‘You’ and ‘Thou’ in Shakespeare

A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Students and Teachers

Penelope Freedman

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781350118676
• eBook ISBN: 9781350118706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Romeo and Juliet always use 'thou' to each other, but they are the only pair of lovers in Shakespeare to do this. Why? All the women in Richard III address Richard as 'thou', but no man ever does. Why? When characters address the dead, they use 'thou' – except for Hamlet, who addresses Yorick as 'you'. Why? Shakespeare's contemporaries would have known the answers to these questions because they understood what 'thou' signified, but modern actors and audiences are in the dark. Through performance-oriented analysis of extracts from the plays, this book explores the language of 'trulls' and termagants, true loves and unwelcome wooers, male impersonators, smothering mothers, warring spouses and fighting men, as well as investigating lèse-majesté, Freudian slips, crisis moments and rhetorical flourishes. Drawing on work with RSC actors, as well as the author's experience of playing a range of Shakespearean roles, the book equips the reader with a new tool for tracking emotions, weighing power relations and appreciating dazzling complexity.

1

Introduction

In The Taming of the Shrew, Petruchio starts 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.

(Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.192–5)

But he ends it with

And will you, nill you, I will marry you.

(Taming of the Shrew, 2.1.265)

Why does he make the change? What is the difference between thou, thee, thy, thine on the one hand, and you, your, yours¹ on the other? Does it matter?

Shakespeare’s audiences clearly understood a difference: letters and trial transcripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries show ordinary people using and exploiting the implications of choosing to call someone ‘you’ or to call them ‘thou’. Those implications were part of the small change of the language of the time and they were naturally incorporated into the language of the plays of the time. To call someone you or thou was as important as the name by which you addressed them – title, surname, Christian name or nickname. It revealed attitude and relationship in everyday life and on stage.

As modern audiences, readers, students, teachers, actors or directors, we are the poorer for being deaf to the differences between you and thou and ignorant of their implications. If we think about them at all, we often assume that thou is more formal than you: we connect it with the language of the Bible, hymns and prayers, and nineteenth-century poetry. The first surprise for students and actors is to discover that thou was generally less formal, more intimate and personal, the pronoun used between lovers, close friends, parents and children.

The reasons lie in the history of you and thou. Up until the thirteenth century, thou was the only way to address one person and you was used only when addressing more than one. With the Norman Conquest came a French-speaking upper class and, as the French influence began to spread into the English language, English speakers began to imitate the French habit of using their plural, vous, as a polite, respectful singular in place of the more intimate tu. So, from the thirteenth century onwards, you started being used in the singular as well as the plural. It was a special usage, aping courtly language, intended for expressing particular politeness and respect. However, it quickly spread down the social strata and though, for a while, thou continued to be the normal or ‘default’ singular, the use of you rapidly became more common until, by the sixteenth century, it had actually replaced thou as the normal singular, and thou had become the unusual form.

By the time Shakespeare was writing, then, you was the ordinary, unexceptional, neutral form, while thou was now unusual, ‘marked’, and carried a rather divergent range of special meanings. It is appreciating the ‘specialness’ of thou that is the key to understanding the way Shakespeare and his contemporaries used it.

•Thou was used to close friends, lovers, family members and children; it was, in other words, the informal, intimate form of address.

•Thou was used by the aristocracy to patronize social inferiors, servants and so on, and they were addressed with respectful you in return.

•Thou was used for insults, and to express anger or contempt; it marked the deliberate refusal to use you, the choice not to be polite.

One way of making sense of these apparently contradictory uses is to see you as the public pronoun, the form of address that included a person’s many roles and faces (in this sense, it retained something of its plural origins). Thou, then, was used when intimacy and affection made this public recognition unnecessary (rather like using a nickname or pet name), but it was also used to cut someone down to size, to treat them as though they were a social inferior, to refuse them the dignity of their public roles, to address them with insulting directness. This kind of use is made overt in Twelfth Night in Sir Toby Belch’s advice to Sir Andrew Aguecheek when he is writing his challenge to ‘Cesario’: charging him to be ‘curst’ and to ‘taunt’ him, he adds: ‘If thou thou’st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss’ (Twelfth Night, 3.2.44).

The use of thou and you was very flexible. We find, both in the language of ordinary people and in the plays, rapid shifts between the two, sometimes in the same sentence or line of verse. These shifts to reflect transitory mood changes are what make paying attention to the pronouns so revealing. They act as a kind of barometer: where we find increasing thou use, there we find a rise in the emotional temperature, whether the emotion be love, fury, contempt or grief. Looking at you and thou patterns helps to clarify uncertain relationships, to track the dynamics of a scene, to identify crisis moments.

In fact, even without analysing the implications of thou, many actors respond instinctually, almost viscerally, to the feel of it in the mouth. Its vocal characteristics, the lingual consonant and the front vowel, lend themselves to both its functions: it can be caressed seductively on the tongue by a lover, but equally it can spit anger and contempt. It is a gift to an actor.

Within the broad categories of intimacy/affection and anger/contempt there are further, fascinating patterns to be found. Summarized below are the patterns to be found in Shakespeare’s plays (though it should be emphasized at this point that Shakespeare was not alone in using the pronouns in this way: these were the conventions of the time, and the same patterns are found in the work of his contemporaries).

•Men use thou far more commonly than women do: they use it not only to assert power and status and for angry altercations, but also to express male bonding and affection. Women use thou to one another far less: thus, for example, Benedick and Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing use thou to each other but Beatrice and Hero do not.

•It is men who initiate thou address as lovers. It is the pronoun for the wooer who believes that his love is, or will be, reciprocated: Romeo uses it to Juliet from the outset, as does Petruchio, perversely, to Katherine, in spite of her protests – it is one of the ways he wrong-foots her. Benedick, once he starts wooing Beatrice, wavers uncertainly between thou and you. Rejected lovers, like Silvius with Phebe in As You Like It, or Proteus with Silvia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, use you.

•For a woman to use thou to a potential lover before he has used it to her is a mark of inappropriate or forward behaviour. We see both Goneril and Regan use it to Edmund in King Lear, though he does not reciprocate, and we see Olivia use it to Viola (as Cesario) in Twelfth Night, and Titania use it to Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, both of them in the throes of comically unsuitable passions. Respectable women use thou sparingly.

•Thou is the pronoun for mutual lovers, but they tend to use it only when expressing their love. When they move to other topics, they revert to you. Romeo and Juliet are unique in using it throughout the play; no other pair of lovers uses it with anything like this consistency.

•Although thou is the intimate pronoun, it is not standard between husband and wife; it is used only to express special affection or, as with any speakers, in anger or argument. Husbands use it more than wives do, and this use may be patronizing as well as affectionate.

•Thou is often used by parents to children, but not invariably. Again, it is reserved for special affection. It is virtually never used even by adult children to their parents. Parents use it less to their adult children, but we find mothers using thou to their adult sons when they want to exercise control over them (Gertrude to Hamlet, for example, and Volumnia to Coriolanus).

•Thou is the emotional pronoun: it is used to express anger, love, fear or grief. These powerful emotions may override considerations of social status or power relations, as we shall see in some of the scenes explored later.

•Thou use intensifies in the emotional ‘hot spots’ of the plays. We find it in love scenes, of course, and increasingly towards the end of tragedies and in scenes of comic confusion like the climax of The Comedy of Errors.

•Excessive, indiscriminate or inappropriate use of thou often goes along with a general loss of self-control. We find this in the language both of King Lear and of Timon in Timon of Athens as they descend into madness.

•A switch from you to thou or vice versa can be used to suggest that a character is adopting a new persona, either literally as in the case of Feste in Twelfth Night when he adopts the role of Sir Topaz the curate, or more subtly, as in the manipulative psychological games that Petruchio plays with Katherine, switching to thou when he is playing the wooer or pretending to be the concerned husband.

•Thou is also the rhetorical pronoun. It is used for ‘speech acts’ such as blessing, ‘charging’ and pleading; it is used for addressing anyone who is absent, sleeping or dead, and for addressing abstract entities like Fate or Love.

•F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series preface
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on texts
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Practical sessions
• 3. Commentary
• 4. Afterword
• About the author
• Copyright