Edward

Neafcy
February
2015.
Shakespeares Sonnets Addenda
Use of the Second Person and What it says Dec 2016
about
Shakespeare

In her Shakespeares Wife, Germaine Greer says of the first 17 sonnets (chapter
15) It is conceivable if not obvious that the thou and you are not the same
person and the relationship not the same relationship. In fact, the distinction
between the familiar and the formal second person goes beyond these 17
sonnets. In Table 1 below I have broken down all the sonnets into three groups:
the thee/thou sonnets; the you/ye sonnets; and the sonnets with no second
person. I have indicated by colour to whom the sonnets are addressed. It will be
seen that both the Fair Youth and the Rival Poet sonnets are split between the
familiar and the formal second person. Only the sonnets to the Dark Lady are
consistent she is always the familiar thee/thou. The most popular candidate
for the identity of the Fair Youth is the Earl of Southampton. My problem with
Southampton is, being an aristocrat, he would have expected to be addressed as
thee only by his family, his close friends, other peers and the Queen. It would
have been presumptuous of a commoner to have been so familiar.

Table 1

Green: - the Fair Youth; Red: - the Rival Poet; Black: - the Dark
Lady

Thee/Thou sonnets: (93)

1 2 3 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 14 18 19 20 22 24 26 27 28 29 30 31 34 35 36 37 38 39
40 41 42 43 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 56 60 61 62 69 70 73 74 77 78 79 82 87 88
89 90 91 92 93 95 96 97 99 100 101 107 108 109 110 122 123 125 126 128 131
132 133 134 135 136 137 139 140 141 142 143 146 147 148 149 150 151 152

You/Ye sonnets: (34)

13 15 16 17 52 53 54 55 57 58 59 71 72 75 76 80 81 83 84 85 86 98
103 104 106 111* 112 113 114 115 117 118 120 145

No Second Person sonnets: (27)

5 21 23 25 32 33 44 63 64 65 66 67 68 94 102 105 116 119 121 124 127 129

130 138 144 153 154

- something rhymes with you *- something rhymes with

ye.

According to Germaine Greer, nobody knows the identity of the young man,
who may be several interchangeable young men. She challenges some of the
accepted classifications, pointing out that Ann Hathaway may have been the
person Shakespeare had in mind. In my No Second Person group above, she
refers to sonnets 21, 23, 25 and 116. She challenges 27, 28, 29, 30, 50 and 110
in my Thee/Thou sonnets; and 111, 117 and 145 in my You/Ye group. These last
three seem problematical for me, as I think Ann Hathaway should have been
thee to Shakespeare.
Sonnet 111 has the only example of ye as the second person. He uses the
nominative ye as accusative: I assure ye. Why not I assure you? Ye makes
the poem rhyme. He could have rhymed it using I assure thee, which would
have been grammatically correct. Shakespeare chose poor grammar rather than
the familiar second person. He must not have been entitled to use thee to this
person. Sonnet 145 is the sole instance of where Shakespeare is himself
addressed in the second person by the other party: she addresses him as you. I
hate not you. Whether the woman concerned is the Dark Lady or Ann Hathaway,
Shakespeare would not have wanted to be you to a woman he was so close to.

Table 2

Person Addressed as Addressed as No Second Total

Addressed Thee/thou You/Ye Person

Dark Lady 20 74% 0 0% 7 26% 27 18%

Fair Youth(s) 70 60% 27 23% 20 17% 117 76%

Rival Poet(s) 3 33% 6 66% 0 0% 9 6%

Shakespeare 0 0% 1 100% 0 0% 1 1%

Total 93 60% 34 22% 27 18% 154 100%

Table 2 shows that 18% of the sonnets do not have a second person. Of the 82%
with a second person, it is either the familiar thee/thou or the formal (or plural)
you/ye. It is never both in one sonnet.

Three quarters (76%) of the sonnets are deemed to be to the Fair Youth(s).
These are sonnets 1 77 and 87 126. Sonnets 78 86 are to the Rival Poet(s).
Of the 97 second person sonnets to the Fair Youth(s), 60% are thou/thee
sonnets and 23% you/ye sonnets. Words rhyming with you (and the one
example of ye), occur in only 11 sonnets, of which seven are addressed to the
Fair Youth(s). This means that without changing any other words, the Fair
Youth(s) thou/thee sonnets could have been 77 rather than 70 out of the 97
with a second person.

Addendum December 2016

I have now heard that sonnet 145 was early about 1582, when Shakespeare
was only 18 years old; that it is unique in being in iambic tetrameter (the others
are iambic pentameter); and that it may well have been addressed to Ann
Hathaway. An early date would explain his use of you. He had not known her
long enough to be on thee/thou terms with her. I now think that the you rules
out the Dark Lady as the person addressed.
Sonnet 111 remains puzzling. Who could be the dear friend with whom he was
not on thee/thou terms?

May 2017.

For those who have never encountered thee and thou in their spoken English,
Ill explain my interest in the second person. When I was born in 1943, my
Lancashire grandmother was 57 years old. Her generation had lived into their
twenties or thirties without electricity and therefore without radios. They spoke a
dialect with the use of thee and thou. This was still going strong in the 1950s.
There were still homes not reached by electricity. In some ways my
grandmothers English was older than Shakespeares. In some ways it was just
different. The old timers still had inflected verbs I have but we haven. The
youngsters heard that, didnt use it, continued with thee and thou, and knew
the rules.

I knew it was insulting to call someone thee when respect required you. I knew
the dismay when you get you when you want the inclusion of being thee. Most
of the time Shakespeares use of the familiar and formal second person is as I
would expect. The simple rule is that a superior or senior person - or a stranger
perhaps - gets you and an equal or inferior person or someone you are close to
gets thee. The huge exceptions are the Paternoster (Lords Prayer) and the Ave
Maria. God the Father Almighty and the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven,
both get thee, thou and thy. But thats another story.

Shakespeare can make fun out of which second person should it be. We see in
Much Ado about Nothing Benedicks wooing of Beatrice. He keeps slipping in
thee into the conversation, obviously trying to get her to use the familiar in
response to him. She never rises to it. After each failure he backs off for a while.

I see it as weakness when King Claudius addresses Laertes as you in Hamlet. I

see it as contempt for the king when John of Gaunt calls him thee in Richard II.

Sometimes however Shakespeare is puzzling. I have commented in my piece on

The Merchant of Venice that Bassanio hardly ever gets thee from anybody.
What makes this character so exalted?

I would add something from experience of old Lancashire English and from
English in the North generally, that does not appear in Shakespeare in what I
have read so far. We had in Lancashire a kind of familiar and formal first person.
For example, you would not say Lend it to me. You would say Lend it us It was
as if you were the spokesman or representative of your family or gang. To this
day, I sometimes feel that someone saying me is somehow lonely, singled out,
isolated.