[1] Middle English underwent significant change over time and contained large dialectical variations.

Early Modern English, on the other hand, became more standardised and developed an established canon of literature that survives today.

From around the 1690s onwards, England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encouraged the arts including literature.

The towering importance of William Shakespeare over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his reception during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of Standard English.

The orthography of Early Modern English is recognisably similar to that of today, but spelling was unstable.

Some of the changes that occurred were based on etymology (as with the silent ⟨b⟩ that was added to words like debt, doubt and subtle).

By the time of Shakespeare, the spellings ⟨er⟩, ⟨ear⟩ and perhaps ⟨or⟩ when they had a short vowel, as in clerk, earth, or divert, had an a-like quality, perhaps about [ɐɹ] or [äɹ].

The translators of the King James Version of the Bible (begun 1604 and published 1611, while Shakespeare was at the height of his popularity) had a particular reason for keeping the informal "thou/thee/thy/thine/thyself" forms that were slowly beginning to fall out of spoken use, as it enabled them to match the Hebrew and Ancient Greek distinction between second person singular ("thou") and plural ("ye").

Over the centuries, however, the very fact that "thou" was dropping out of normal use gave it a special aura and so it gradually and ironically came to be used to express reverence in hymns and in prayers.

The use of modals' present participles to indicate aspect (as in "Maeyinge suffer no more the loue & deathe of Aurelio" from 1556), and of their preterite forms to indicate tense (as in "he follow'd Horace so very close, that of necessity he must fall with him") also became uncommon.

Also, this period includes one of the earliest Russian borrowings to English (which is historically a rare occasion itself[32]); at least as early as 1600, the word "steppe" (rus.

степь[33]) first appeared in English in William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream.