To branch the language gap between Elizabethan English and Victorian English, Edwin A. Abbott penned a list of grammar rule, explaining why Elizabethan, or Shakespearean, writers wrote the way they did.

If you find yourself reading Shakespeare, or any of his English contemporaries, you might find this helpful guide more useful than those copies of Shakespeare plays that have every single obscure word or phrase defined on the recto page, like some Great Illustrated Classic. At least, I found this guide more useful, and at least comparable to teaching someone to fish, versus giving them a fish.

Being that this book was writte about 100 years ago, it might need to go alongside a copy of the hypothetical reference book An Abbottean Grammar, bridging the gap between Victorian English and Second Elizabethan English. Nevertheless, this will be more helpful than not when pursuing a study in (First) Elizabethan English. ( )