To be clear, Shakespeare did not speak American Standard English (or any dialect of English currently spoken). However, as I replied to your sibling, the Englis

To be clear, Shakespeare did not speak American Standard English (or any dialect of English currently spoken). However, as I replied to your sibling, the English that he spoke is not more different from ASE than many other dialects of modern English, and is much closer than some. (Where it differed is primarily in orthography, as the last thing to be standardized in English was spelling, which makes the difference when reading text seem much greater.) As noted elsewhere in these comments, the distinction between a language and a dialect is primarily a political one (and some linguists reject it entirely). However, there is a clear line between between Middle English and Modern English which does not exist between Elizabethan and American Standard, and that's why I say the original claim is false. If what you want to say is, "Okay, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, but he spoke a different dialect than I do, and in my dialect double negatives reverse meaning", that's a fine and fairly uncontroversial statement, in that it forces one to acknowledge that one speaks a dialect. If on the other hand you're trying to say, "Okay, but that was an old kind of English and English today is different," that's factually false.