Power and Passion in Shakespeare's Pronouns

Interrogating 'you' and 'thou'

Penelope Freedman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351909556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik von Shakespeare

In revealing patterns of you/thou use in Shakespeare's plays, this study highlights striking and significant shifts from one to the other. Penelope Freedman demonstrates that understanding of the implications of you/thou use in early modern English has been bedevilled by overconcern with issues of power and status, and her careful research, analysing all the plays, reveals how a fuller understanding of Shakespeare's usage can provide a key to unlock puzzles of motive and character, and a glass to clarify relationships and emotions. The work focuses particularly on dialogue between men and women, and sheds new light on male and female language use. The scholarship presented in this volume is augmented with tables and a glossary of linguistic terms.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Petruchio opens his wooing of Katherine with,

Hearing thy mildness praised in every town,

Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded –

Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs –

Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.

(The Taming of the Shrew, 2.1, 191-4¹)

but he ends it with ‘And will you, nill you, I will marry you.’ (2.1, 265). Troilus four times says to Cressida ‘be thou true’ before they part (Troilus and Cressida, 4.5, 55–65), but when Cressida finally seeks reassurance from him, her question is: ‘My lord, will you be true?’ (4.5, 101). Henry V ends his wooing of the Princess Catherine with ‘wilt thou have me?’ (Henry V, 5.2, 244), but celebrates her acceptance with ‘Upon that I kiss your hand, and I call you my queen’ (5.2, 249–50).

For a modern Anglophone audience, as indeed for most actors and directors, the distinction between ‘you’ and ‘thou’ is virtually lost. We absorb both pronouns indiscriminately, and few would claim that they were aware of the choice of one pronoun or the other even at a subconscious level. We turn a deaf ear and editors turn a blind eye: T/V² differences are rarely considered in discussions about textual authenticity; Foakes (1997: 7–8) is a rare exception in commenting on the significance of ‘thou’ use in the introduction to his New Arden edition of King Lear, and even there I shall argue that he is not entirely clear about the conventions Shakespeare was using. Speakers of other European languages which still employ a formal and an informal second-person singular are, of course, more attuned to the distinction, though they are often bemused by the slippery complexity of English usage compared with the less flexible conventions of their own languages. It is no accident that among the mere dozen studies of T/V use in individual Shakespeare plays written in the past forty years, three by the Spanish scholar Clara Calvo (1992a, 1992b, 1994) and one by the Austrian Manfred Draudt (1984) are the most enlightening.

Such discussion as there is has been heavily influenced by a major paper, first published in 1960 by Brown and Gilman,³ in which they attempt to trace and explain the changing use of second-person pronouns in European languages (in particular, French, German, Italian and English) from the early mediaeval period to the present day. They take the generally accepted view that ‘you’ can be attributed to a borrowing from the Norman French nobility of vous, itself derived from the Latin plural vos,⁴ used to address the Roman Emperor in the fourth century AD. They assume that this plural address derives from the actual duality of the emperor (the existence of one emperor in the East and one in the West), while imperial power was still considered to be a unified whole. Not only was the Emperor one of a pair, however, but he was also the representative of his people, and as such used the plural nos to refer to himself, thus inviting the reflecting vos in return. Gradually, the use of this reverential plural was extended to other people of importance and the usage found its way into the languages of Europe after the break-up of the Empire. There, after a good deal of fluctuation, ‘a set of norms crystallized which we call the nonreciprocal power semantic’ (Brown and Gilman, 1960: 255).

They suggest that V came to be used reciprocally between members of the upper class because only those who were themselves of high status had occasion to address people of the greatest importance, and thus the very use of V indicated that the speaker was of high status. The poor, on the other hand, continued to exchange the old singular T, starting to use V to their social superiors as the expectation of the deferential use trickled down the social strata, and receiving T in return. They claim that when tensions were introduced into the system – that is, when questions of ‘solidarity’ began to override questions of social superiority or inferiority – then fluctuations began. Then T might express solidarity in any class or class combination, and V the absence of solidarity. Only when it acquired this solidarity function, they argue, did T come to carry, in addition, connotations of nearness or intimacy, ‘approach’ contrasted with the ‘withdrawal’ of V.

Their paper is hugely informative and wide-ranging, going beyond the European languages to comparisons with Gujarati and Hindi, but I would suggest that, as far as English is concerned, it has been quite misleading in focusing narrowly on the power and social class implications of T/V choice and ignoring its powerful and complex emotional connotations. Calvo comments on the ‘dogma-like status’ achieved by Brown and Gilman’s paper (Calvo, 1992a: 6), and attributes to it the overwhelming emphasis in subsequent papers on the status and social class aspects of ‘you’/’thou’ use and the conviction that it paralleled closely the use of T/V pronouns in other languages. Among those influenced by the Brown and Gilman view, she cites Barber (1976), Blake (1983) and Hussey (1982), together with a cluster of papers on King Lear by Aers and Kress (1981), Hodge and Kress (1982), Short (1981) and Downes (1988). I would add to her list Finkenstaedt (1963) together with Mulholland’s (1967) work on Lear and Much Ado About Nothing and Barber’s (1981) paper on Richard III. Even Magnusson, in her fascinating discourse pragmatics study of Shakespeare’s dialogue, comments in her introduction that:

Linguists have long since identified one isolated feature of verbal exchange in early modern English that can serve as an index to social relationships. It is generally accepted that the selection of ‘thou’ or ‘you’ (T/V), the pronouns of address, can register relations of power and solidarity. (Magnusson, 1999: 2)

She goes on, however, to remark that:

the other contextual factors governing selection seem to be so complicated that no-one can be said to have entirely cracked the code. (1999: 2)

It is my intention in this study both to crack that code (or to complete the decoding begun by others) and to demonstrate the wealth of hidden information that was readily available to Shakespeare’s audience, who understood the code, and becomes accessible to us once we can read it too. In doing so, I shall show that the ‘power and solidarity’ dyad is not the key.

Countervailing voices (McIntosh, 1963; Quirk, 1971; Wales, 1983; Draudt, 1984; Calvo, 1991, 1992a, 1992b, 1994) to those of Brown and Gilman and their followers tend to focus on the marked status of T. In Early Modern English, they argue, V was the unmarked pronoun of address, the norm, and every use of T was in some sense a deviation from that norm, specifically justified by the social, emotional, psychological or rhetorical context of its use. T carried a powerful significance, and to ignore it when we read or listen is to lose vital subtext. Wales (1983) draws on evidence of mediaeval usage to argue that the power and solidarity dyad is not compatible with pronoun usage either in Middle English or in Early Modern English. She claims that a deeper semiotic of ‘nearness’ and ‘distance’ underlies the solidarity/no solidarity dyad, and that it was not an ‘add-on’, as Brown and Gilman suggest for their later dyad of ‘approach’ and ‘withdrawal’. She argues that this emotional distinction was always present in English usage, traceable back to the thirteenth century, and that momentary shifts between the pronouns were always possible in English while they were very rare in French or German. She cites the work of Burnley (1983: 19), who finds that in Chaucer’s work the T/V distinction is one of ‘nearness and intimacy’ versus ‘detachment and remoteness’, and Mossé (1952, repr. 1968: 94), whose quotations from Havelock the Dane at the end of the thirteenth century and Second Shepherd’s Play at the end of the fourteenth century show T/V switches which cannot be explained simply by a change of context or social attitude, but must be attributed to momentary shifts of mood or emotion. Taking Quirk’s (1971) marked versus unmarked distinction, she suggests that since the adoption of ‘you’ as a polite singular in Middle English was a borrowing from the Norman French aristocracy, its use would have been, for the gentry, the equivalent of sprinkling one’s conversation with French phrases – a practice more suited to public than to private speech. Rather than standing in opp...