ABSTRACT
For a modern Anglophone audience, as indeed for most actors and directors, the distinction between ‘you’ and ‘thou’ is virtually lost. We absorb both pronouns indiscriminately, and few would claim that they were aware of the choice of one pronoun or the other even at a subconscious level. We turn a deaf ear and editors turn a blind eye: T/V2 differences are rarely considered in discussions about textual authenticity; Foakes (1997: 7-8) is a rare exception in commenting on the significance of ‘thou’ use in the introduction to his New Arden edition of King Lear, and even there I shall argue that he is not entirely clear about the conventions Shakespeare was using. Speakers of other European languages which still employ a formal and an informal second-person singular are, of course, more attuned to the distinction, though they are often bemused by the slippery complexity of English usage compared with the less flexible conventions of their own languages. It is no accident that among the mere dozen studies of T/V use in individual Shakespeare plays written in the past forty years, three by the Spanish scholar Clara Calvo (1992a, 1992b, 1994) and one by the Austrian Manfred Draudt (1984) are the most enlightening.
