Listening to earlier English
Old English
English 1500 years ago sounded a bit different from today. The poem Beowulf tells the stirring adventures of this great hero, who is from Sweden. While still a young man, he is called in by the Danish king to help them fight a monster from hell, Grendel, who is terrorising the royal Danish hall. Beowulf defeats Grendel but then faces a second monster – Grendel’s mother, unhappy at the loss of her son and out to revenge him. However, Beowulf is victorious in this fight as well. He returns home and under his kingship, his country enjoys a long period of peace and prosperity. But one day, a dragon comes and puts an end to this. Beowulf, an old man now, bravely goes into battle again. He indeed kills the dragon but dies himself too in the attempt. The poem ends with a lament for the courageous old warrior.
The poem Beowulf has been translated into modern English many times. The Penguin Classic translation provides a good example. In 2000, the poet Seamus Heaney published a much-praised translation in verse. The complete Old English text of the poem and line-by-line translation can be found on the Representative Poetry web site. Further scholarly material on the poem can be found on the Beowulf in Hypertext website.
Late Middle English
Jumping forward 900 years in time takes us to the time of Chaucer. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales tells the story of a group of pilgrims travelling from London to Saint Thomas Beckett’s grave in Canterbury. All the social classes and occupations of late medieval England are represented in the group. They do not have any stirring adventures on the way, but they do tell each other stirring tales – some of adventure, some of romance, some of Christian humility, some of greed and folly, and all of them bringing out the characteristics of the tellers and also often of the listeners. Chaucer himself is one of the pilgrims.
For full information about the Canterbury Tales and all Chaucer's other works, see the Harvard Chaucer Page and the Chaucer MetaPage.
There has been no shortage of translations of the Canterbury Tales.
Parts of the work were translated by John Dryden and later by William Wordsworth. Classics among the modern translations are the one in the Everyman Library and in the Penguin Classic series. Widely used today in college and university courses are the more recent translations by David Wright.
The Canterbury Tales opens with a poetic description of the month of April, which is the time when people feel the urge to go travelling. The travel in this particular case is a pilgrimage to Canterbury, the place where archbishop Thomas Beckett – killed at the instigation of Henry II in 1170 – is buried. Because he died for the church, his martyrdom earned Thomas a sainthood. In this capacity he is able to heal sick people that pray to him.
Here are the opening lines of the poem. These opening lines of Caucer’s CT can also be seen in phonetic transcription (to the right) and hear what this passage would have sounded like when read aloud by Chaucer’s daughter Elizabeth. (WAV file: 3.6MB)
First 18 lines of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droughte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the younge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages)
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke
Early Modern English
A jump of further 200 years brings you to Macbeth. If Chaucer is the prime representative of late Middle English, of course William Shakespeare is the literary giant of the Early Modern English period.
The following lines from Act V, scene 5, of his tragedy Macbeth show the character Macbeth expressing disillusionment with his earlier burning ambition. The words look just like modern English but a phonetic transcription of this scene helps an understanding of the different sounds (image on the right). 
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
Hear what the passage sounds like. (WAV file: 928KB)
In 2004, the entire play Romeo and Juliet was performed at the Globe Theatre in London using the pronunciation that would have been current in Shakespeare’s own time. The linguistic advisor on this project was David Crystal, who has written a book about it: Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment (2005). The books website also contains four sound files.