The period boundaries are fluid - Old English did not become Middle English overnight, for example - and within each period there will be a lot of variation as well. Thirteenth century Middle English is quite different from that of the fifteenth century. Before the invention of the printing press (around 1440), which started the process of standardisation in spelling and vocabulary, there were also huge dialectal variations (northern, southern, midland, and Anglian are the main ones) within the language. The first recorded instance of a southerner making fun of the northern English accent is in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale.
Old English (OE): pre-Norman conquest (1066). To someone unused to it, impossible to read.
Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
First three lines of Beowulf. Translated into modern English, they read:
What were we War-Danes in our yore-days?
Tribal-Kings! Truly cast that glory past,
how the counts had courage vast!
Via http://www.csun.edu/~ceh24682/beowulf.html
Middle English (ME): from the Conquest to the end of the Plantagenets (Richard III, died 1485, was the last Plantagenet king). Once you work out that þ (thorn) = th, v = u and ȝ (yogh) = y it is surprisingly easy to read, especially if you use editions in modern spelling.
Al men þat walkis by waye or strete,
Take tente ȝe schalle no trauayle tyne.
Byholdes myn heede, myn handis, and my fete,
And fully feele nowe, or ȝe fyne,
Yf any mournyng may be meete,
Or myscheue mesured vnto myne.
Crucifixio Christi l.253-8, in The York Plays, edited by Richard Beadle (Oxford: Early English Text Society for Oxford University Press, 2009).
All men that walk by way or street,
Take tent ye shall no travail tine.
Behold mine head, mine hands, and my feet,
And fully feel now, ere ye fine,
If any mourning may be meet,
Or mischief measured unto mine.
Crucifixion l.253-8, in York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling, edited by Richard Beadle and Pamela King (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009).
All you men who walk by in the street,
Take heed and notice My suffering!
Behold My head, My hands, and My feet,
And consider well, before you pass on,
If any sorrow can match,
Or any misfortune compare to Mine.
The first passage (part of Christ's speech from the cross in the York Crucifixion play) is Middle English in its original spelling, the second is Middle English but in modern spelling, and the third is 'translated' into modern English.
Early Modern English (EME): from the Tudors (Henry VII was the first Tudor king) to the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, thus encompassing the entire Tudor period, the Elizabethans, Jacobeans, and the period of the Civil War. This is the language of Shakespeare.
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again, it had a dying fall;
O it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night I.I.1-7, edited by Rex Gibson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Modern English (sometimes New English or NE): from the mid-seventeenth century onwards.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice [1813], edited by Vivien Jones (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 5.
Present Day English (PDE) is, like, what we speak now, innit? c u l8r!
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