Linguistic Variation in the Shakespeare Corpus: Morpho-Syntactic Variability of Second Person Pronouns (review)

Shakespeare’s writings show a considerable amount of variation between T and Y forms, as represented for instance by thou and you. Busse casts doubt on the role of grammar-internal factors—of the type that thou is used with closed-class verbs and you with lexical verbs—as an explanation and instead focuses attention on such factors as the date of composition, genre, and medium. With respect to genre, he finds that Y forms are strongly represented in comedies, and that apart from romances, ‘all the other subgenres show a regression of T forms over time’ (283). At a more nuanced level, B emphasizes the role of what he calls socio-pragmatic factors: ‘there is … a strong correlation between the nominal form of address and the address pronoun’ (286). He has identified a large number of nominal address forms, including (my) liege, sir, sirrah, rogue, witch, and many others, and grouped them into semantic classes. He then examines the incidence of second person pronouns within the same speaker turn (‘one single uninterrupted utterance by a single speaker’, 103) where the nominal address form occurs. Using this method B is able to point to cases that are not in accordance with explanations based on notions of power and solidarity, suggesting that there is a meaningful choice between T and Y forms.

The long chapter on nominal address forms and address pronouns (99–186) is probably the most important of the book. The discussion gains depth and solidity in part because B does not rest content with reductively limiting the investigation to strategies of politeness, as still happens sometimes in the literature. Instead he is sensitive to, and takes account of, the role of impoliteness in the study of linguistic communication. He is also right to emphasize that ‘a mere computer-assisted study or a glance at concordance lines will not suffice, as in some cases a you followed by a reverential address may be ironical or mock-polite’ (100).

B is also to be commended for the clear way in which he states the objectives of each chapter in an introductory section. He provides reviews of the literature that are generally useful, though it may be added that some of the quotations are a little lengthy and might have been paraphrased, and he fails to give English translations for quotations in German. He is rather dismissive of studies of pronoun usage devoted to single plays (100), perhaps not recognizing that the format of a more narrowly focused investigation may legitimately supplement his own more broad-based approach by shedding light on how the choice of a particular second person pronoun may on occasion be significant and natural in the world of a play (for instance, from the point of view of the development of theme and character in the play).

B’s book is a welcome contribution to the study of the history of second person pronouns in English, emphasizing the centrality of the Shakespearean canon in this connection.