Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject.
For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4:
Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How
do you, man? the music likes you not.
Julia. You mistake; the musician likes me not.
In modern English, it would mean "You don't like the music" and "I don't like the musician."
I don't buy that. For one thing, Shakespeare's plays were written in modern English. Otherwise, his work would be almost impossible for most people to read and follow today. Middle English and Old English don't look much like modern English, and there is no such thing (or at least no such period) as "Archaic English," except from a modern perspective.
For another, history is full of similar forms ("He loves me, he loves me not") that are probably just as old and absolutely unambiguous.
To my ear, it's more similar to modern day "me likes", as in "I like".
Keep in mind archaic English retains more of the Scandinavian structure. "Likes" would in that case be active, i.e. the person doing the liking.
If my hunch is right, it's a play on words going from that more archaic structure in what the host says to the more modern structure in how Julia says it. Playing with the ambiguity of language.
"The music likes me not" - "The music" is the grammatical subject, so the third-person singular conjugation "likes" is used. "Me", being the object form of the first-person pronoun, is the object of the sentence.
It's comparable to how in Spanish, you'd say "Me gusta la música" and not "Yo gusto la música" - the person that does the liking is the grammatical object, and the thing that the person likes is the grammatical subject.
Except, in English, unlike in Spanish, it used to be in free variation which things were the grammatical subject and object. You can even see how, in Old English, the person who liked was put in the dative case[0].
Translated into modern English, the lines would be:
You don't like the music.
You're wrong. I don't like the musician.
Another verb this happened to was "to think." The word "methinks" is a archaism/holdover from when "think" had the meaning "to seem" and so "me thinks" came from Old English "mē thyncth," which had the first-person in the dative case.
According to Wiktionary, it seems the meaning "to seem" was the Old English verb þyncan, and there was another verb þenċan, which meant "to think." That is, it came from the combination of two different verbs that sounded similar. So, maybe it wasn't the best example.
No, because at that time, music was the subject. The subject-object relationship could be inverted for the verb "like". You can think of it as though "like" were a synonym for "please," with "it likes me" being analogous to "it pleases me." No one uses the word "like" like that nowadays, of course.
For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4:
In modern English, it would mean "You don't like the music" and "I don't like the musician."