Shakespeare Translator - English to Shakespearean

It depends on where "you" falls in the sentence. As the subject it is thou ("thou art kind"), and as the object it is thee ("I love thee"). "Your" is thy before a consonant and thine before a vowel ("thy heart", "thine eyes"), "yours" is thine ("the choice is thine") and "yourself" is thyself. Shakespeare also used "you" itself: it was the polite or plural form, used for a stranger, a superior or a group, while thou was for a friend, a lover, a child or someone being insulted. This tool uses thou and thee throughout, which is what most people are looking for when they ask for Shakespearean English.

It modernizes the words. Choose Shakespearean to English and thou, thee, hath, doth, 'tis, wherefore, prithee and verbs ending in -eth or -est come back in their modern forms. It works from a dictionary of common words, so it does not explain what a passage means. Shakespeare used many words that have since changed their meaning or dropped out of use, and his word order, wordplay and imagery are not something a word swap can rewrite. For a speech you are studying, use the modern words as a starting point and check the meaning against an annotated edition of the play.

It means "why are you Romeo?", not "where are you?". In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is asking why the man she loves has to be a Montague, the family her own is at war with. Wherefore meant why, and art is the form of "are" that goes with thou. Typing "wherefore art thou" into the Shakespearean to English side gives "why are you".

In Early Modern English the verb had its own ending for thou and for he, she or it. After thou it ends in -est or -st: thou knowest, thou sayest, thou hast, thou dost, thou wilt. In the third person many verbs end in -eth: she knoweth, he goeth, it seemeth, with hath for has and doth for does. The tool adds -eth where the word is clearly a verb, so "she loves him" becomes "she loveth him" but "my loves" stays as it is.

No. Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English, the English of about 1500 to 1700, which a modern reader can follow with a little help. Old English is the language of Beowulf, spoken before about 1100, and it looks like a foreign language today, with different words, grammar and letters such as þ and ð. People often say "Old English" when they mean the language of Shakespeare or the King James Bible, and that style is what this tool writes.