Yeah, modern English begins around 1500ish; Shakespeare wrote in early modern English. If you just see a few antiquated words here and there, it's not even Middle English, let alone Old English.
Middle English you can puzzle out but many words are spelled quite differently and the grammar has a more complex structure to it.
Old English is arguably easier to read for a fluent current German speaker than a current English speaker; it's free of most of the French/Romance influences and still makes strong use of heavily inflected forms (including of nouns and such), freer word order, and other traditional Germanic grammar forms.
For fun, here's the Lord's Prayer in Middle English (a fairly late form, but still Middle English):
Quote:
Oure fadir that art in heuenes,
halewid be thi name;
thi kyngdoom come to;
be thi wille don, in erthe as in heuene.
Yyue to vs this dai oure breed ouer othir substaunce,
and foryyue to vs oure dettis, as we foryyuen to oure dettouris;
and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but delyuere vs fro yuel. Amen.
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It'd be tough to read things written in this language, especially if you didn't know what they were ahead of time. But even without specific instruction, you can puzzle through it to a large extent and at least get the gist of most bits, though you'll miss nuance and be completely confounded by certain words and constructions. The farther back you go, the more alien it gets.
Old English, on the other hand, is much tougher to read—even for just a gloss of what the content is—without some background:
Quote:
Fęder ure žu že eart on heofonum;
Si žin nama gehalgod
to becume žin rice
gewurže šin willa
on eoršan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedęghwamlican hlaf syle us todęg
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfaš urum gyltendum
and ne gelęd žu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele sožlice
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