Power and Passion in Shakespeare’s Pronouns: Interrogating “You” and “Thou” (review)

The knottiest problems to do with Shakespeare’s language are often those we are least aware of. Who would guess, for example, that Cressida’s “‘I love you’” to Troilus (142) is a highly unusual collocation, likely to have unsettled its Renaissance audience with its paradoxical mixture of profession of love and formal pronoun? Far more usual is Petruchio’s “‘I love thee’” (48)—although, as Penelope Freedman points out, the surface conventionality of Petruchio’s choice cannot mask darker, more manipulative connotations. Scholars have long known about the options in pronoun form that Early Modern English offered its speakers, but until now, detailed consideration has been largely confined to those with a specialist linguistic interest. Freedman is a theater director, as well as a scholar, and the particular promise of this book is a consideration of pronoun choice in the light of the possibilities of performance. If the book does not entirely fulfill this promise, it is none the less studded with insights and written without recourse to overly technical jargon (either literary or linguistic).

The book opens with an efficient survey of work on pronouns in Shakespeare, likely to be of particular use to students and teachers seeking an easy way into this productive topic. Using the folio genre divisions, Freedman notes that comedies have an average use of “thou” of 31 per cent; tragedies, 41 per cent; and histories, 47 per cent. After a chapter devoted solely to The Merry Wives of Windsor (because its linguistic forms are assumed to be closest to those of Shakespeare’s England), the book considers each folio genre in turn, and in ascending order of frequency of “thou.” Within the chapters, each of the canonical plays (and Edward III ) gets a separate section discussing the use of pronoun forms. Actors and directors are the book’s target audience, and those preparing a production will be able to go straight to the relevant section. The danger with books organized as lists, however, is that they become dutiful plods, and this book is not an easy read from cover to cover. The space Freedman allots to each play varies considerably, and the book takes flight when she reaches the later comedies around chapter 4 and can devote extended sections to subtle and complex relationships. Beatrice and Benedict, for example, are marked as old sparring partners by their early exchange of “you” (81); something of Benedict’s fragility is shown by the fact that his subsequent “thou” in Act 4 to Beatrice is never reciprocated (85). Freedman’s argument here is strengthened by her ability to refer back to her analysis of Taming of the Shrew, and the book would work better with a more thematic structure.

Similarly rich is her reading of Twelfth Night, which strikingly shows how frequently characters are drawn into inappropriate pronoun choice due to their misperceptions of gender, identity, and status. In Richard III , we learn that no man addresses Richard with “thou,” while almost every woman does. Freedman’s interpretation of this is bleak: while the men can be convicted of moral cowardice, the women’s honesty is mitigated by the fact that they simply do not count—“they can be hurt only through their men, their husbands and their sons, and these are lost already” (202). Hamlet and Ophelia’s exchanges are read in relation to a number of filmed versions of the play; elsewhere, productions are referred to, although not as frequently as might be expected, given the stated aim of the book. A keen eye is kept on quarto and folio variants throughout.

A paradox haunts the book: Freedman claims (I think rightly) that the conventions for using “thou” and “you” are “sufficiently complex and subtle to allow for multiple interpretations of any scene” (19), but her readings are rarely ambiguous. Actors and directors must make decisions after all, and must decide how to weight a pronoun in...