ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s earliest comedy offers exactly those extremes of emotion and expression that are absent from The Merry Wives. T use is high, at 40 per cent of the pronouns of address in the play, the highest in any of the comedies except The Tempest. My interest is in the use between the pairs of lovers, Proteus and Julia, Proteus and Silvia, Valentine and Silvia, but this has to be set against the high T use between Proteus and Valentine: nearly half of Proteus’s T uses are to Valentine, over half of Valentine’s are to Proteus. This pattern is established at the opening of the play in their emotionally charged farewell, conducted mainly in mutual T. The farewell between Proteus and Julia, however, is rather different. We might expect to find mutual T use marking both their conventional status as lovers and their current distress at their threatened separation. In the opening scene, we have heard Proteus use ‘thou’ to the absent Julia, but this is standard usage to absent addressees, in fact, and does not necessarily reflect the pronoun that would be used if the addressee were present. As they bid farewell in 2.2, it is Julia who uses T first, switching from her initial V:
If you turn not you will return the sooner. Keep this remembrance for thy Julia’s sake. (2.2, 4-5)
Oddly, Proteus does not reciprocate immediately, but replies with:
Why then we’ll make exchange. Here, take you this. (2.2, 6-7)
It is important not to over-interpret, but this asymmetry, together with the unusual initiation of T by the woman, does convey, in a poignant farewell between devoted lovers, at least a subliminal awkwardness, if not a deliberate mismatch in emotional intensity.
