How can I understand the archaic English language used in Shakespeare's plays?
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Elizabethan English was a declined and conjugated language.  It was four hundred years closer to its German/Latin/Norman forebearers, and so endings etc., were common in the language.  Here I list some of the more common differences between Elizabethan and modern English.\n\nThe first thing one must realize is whereas in modern English the word "you" can be used in the singular and plural, and stays the same whether in the nominative, accusative, or dative, in Elizabethan English, there were differentiations of form in the second person pronoun (modern english does retain a genitive form of the word, in your/yours).\n\nThou: Second person pronoun, singular nominative  (subject of the sentence).\nThy/Thine: Second person pronoun, singular genitive (possessive).\nThee: Second person pronoun, singular dative/accusative (object of the sentence/preposition).\nYe: second person pronoun, plural nominative.\nYour/yours: second person pronoun, plural genitive.\nYou: second person pronoun, plural dative accusitive.\n\nAnother difference is verb endings.  We almost entirely dropped these endings in modern english, and replaced word order as a means of understanding a sentence.\n-est: second person present\n-eth: third person present\nhast: second person present of the verb to have\nhath: third person present of the verb to have\n\nHope this helps some.
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you could try the latin english dictionary
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A bunch of books, plays, etc. from England are usually read and discussed in English literature.  You can pretty much guarantee that Shakespeare will be read.
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Mine was English...until the only thing we were allowed to study was Shakespeare, then it got sort of ludicrous. It was a very long time before I could read Shakespeare again.
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English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to Britain in the 5th Century AD by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany. The original Old English language was subsequently influenced by two successive waves of invasion. The first was by speakers of languages in the Scandinavian branch of the Germanic family, who colonised parts of Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries. The second wave was of the Normans in the 11th century, who spoke Norman (an oïl language closely related to French).\n\nAccording to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, around the year 449, Vortigern, King of the British Isles, invited the Angles to help him against the Picts. In return, the Angles were granted lands in the south-east. Further aid was sought, and in response came Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. The Chronicle talks of a subsequent influx of settlers who eventually established seven kingdoms. Modern scholarship considers most of this story to be legendary and politically motivated.\n\nThese Germanic invaders dominated the original Celtic-speaking inhabitants, whose languages survived largely in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, and Ireland. The dialects spoken by the invaders formed what would be called Old English, which resembled some coastal dialects in what are now north-west Germany and the Netherlands. Later, it was strongly influenced by the North Germanic language Norse, spoken by the Vikings who settled mainly in the north-east (see Jórvík).\n\nFor the 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and the high nobility spoke only Anglo-Norman. A large number of Norman words were assimilated into Old English. The Norman influence reinforced the continual evolution of the language over the following centuries, resulting in what is now referred to as Middle English.\n\nDuring the 15th century, Middle English was transformed by the Great Vowel Shift, the spread of a standardised London-based dialect in government and administration, and the standardising effect of printing. Modern English can be traced back to around the time of William Shakespeare.
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Old English? http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~sconstan/
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Do a 'net search on Middle English. You'll find LOADS of examples and information about the language.
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5 acts in a shakespearean play
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well, if you're referring to Mercutio's speech in Romeo and Juliet, the line is something like\n\n"Her wagon-spokes made of long spinners' legs,\nThe cover of the wings of grasshoppers,\nThe traces of the smallest spider's web,\nThe collars of the moonshine's watery beams,\nHer whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film,\nHer wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,\nNot so big as a round little worm\nPrick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;\nHer chariot is an empty hazel-nut\nMade by the joiner squirrel or old grub,\nTime out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers."\n   Act 1, sc. 4\n\nDon't know where you'd find a picture of this, but No Fear Shakespeare's modern version words it like this:\n\n"The spokes of her wagon are made of spiders' legs. The cover of her wagon is made of grasshoppers' wings. The harnesses are made of the smallest spiderwebs. The collars are made out of moonbeams. Her whip is a thread attached to a cricket's bone. Her wagon driver is a tiny bug in a gray coat; he's not half the size of a little round worm  that comes from the finger of a lazy young girl.Her chariot is a hazelnut shell. It was made by a carpenter squirrel or an old grubworm; they've made wagons for the fairies as long as anyone can remember"\n\nhope this helps
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This will help...\n\nWHO\n\nETYMOLOGY: \nMiddle English, from Old English hw; see kwo- in Indo-European roots\nUsage Note: \nThe traditional rules for choosing between who and whom are relatively simple but not always easy to apply. Who is used where a nominative pronoun such as I or he would be appropriate, that is, for the subject of a verb or for a predicate nominative; whom is used for a direct or indirect object or for the object of a prepostion. Thus, we write the actor who played Hamlet was there, since who is the subject of played; and Whom do you like best? because whom is the object of the verb like and To whom did you give the letter? because whom is the object of the preposition to.·It is more difficult, however, to apply these rules in complicated sentences, particularly when who or whom is separated from the verb or preposition that determines its form. Intervening words may make it difficult to see that Who do you think is the best candidate? requires who as the subject of the verb is (not whom as the object of think) and The man whom the papers criticized did not show up requires whom as the object of the verb criticized (not who as the subject of showed up). Highly complex sentences such as I met the man whom the government had tried to get France to extradite require careful analysisin this case, to determine that whom should be chosen as the object of the verb extradite, several clauses away. It is thus not surprising that writers from Shakespeare onward have often interchanged who and whom. Nevertheless, the distinction remains a hallmark of formal style.·In speech and informal writing, however, considerations other than strict grammatical correctness often come into play. Who may sound more natural than whom in a sentence such as Who did John say he was going to support? though it is incorrect according to the traditional rules. In general, who tends to predominate over whom in informal contexts. Whom may sound stuffy even when correctly used, and when used where who would be correct, as in Whom shall I say is calling? whom may betray grammatical ignorance.·Similarly, though traditionalists will insist on whom when the relative pronoun is the object of a preposition that ends a sentence, grammarians since Noah Webster have argued that the excessive formality of whom is at odds with the relative informality associated with this construction; thus they contend that a sentence such as Who did you give it to? should be regarded as entirely acceptable.·Some grammarians have argued that only who and not that should be used to introduce a restrictive relative clause that identifies a person. This restriction has no basis either in logic or in the usage of the best writers; it is entirely acceptable to write either the woman that wanted to talk to you or the woman who wanted to talk to you.·The grammatical rules governing the use of who and whom in formal writing apply equally to whoever and whomever and are simililarly often ignored in speech and informal writing. See Usage Notes at else, that, whose.
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a lot of shakespeares plays are examples. they are plays written in the middle ages (medieval times) that have a hidden moral adn your suposed to learn something from them
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As a matter of fact, in OLD English the plural of "house" was similar to that for mouse.  We can still see this in German which has singular "Maus", plural "Maeuser" (mouse/mice) and singular "Haus", plural "Haeuser" (house/houses).  \n\nMost of the older forms in English have done as "house" did, adopting the Middle to Modern English way of forming plurals by adding -(e)s.       But there was a group of them --   foot/feet, goose/geese,  tooth/teeth,  louse/lice,  man/men, etc. -- that did not make the change.   Then there are those whose older forms may co-exist alongside the new forms, like the somewhat archaic form "brethren"  (and if you have a King James Bible, you can find "kine" as the plural of "cow").    \n\n(Note that the -(e)n is another remnant of an older, Germanic way of forming the plural.    We see it again in plurals like "oxen".)\n\nSome of the older forms survive as "irregular plurals".    Many of them do so because of the different vowel\n\nActually, the changed vowel in Old English plural noun forms (and various other parts of the language) was NOT invented as a way to mark the plural.   It was an indirect result.\n\nHere's how it happened:\n\n1) In most of the ancient Germanic languages, adding a suffix with an i-vowel in it caused the vowel in the preceding syllable to change to be a bit more like the i-vowel ("vowel harmony" -- a comon, very natural change in human speech).  This change is called "i-mutation" or "umlaut".\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_umlaut\n\n2) Old English had a whole system of case endings  Some of these endings had i-vowels in them and caused the change in the preceding vowel noted in #1.  (These changes took place in various forms, not just plurals.)   \n\nWe can see the same sort of change in many other words that took various suffixes:   hale/health,  long/length, old/elder, eldest, food/feed. \nhttp://www.wmich.edu/medieval/research/rawl/IOE/pronunciation.html#pronounce:imutation\n\n3)  The system of case endings died out amidst the massive changes that gave us Middle English  (for which you may blame the Norman French invaders if you like!)    But the vowel changes in many of these old noun forms survived..     Without the endings, the changed vowel itself began to function as a marker of the plural form.\n\n4)  The "new" system of forming plurals by adding -(e)s was adopted for MOST English nouns.   But many of the most common, familiar words were NOT changed.    (This is typical of human language.    Note how all our irregular VERBS are COMMON words - have, be, bring, come, go...    Rarer words are easily forced into a consistent pattern.)
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http://www.fonts.com/findfonts/mondosearchresults.htm?st=12&kid=old%20english%20text\n\nhttp://www.dafont.com/search.php?q=old+english
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Try this...\n\n\nhttp://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=differences+of+mary+sidney+herbert%27s+dedicatory+poem+and+shakespeare%27s+sonnet+30&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
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Yes. The play, in full, unabridged, can be viewed at :\nhttp://www.william-shakespeare.info/script-text-julius-caesar.htm\nYou will need to change the language option on your Windows program. Arabic is offered.\nHappy reading !
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You'd do best to start simple. Eight lines, for instance, with either eight or ten syllables in each line. Make the last word in line 2 rhyme with the last word in line 4, and the last word in line 6 rhyme with th elast word in line 8. You don't have to make all the lines rhyme. You might want to try meter; if so, iambic is the easiest.\n\nLike singing, juggling, riding a bicycle no hands or baking a cake, it takes practice.\n\nFigure out what you like best about him - or just something you like about him - and set it to rhyme.\n\n"I love to take your hand in mine, as we\nWalk a-long life's trail; you are so strong and\nWarm, I feel pro-tec-ted in your grasp, I\nE'en like the feel of call-ous on your hand."\n\nI put "-" in to show syllables. "E'en" is a poetic contraction to make the last line come out 10 syllables. It means "Even". I didn't use much meter. The first eight syllables in the first line are iambic (soft-hard). Then it goes to pot. "as we" is two soft syllables in a row.\n\nThis one was what we in the writing trade call quick and dirty. Yours will vary. If he doesn't hold your hand when you walk together, or he doesn't have callouses, pick something else you like about him. It would probably be better to write a number of short ones about shared times or different things you like about him than to try to put all of your love in one long poem.\n\nThere are poems that don't rhyme or have meter. They are easier to write, but they aren't as good. They are like serving hamburger helper instead of rib steak.\n\nMeter means you have a pattern of soft and hard syllables. Most people prounounce "Even" with a strong "E" and a soft "ven", for instance. Iambic means you alternate soft and hard syllables, starting with a soft one. Some people say it is the natural form of English. Iambic pentameter is five of each in each line. Shakespeare used it a lot.
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It’s funny nobody knows what is a mystery play...\nAnyway, the oldest English one is the Harrowing of Hell