'I'll tell thee thou dost evil‪'‬

Looking at the Early Modern English pronoun system, the Middle English pronoun system, its immediate predecessor, has to be taken into account:

Fig. 1 Middle English personal and possessive pronouns (Simpson et al. 2005: entry thou, pers., pron., 2nd sing.)

It is important to note that in the Middle English period, the second person plural pronoun was by 1300 beginning to be used for the second person singular to show respect when addressing a powerful person such as, for example, a king or bishop (Wales 1983:108). This use became more popular during the Early Modern English period (Hope 2003:73). There is a pronoun to address two persons (as opposed to more than two for which the ‘real’ plural was used), 3it (yit – “ye two”), which existed in Old and Middle English but became obsolete in Early Modern English. Major changes to the pronoun system occurred within the Early Modern English period. By 1500, the pronoun system was as follows:

Fig. 2 Early Modern English pronouns by 1500 (Barber 1976:204)

There are a number of different spellings for several pronouns which have been left out by Barber for the sake of simplicity and are not important for this paper’s purpose either. The case distinction between ye and you was still consistent by 1500, but this changed quickly. According to Görlach (1991:85), this change came about because “ye and you had the weakly stressed form [j?] in common, which combined with redundant case marking to produce incorrect generalizations”. He adds that the reversed vowel pattern for the case marking, Thou/Thee vs. Ye/You could possibly have influenced this change or overlap. Thus, “by Shakespeare’s time, you had become the normal form, and ye was merely a less common variant” (Barber 1976:205). There were other changes regarding hit vs. it; he and its unstressed form ‘a or a that occurred, and consequently, the pronoun system by 1600 looked thus:

Fig. 3 Early Modern English pronouns by 1600 (Barber 1976:208)

This is the pronoun system that is most important for the present paper as it describes Shakespeare’s use of pronouns. The singular/plural distinction does not play an important part in the choice of the second person pronoun, Thou definitely meant singular, but You could mean both. Therefore, the polite use gained importance. Before consonants, My and Thy were the common forms, whereas before vowels, by that time My/Mine and Thy/Thine, were in free variation as they are in Shakespeare’s plays (Barber 1976:208). During this period, there was a trend for You to become more and more popular and Thou gradually more obsolete, being increasingly restricted to specialized contexts such as addressing God (Hope 2003:78); a more detailed description of this development can be found in section 2.4 of this paper. As a result, the pronoun system by 1700 was in effect the same as it is today: