Second Person Pronouns in Late Elizabethan and Jacobean English

Abstract

The general criteria determining the choice of thou or you as the mode of direct address in polite sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usage are adequately appreciated. However, in this period of transition from bimodal to monomodal usage, a certain amount of flexibility, ambiguity, and uncertainty as to the social and emotional implication of the choice of one or the other is apparent. Illustrations are drawn from a number of Elizabethan and Jacobean writers, with particular emphasis on Shakespeare.