Early Modern English

===Development to Modern English===
{{main|Modern English}}
The 17th-century [[port town]]s and their forms of speech gained influence over the old [[county town]]s. From around the 1690s onwards, England experienced a new period of internal peace and relative stability, which encouraged the arts including literature.

Modern English can be taken to have emerged fully by the beginning of the [[Georgian era]] in 1714, but [[English orthography]] remained somewhat fluid until the publication of Johnson's ''[[A Dictionary of the English Language]]'', in 1755.

The towering importance of [[William Shakespeare]] over the other Elizabethan authors was the result of his [[William Shakespeare's influence|reception]] during the 17th and the 18th centuries, which directly contributes to the development of [[Standard English]].{{Citation needed|date=May 2018}} [[Shakespeare's plays]] are therefore still familiar and comprehensible 400 years after they were written,<ref>[[Fausto Cercignani|Cercignani, Fausto]], ''Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation'', Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981.</ref> but the works of [[Geoffrey Chaucer]] and [[William Langland]], which had been written only 200 years earlier, are considerably more difficult for the average modern reader.