How do you say Wow what a night I feel as if I am floating above air in Shakespearean English?

Answer 1

Shakespearean English is pretty much the same as modern English. They didn't say "wow" back then, but they had a number of other similar expressions, most of which are mild religious swearing (some of them are more serious religious swearing). "Zounds!" is a favourite. (It's short for "God's wounds"). Quite often, they would just say "O", as people do nowadays (see the Four Seasons Song December 1963--"O, what a night!")

When we say "O what a night", we really mean "O, what a night that was!", but we leave off the verb. This kind of structure is called an ellipsis and was less common back then than it is now. "O brave new world, that has such creatures in't" is a rare example from Shakespeare. Apart from that, the sentence looks like an Elizabethan English sentence.

Probably you are confused between Shakespeare's language(which was modern English, the same language we speak now, just in an early dialect) and Shakespeare's style (which involved a wide vocabulary, frequent use of blank verse, occasional rhymes and alliterations, Classical allusions, metaphors and similies and other poetic and rhetorical devices.)

It would not be difficult to make this sentence into iambic pentameter, although there are too many syllables for one line. I hope you will excuse that, for the sake of rhythm I have changed the progressive to the present tense, as follows: "O, what a night! I feel as if I float/ above the air." Sound more like Shakespeare now?