[eddy_chan]

Thanks for posting that. It's amazing how accessible the english language was (190 years ago) to a reader today. Spelling and vocabulary are pretty much the same. Compare that with a period 190 years before 1829, 1639 and you'd almost be back in Shakespearean England.

[kwhitefoot]

English from 1639 is much more accessible to English speakers than texts from that period in many other languages are to their speakers now.

What often makes Shakespeare difficult is that he and his audience had a shared background so a lot of allusions are lost on a modern audience.

Even Chaucer has a lot of quite readable passages. Take a look at this side by side original and modern English versions of the prologue to the Canterbury Tales: http://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/halsall/source/CT-prolog-para...

[wycx]

Early volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society [1] (starting from 1665) are surprisingly readable.

[1] http://rstl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/by/year