Why did English change so much between Chaucer and Shakespeare?

Question

My inexpert perception of things is that the distance between The Canterbury Tales (end 14th century) and Romeo and Juliet (end 16th), from a language perspective, is vast, and vastly greater than the distance between Romeo and Juliet and today's English.

The Canterbury Tales reads like a different language. I can't make much sense of it at all. Romeo and Juliet is broadly intelligible without outside help.

If this is right... why did English change so much in the space of 200 years, and comparatively little in the next 400?

Answer 1

The printing press changed everything.

Prior to Gutenberg, English was primarily a spoken language and stories were often passed on in the oral tradition. The introduction of printed works in the mid-15th century had two major effects:

1. Standardization, as printed works were distributed beyond the reach of the local authors. This led to standardization of the language from what had been myriad local dialects to a more common single lexicon.
2. Stabilization, as the shift from an oral tradition for recording stories to a printed one fixed the form of the tales being written. As you can imagine, passing a story verbally for a century leads to many slight alterations of the story and even of the language in which the story is told. Once printed, however, its form is essentially fixed and will change very little - and the same is true of its language.

It is this second effect which results in what you've noticed: prior to the mid-15th century, the English language changed much more rapidly than afterwards.

Example of some research into this effect: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/courses/6361dickens.htm

Answer 2

I think there are two major factors at work.

1) Chaucer was the first person to write and publish in what was Middle English (check your copy of Canterbury Tales, I bet it is a translation into "Modern English" although the English in my copy isn't very modern and is still very difficult). Before then back to the time of the Norman Conquest the main language of the educated / ruling class was the French of the conquerors and so secular published material was either French or Latin.

Once Chaucer published everything was up for grabs and change was fairly rapid. Books were rare and normally one upper class person read a book out loud to his/her less educated peers. Chaucer's work extended the written word to the middle classes if not the proletariat. His bawdy tales in the vernacular naturally attracted a much wider audience and perhaps marked the start of literacy beyond just the elite in England.

2) Society went through enormous changes between 1400 and 1600. Elizabeth turned England into a world power. Having said that Spencer's "Faerie Queen" 50 years earlier may mark the start of modern English and that was before Elizabeth's time. These societal changes were reflected in the language.

The European development of the printing press in about 1450 was important but I don't see how that accounts for the differences. After all it comes only 50 years into the 200 year period. Note that the Chinese had the printing press much earlier.

Answer 3

Both English and French changed dramatically between 1450 and 1500. Both English and French had vowel shifts.

As Mark Thompson points out, this is when the printing press was introduced. It was also when the Hundred Years War ended, and the War of the Roses occurred. France got control of Burgundy, Aquitaine, and Northern France; Austria gained the Low Countries; and Spain completed the Reconquista.

These historical events caused the rulers of both France and England to focus on creating a distinctly French nobility and a distinctly English nobility, and caused the Anglo-French nobles to choose whether they were English or French.

In terms of "fixing" the language, probably the most important event was the publication of the King James Version of the Bible in 1611. This text is still read daily by a noticeable fraction of the world's English speakers.

Answer 4

It's not just a change of language over time but also over location. The focus of written culture moved South following the courts.