Chaucer's plain, poetic storytelling is already, recognizably, our tongue. The struggle for access to information, and to literature, was on.

Young William Shakespeare, two centuries later in Stratford-on-Avon, was the son of a skilled glover -- a businessman and civic politician who was himself completely illiterate. He sent his son to the local school, where young Will, probably much like young Chaucer, laboured through an entirely Latin curriculum -- not one word of the English that runs riot in Shakespeare's sonnets and plays was taught to him during his eight years of formal education.⁽²⁾

No wonder these guys couldn't spell! That's why we all depend on style Czars like William Sabin. [Bill, are you here yet? Would you stand up and say hello?]

With no rules to follow, Shakespeare and Chaucer still shared a horror of the contrast between the formal, classical language of their education and the lively, contemporary language they were helping to create.

"An honest tale speeds best being plainly told," the Bard wrote in Richard III.

And in Hamlet, he steps right off the page and out of Hamlet's character to lecture the visiting players on the proper, natural delivery of their lines, as if Shakespeare the actor/director could not stand to see his language treated in the old, stiff style.

Christine also reminded us that Bill Sabin's honourable profession was born during Shakespeare's lifetime, with the first English dictionary, compiled in 1604 by Robert Cawdry. Cawdry explicitly designed it to broaden literacy by explaining all those difficult Old French and Latinate terms…

"in pleine English wordes, gathered for the helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskillfull persons."⁽³⁾

A little later in the 1600s, Sir Edward Coke was making the case for translating the law from French into English:

"I cannot conjecture," said Coke, "that the general communication of these laws into the English Tongue can work any inconvenience, but introduce great profit, seeing that ignorantia juris non excusat, ignorance of the law excuseth not."