"On The Other Claw...."

I just realized I forgot one important point.

Both Shakespeare and Chaucer were writing what they considered phonetic English; that is, the spellings mimicked how the words were pronounced. However, Shakespeare was writing at a time of great literary achievement. The Renaissance saw a huge jump in literacy, mostly due to the advent of the printing press, the rising middle class, and the rise of Protestantism. As a result, the language was codified to reflect pronunciations that Shakespeare considered normal. Until then, the written language had kept pace with the spoken in terms of change; after him, though the spoken language continued to evolve nearly as fast as before until the 20th century, the written language became more static.

An excellent example of this actually comes from French. Someone reading a document written in Norman French at the beginning of the twelfth century would have little trouble equating the words to modern French. A document in English from the same period is a foreign language. That's because French had already been codified by the twelfth century. The language as it is spoken today bears no phonetic resemblance whatsoever to the spellings, because the spoken language has been evolving for at least eight centuries since the written language became basically static.