ABSTRACT
Approaching the plays by chronology and genre reveals the former to be relatively unimportant: the same conventions operate throughout the plays, even, I have argued, in Henry VIII, where T is used so little. There may be some evidence of a change in usage, however: I have suggested that conscious archaism is a factor in the heavy T use in the early history plays, but the Chaucerian origins of the late The Two Noble Kinsmen are not reflected in a similar heavy use. This difference may be a function of time, but it may well reflect the greater maturity of the playwright rather than the influence of changed usage in the spoken language. Regarding genre, the summaries at the ends of chapters suggest that clusters of T/V uses emerge which are, to some extent, genre-related: the formalised wooing conventions of the comedies (and deviations from them); the subtle, sometimes manipulative, micropragmatic switches of the tragedies; the rhetorical and power-oriented conventions found in the histories. Equally, however, the conventions cross genre boundaries; no convention is actually genre-specific. The T/V use of lovers in the tragedies is not essentially different from that of lovers in the comedies; husbands and wives negotiate the marital minefield in much the same way whatever genre they find themselves in; rhetorical and literary conventions span the spectrum. What we find in the plays are patterns dictated neither by the decline of T in the spoken language nor by the conventions of particular dramatic genres. What we see, at any particular moment in any play, is a chosen use, a use that is an essential note in the voice of the speaker. It is a use motivated partly by genre, but also by setting, situation, character, relationship, mood, tenor and rhetoric.
