'You' and 'Thou' in Shakespeare: A Practical Guide for Actors, Directors, Students and Teachers

Description

Romeo and Juliet always use 'thou' to each other, but they are the only pair of lovers in Shakespeare to do this. Why? All the women in Richard III address Richard as 'thou', but no man ever does. Why? When characters address the dead, they use 'thou' - except for Hamlet, who addresses Yorick as 'you'. Why? Shakespeare's contemporaries would have known the answers to these questions because they understood what 'thou' signified, but modern actors and audiences are in the dark. Through performance-oriented analysis of extracts from the plays, this book explores the language of 'trulls' and termagants, true loves and unwelcome wooers, male impersonators, smothering mothers, warring spouses and fighting men, as well as investigating lese-majeste, Freudian slips, crisis moments and rhetorical flourishes. Drawing on work with RSC actors, as well as the author's experience of playing a range of Shakespearean roles, the book equips the reader with a new tool for tracking emotions, weighing power relations and appreciating dazzling complexity.

Penelope Freedman is a teacher and academic with a background both in linguistics and in theatre. With a first degree in Classics from Oxford, an MA in Linguistics from the University of Kent and a PhD on Shakespeare from Birmingham University, she has been a lecturer at Kent and Warwick universities, as well as at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. She has also directed several Shakespeare productions and played eight of Shakespeare's heroines.

Have you ever stopped to wonder at the lexical flowering of pronouns that blossoms within the garden of a Shakespeare text? From thou, thee, thy, thine, all the way to you, your, and yours? Well, thankfully, for us, Penelope Freedman has! And what she has to say about the distance between thou and you will open up the entire, intricate, and labyrinthian world of Elizabethan social relations. Read this book and it will, quite simply, transform your understanding of Shakespeare, his times, and what it means to address another human being. * Brian Kulick, Columbia School of the Arts, USA * These two small words "You" and "Thou" can unlock and inform so much in the relationship between two people in a scene. Penelope Freedman demonstrates how they are rarely accidental and not as interchangeable as they may seem. This book is full of insights, choices and imaginative exercises that help the actor to wring the maximum meaning out of them. * Harriet Walter * An intriguing and essential study of a subject that is often ignored by theatre practitioners. Splendid. * Greg Doran, Artistic Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, UK * What a fantastically useful book, for actors, directors and audiences alike. Through practical examples and great scholarship, it helps us unpick the weave of Shakespeare's speech and understand better the sexual tension, the mouth-filling insults, the disdain of aristocrats and the condescensions of patriarchy behind the choice of "thou" or "you". Whether you want to understand your soliloquy better, make your production clearer or enjoy what you're watching and hearing more, this book is an excellent guide. * Sam West *