“Thou” and “You” in Shakespeare

Many European languages have two words for the second person pronoun ‘you’ where Standard English has just the one.  These two words enable the speaker to distinguish between ‘you’ singular and ‘you’ plural, and often they allow a second nuance or subtlety of meaning to emerge: a distinction between formality or detachment on one side and informality even intimacy on the other.  So as a very general rule, in languages like French, German and Spanish, a student speaking to a teacher might use the formal option whereas, when speaking to a friend, they might use the informal. 

English used to have a similar distinction.  ‘You’ was invariably used for the plural and ‘thou’ for the singular.  Furthermore, ‘you’ also denoted formality, respect and detachment, whereas ‘thou’ was informal and intimate.  Again, these are very broad guidelines, but around the time Shakespeare was writing, four centuries ago, this distinction began to fade, and in the modern era (outside places like Yorkshire and Lancashire where non-standard dialects remain strong) we are unlikely to hear the word ‘thou’ other than in a love poem or a Bible class. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, Shakespeare seems not to have embraced the disappearance of the informal pronoun, and his plays and poems make extensive use of both forms.  He doesn’t use them interchangeably, because they mean different things, and have different implications. But he does use them extensively, in quite different ways.  But does anybody notice?  And does it matter if they don’t?  The answer to the first question is maybe not, and the answer to the second is: it definitely does.

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Take an example from early in ‘The Merchant of Venice’.  Antonio and Bassanio need money to finance Bassanio’s courtship of the desirable (and very rich) Portia.  Shylock may be able to assist, but in the past, relations have been frosty.  Nonetheless, they address him now in Act One Scene Three in formal and respectful terms, because after all they need his help.  Shylock takes his time but Bassanio is impatient: ‘May you stead me?’ he asks, ‘will you pleasure me?  Shall I know your answer?’  The formal second person pronouns reveal the power relations here – in Shylock’s favour – and they punctuate the first three-quarters of the scene.

In all, Bassanio addresses Shylock nine times in the opening 131 lines of the scene, each time using the respectful ‘you’ form (‘Be assured you may’, ‘If it please you to dine with us’ etc).  Antonio addresses him twice in the same way, as the deal is gradually sealed: ‘Well, Shylock’, he concludes, ‘shall we be beholding to you?’  While negotiations continue, the ‘you’ form is used exclusively.  But with the deal about to be sealed, Shylock recollects past abuses: ‘You call me misbeliever, cut-throat dog’, he recalls, ‘And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine’.  This constitutes an abrupt change in mood, and it is reflected in changed language: ‘I am as like to call thee so again’, replies Antonio, addressing him as if he were an inferior, ‘To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too’.  This short speech contains seven second-person pronouns (‘thee … thee … thee …thou … thy … thine … thou …’), and their common ground does not need further elaboration.  By contrast, Shylock uses the second-person pronoun 47 times in this scene, each time selecting the formal and respectful ‘you’ form of address. 

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Why does Shakespeare do this?  What is he telling us?  The dramatic opening scene of ‘King Lear’ helps us understand his thinking.  Lear has reached the age when thoughts turn to retirement, and he is minded to pass his kingdom on to his three daughters.  Goneril and Regan sing their father’s praises and receive their reward: substantial realms to the north and west of Britain.  So to the third daughter, Cordelia, whom Lear addresses in appropriately formal terms: ‘what can you say’, he asks, ‘to draw / A third [realm] more opulent than your sisters?’  Cordelia responds neutrally, and Lear rebukes her: ‘Mend your speech a little,’ he tells her, ‘Lest it may mar your fortunes’. Cordelia replies that she loves him as a daughter should love a father, but her first love will be to her husband.

At this, Lear’s mood changes, and Shakespeare signals the change with a change of pronoun: ‘But goes thy heart with this?’ he asks, and when Cordelia confirms what she has said, Lear’s anger is self-evident: ‘Let it be so!’ he exclaims, ‘thy truth then be thy dower!’  Furthermore, he resolves to ‘Hold thee from this [inheritance] for ever’ and he denounces her chillingly as ‘thou my sometime daughter’.  In fewer than forty lines his love and respect for his daughter have collapsed, and Shakespeare’s audiences will have been alert to the way this is reflected in the terms of address he employs. 

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Similar nuances can sometimes be seen in the course of a single speech.  A good example comes in ‘The Tempest’, Shakespeare’s last play.  Here Caliban – the original inhabitant of the island before he was joined by the more powerful Prospero and his daughter Miranda – is running through some of his grievances against the more recent arrivals.  There was a time, he remembers, when their relationship was co-operative, and his memories of those days are reinforced by his use of the intimate form of address: ‘When thou camest first’, he reminds Prospero, ‘Thou strokest me and madest much of me’.  These were times when they worked together: ‘and then I loved thee’, he remembers, ‘And show’d thee all the qualities of the isle’.  So far the mood has been warmly reminiscent.

But the good times did not last: “Cursed be I that did so!” exclaims Caliban, and the abrupt change of mood is marked by a change of pronoun: ‘All the charms / Of Sycorax [his mother, a witch] light on you!’ Caliban’s detachment from his previous warm memories is emphatic, and his anger at Prospero is clear: ‘here you sty me’, he points out, referencing his imprisonment, ‘whiles you do keep from me / The rest o’ the island’. In a brief speech of fourteen lines, the contrast between past and present is underscored by the move from the intimate ‘thou … thou … Thou … thee … thee …’ to the detached ‘you … you … you … you …’.  It is a striking pattern, and it would be fascinating to know how far Shakespeare was conscious of what he was doing in speeches like this, and just how much of the pattern was instinctive and unconscious.

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Similar patterns emerge from a study of ‘Macbeth’.  Look at the form of address favoured by Lady Macbeth in speaking to her husband.  At first, when she reads about his encounter with the witches and reflects on his personality, she is inclusive and intimate: ‘Glamis thou art, and Cawdor’, she reflects, ‘and shalt be / What thou art promised’.  But she has misgivings too: ‘I fear thy nature’, she admits – he is too pliable, too law-abiding: ‘thou wouldst be great’, but ‘what thou wouldst highly / That wouldst thou holily’.  In a brief speech of sixteen lines, intimate forms of the pronoun are used fourteen times. But when Macbeth arrives in person, things get serious and the mood changes: ‘Your face,’ he tells him, ‘is as a book’ – easy to read, she claims, and then comes her advice: ‘bear welcome in your eye, / Your hand, your tongue’, but above all ‘you shall put / This night’s great business into my dispatch’. Following the sequence of intimate pronouns earlier, the abrupt mood, changed by Macbeth’s physical presence, signals a move to the formal and detached form, used here five times.

Lady Macbeth is clear about her objectives but is less clear how they can be achieved.  Macbeth is the variable – intermittently committed to the murder, then reluctant to engage.  Lady Macbeth varies her tactics. When Macbeth cancels the project she is initially sympathetic to him: ‘Art thou afeard’ she asks him gently ‘To be the same in thine own act and valour / As thou art in desire?’ But her patience is limited: ‘What beast was it, then,’ she asks, misleadingly, ‘That made you break this enterprise to me?’, and the intimate pronouns (‘thy … thou … thine … thou … thou … thou …thine …’) give way to a more formal address that does the trick.  Macbeth, spoken to brusquely, is quite quickly persuaded.

It’s the last time they will speak before Duncan is murdered.  Curiously, Lady Macbeth will never again address her husband with the intimate form.  From now on, her tone will be detached or respectful: after Duncan’s body is discovered, she is angry – ‘Why did you bring those daggers from the place?’ she berates him, and – insultingly – ‘My hands are of your colour; but I shame / To wear a heart so white’.  The intimacy has gone, just as it went with Antonio and Bassanio, with Lear, and with Caliban – and it does not return.  In the last three acts of the play, Lady Macbeth never once uses the informal ‘thou’ to her husband, instead using the formal pronoun around forty times to him.  Even when in the final act, she sleep-walks through the highlights of their murderous reign, her instructions to Macbeth all employ the formal ‘you’: ‘Wash your hands, put on your nightgown’, she tells him, revisiting the murder of Duncan, and then, confusing atrocities, ‘I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried’.  In short, the choices she makes when she speaks to Macbeth reflect the relationship they share – their intimacy and, later, their estrangement.

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The distinction between ‘You’ and ‘Thou’ began to drift in the century after Shakespeare.  This was an egalitarian age, and the hierarchical implications of the distinction began to grate on people.  The Quakers, a highly principled religious sect, wanted to use ‘thou’ only: everyone is my friend, everyone is as important as me – and as unimportant.  Others found the use of ‘thou’ insulting, and there are records of fights starting when the wrong form was used.  So though the old way lived on in the Bible and in Shakespeare, its impact faded, and nowadays, though we know that ‘thou’ roughly equates to ‘you’, we don’t investigate the nuances much further.

Should we?  I think we should.  It’s a fascinating window onto what Shakespeare is thinking when he puts two characters on the stage and listens in.  Moreover, when the relations between those two characters are subject to change, to deepening and development, the form of the address is often information we need to notice.  Does Lear love Cordelia? Does Antonio respect Shylock? Does Lady Macbeth have faith in Macbeth to do the deed?  Yes and no – in that order – because things have changed (as they often do in Shakespeare’s plays) in a handful of lines, and the choice of pronoun tells the tale, a significant signpost to the deeper implications of the text.