Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English, but his form of it is eloquent and highly poeticized. I wonder what a conversation between two people, perhaps educated, perhaps not, would have sounded like during that era. Obviously there was a great variance in dialects, but I believe the form spoken in London was the standardized form.
Could anyone shine some light on this? A small sample conversation would be very interesting. I just feel that Shakespeare's dialogue could not represent the way the average person spoke back then.
If anyone could answer the same question for Middle English, which should be somewhat intelligible to modern English speakers as well, that would be great.
Obviously there was a great variance in dialects, but I believe the form spoken in London was the standardized form.
Don't look into the idea of standards too much. They're always fluctuating and even just within London there's historically been a lot of dialectal diversity.
To get an idea of what the language sounded like, first give the often-passed-around video of Shakespeare in the original pronunciation a listen. Like you said, this is not the same sort of sentence structure you would expect to hear on the street since the plays are more poetic. But this should give you a very good idea of how the pronunciation was different.
If you're really interested and willing to commit a little more time to the topic, there's a much longer video here that's a recording of a presentation. Jump to around 55:45. It's still poetic but you can still get a good idea of the sound of the language.
What we have though, in these videos, is of course not complete. Jump to 1:04:00 to hear Ben Crystal explain what's missing and what's not at least in terms of the pronunciation.
There are of course other good examples. Here's Chaucer being read out loud. Then here's a reading on how to play chess. There's a whole channel of these as well.
You'll notice they don't have the same pronunciation or rhythm and the woman reading that last one has (to me) Italian-sounding stress and intonation. Since we don't have audio recordings from that time, we can't really know what this feature of the language would have sounded like. This is some of what Ben Crystal gets into the video linked further up. This is reconstructed pronunciation, which amounts to (well researched and highly educated) guesswork. So you will find variation from person to person and we can't really know who among them are closest to correct. It does still give us an idea though, which is at least something.
Hope that helps.