This post offers a collection of thoughts on pronouns and the insight they offer into the performance of early modern texts. Some of it is based on a session I organized for Kent’s student-led early modern seminar group, looking at pronoun switching in a selection of plays (Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing, and Thomas Middleton’s The Lady’s Tragedy). I also presented a longer version of some of this work, on The Lady’s Tragedy, at the recent postgraduate conference, Making Connections, hosted by the London Shakespeare Centre and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.
Pronominal address is far from a new area of research in the field of early modern drama, though it tends to focus mostly on second-person pronouns (“thee,” “thou,” and “you”) in Shakespeare’s plays. It’s definitely helpful to start there, since two of the three pronouns I’ve listed are ones that aren’t really in our working vocabulary any more. We modern English speakers have largely forgotten the distinction in meaning between “thou” and “you,” where they used to represent (in medieval English) the informal and formal usages of second-person singular pronouns, respectively. “You” was taken from the Old French “vous” as the polite or formal singular form, as well as the regular plural. Scholars tend to agree that “thou” then fell out of use in English in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. As an Oxford Dictionaries Blog entry puts it, in using “you” as our only second-person pronoun, we English speakers are just being unendingly polite and formal all the time.1
One of the points we discussed during my seminar session was that the old meaning seems to have reversed — my own familiarity with “thee” and “thou” as a child came from church liturgy and prayers, where it sounded like a very fancy term that you only use in certain special (or holy) circumstances. However we also all agreed that we don’t find “thou” intrusive or distracting when listening to or reading early modern texts, and usually just end up substituting “you” in our heads. We know what it should mean and mentally “translate” it for ourselves. But in doing this, we lose out on a whole range of extra meaning that’s packed into those pronouns, which can (and should!) be accessed to add greater depth to our understanding of scenes and speeches.
Using “you” or “thou” can indicate different vertical and horizontal social relationships, between inferiors and superiors, or between peers; they can show a range of emotions and attitudes (like contempt, derision, condescension, affection, and intimacy). As Sylvia Adamson outlines in her chapter on Understanding Shakespeare’s Grammar: studies in small words, when characters switch between “you” and “thou” (in either direction), it can give us an insight into shifts in mood and guide our navigation of the emotional beats of a scene, which is helpful for both readers and actors.2 In The Taming of the Shrew, for instance, Petruchio switches from “you / your” to “thy / thee” as he introduces himself to Katharina:
PETRUCHIO
You lie, in faith; for you are call’d plain Kate,
And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst;
But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom
Kate of Kate Hall, my super-dainty Kate,
For dainties are all Kates, and therefore, Kate,
Take this of me, Kate of my consolation;
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. (2.1.185-194)3
He continues to switch back and forth between “you” and “thou” forms throughout the scene, moving to “thee” when he promises not to burden her and then back to “you” when she strikes him.
Katharina, on the other hand, uses a “thou” form only twice in this scene, and both come when she reaches an emotional turning point. This is not, however, the only way to read this shift. According to Adamson, “you” was the appropriate form for a wife to use for her husband, or, more generally, for use by a woman to a man. This makes Kate’s shifts even more noticeable in performance. The first, “Go, fool, and whom thou keep’s command” (2.1.261), is dismissive, but not nearly as vehement as some of the insults she has previously used for Petruchio. She shifts back to “you” for her next three lines to him. The second “thou / thee”, “I’ll see thee hang’d on Sunday first” (2.1.304), comes after a wedding has been hastily arranged despite her protestations. Memories of performances have probably colored my reading of this line, as I’ve seen this played as shock, loathing, and scorn… all of which could warrant a condescending “thou.”
When we turn to non-Shakespearean drama, pronoun use is much less thoroughly explored. Since my research is primarily devoted to other early modern playwrights, I wanted to spend some time in my seminar session on Thomas Middleton, in part to see if similar shifts in use were happening across a spectrum of playwrights and genres (as well as across decades, since the dates of Middleton’s career do not match Shakespeare’s). My own analysis of The Lady’s Tragedy had turned up some pronoun shifts that I found slightly weird at first and I was curious to see if the other early modern research students at Kent came to similar conclusions as I had.
There are plenty of second-person pronoun shifts in the play, and most of them are in the same vein as the Shakespearean pronoun shifts, like the extract above. The eponymous Lady and her betrothed, Govianus, move between “you” and “thou” forms in a manner which seems both familiar and normal, guiding readers and actors through the emotions written into the verse. Here’s one example I brought to the seminar, where Govianus and the Lady argue over how best to protect her from the Tyrant’s attempt to bring her to court by force:
LADY
Sir, you do nothing; there’s no valour in you.
Y’are the worst friend to a lady in affliction
That ever love made his companion.
For honour’s sake, dispatch me! Thy own thoughts
Should stir thee to this act more than my weakness.
The sufferer should not do’t. I speak thy part,
Dull and forgetful man, and all to help thee! (3.1.88-94)4
One of the things we discussed after reading this passage aloud was the idea of adopting a persona of authority and control. There’s so much at stake for the Lady at this point in the plot, a sense of desperation permeates the scene, but in order to preserve her chastity she assumes what we in the seminar called “a Lady Macbeth attitude” where she tells her husband to get on with it. As we read more of the scene aloud, it was easy to imagine aspects of the staging (particular movements, words that might be emphasized, closing or increasing physical space between bodies) simply by focusing more closely on the pronouns. Even without actors in front of us, without putting the scene on its feet any more than by reading it from our seats around a seminar table, we were able to visualize ways in which the scene could take shape within a stage space. More on this later.
But the second-person shifts weren’t my main focus in sharing scenes and speeches from The Lady’s Tragedy. As I studied the play, I found myself most drawn to the third-person pronoun shifts which increase in frequency during the second half of the dramatic action. This was the subject of my conference paper at the London Shakespeare Centre’s postgraduate conference this past February. The two main male characters differ in how they refer to the Lady after her death. While the Tyrant continues to use feminine pronouns and increases his use of possessive pronouns (calling the Lady “her” and “mine”), Govianus’s rhetoric begins to fluctuate. When thinking about and speaking to the Lady’s ghost, he continues to use some third-person feminine pronouns, but he also makes a distinction between the living body and the lifeless corpse by using the third-person neutral pronoun “it” to refer to the body. I posited that the change in pronoun use by the two men signals a moral and spiritual division between them, and makes it clear which character the audience should identify with and root for in the revenge plot. I analyzed a few different speeches that illustrate this pronoun-shift, but I’d like to focus briefly on a passage that we looked at in the seminar session, but didn’t make it into the final conference version of my paper. This eight-line section at the end of Act 5, scene 1 features the third-person neutral pronoun, as Giovanni speaks of seeing the Lady’s ghost again, urging him to take action:
GOVIANUS
The body of my love is still at court.
I am not well to think on’t. The poor spirit
Was with me once again about it, troth,
And I can put it off no more for shame,
Though I desire to have it haunt me still
And never to give over, ’tis so pleasing.
I must to court. I’ve plighted my faith to’t.
’T’as opened me the way to the revenge. (5.1.177-184)
This was where it was useful to have outside opinions. The other research students highlighted the fact that while the pronouns in this passage technically stay the same, the subject differs. These are not all the same “it.” “It” refers to both the act of revenge and “the body of my love” (5.1.177). This was something I hadn’t noticed at first. I initially focused on the fact that this was another instance of Govianus using “it” to refer to the Lady’s body, and left it at that. After all these discussions, I’m interested in the idea of playing with staging by using the pronouns as they appear in the text. During my seminar session, we talked about the ways in which specific pronouns create linguistic space between characters, for instance with Benedick’s switch from “thee” back to “you” after Beatrice seemingly rebuffs his declaration of love. One of the scenes Dr Emma Whipday workshopped at the LSC conference,5 from Measure for Measure, also spent some time on “thee” to “you” shifts, and how they can be reflected in the physical space between the actors’ bodies. This connection between the verbal and physical is one I’m drawn to in my own research, and I’m now wondering if the connection between “thee / you” and physical space also extends to the third-person pronoun work I’m trying to do in The Lady’s Tragedy, where characters move between “she” and “it.” I’m not sure yet if variation in the gendering of pronouns works in quite the same as the formal to informal variations of “thee” and “you,” but I’d love to play around with a few scenes and find out.
One final, unexpected discovery: I found that my own use of pronouns, especially in written form, tends to go unnoticed. As I noticed on a read-through of my written work, and was also pointed out during the Q&A session of my conference panel, my pronouns are just as unstable and changeable as Govianus’s. While he moves between calling the Lady’s body and ghost “she” and “it,” I too struggle with how to refer to her. This is, I think, because of her shifting status as actor and prop, moving and moved around the stage space, or because I automatically accepted the spiritual divide between body and soul. Reading through my conference paper after the fact, I realized that in an effort to distinguish between the Lady’s body and the Lady’s ghostly soul, I have used distinct pronouns when referring to each. Each time I spoke about “the Lady’s ghost” I used the third-person feminine pronoun “she,” but when I talked about “the dead body” I used the third-person neutral pronoun “it,” which makes me think I’ve somehow unconsciously internalized the the idea of the Lady’s corpse as object.
Beyond the issue of materiality and what you do with dead bodies on stage, I am fascinated by the way in which Middleton’s convention of naming characters by type, rather than giving them a personal name (e.g., “The Lady,” “The Tyrant,” as a way of clueing the audience into who we should identify with and root for or against), works within the grammar and rhetoric of the play. This is, I think, what happened to me. We aren’t supposed to like the Tyrant, or condone his actions, so, grammatically, I didn’t. I followed Govianus’s lead and rhetorically aligned myself with the “good guy.” This means that beyond just making a moral judgement of the characters’ behavior, readers and spectators have the potential to begin to track with and imitate the linguistic “rules” of the play. This impact on the audience is something I’ve not thought about in my academic work before, probably because I approach these texts primarily as a reader. One of the things I’m most looking forward to in my continued work with Cultures of Performance is reframing my analysis of dramatic works, with a sharper eye on performance and its effects.
End Notes:
[1] See Oxford Dictionaries Blog, What’s wrong with you? The history of a pronoun (2017).
[2] Sylvia Adamson, “Understanding Shakespeare’s grammar: studies in small words”, Reading Shakespeare’s Dramatic Language: A Guide, ed. by Sylvia Adamson, Lynette Hunter, Lynne Magnusson, Ann Thompson and Katie Wales (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2001), 210 – 236 (p. 230).
[3] William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, ed. by Barbara Hodgdon (London: Arden Bloomsbury, 2010).
[4] Thomas Middleton, The Lady’s Tragedy, ed. by Julia Briggs, in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Words, gen. eds. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).
[5] More information on Dr Whipday’s workshop, Sibling Connections: Brother-Sister Relationships on the Early Modern Stage and Page, including the abstract, is available in the Making Connections programme.