What is you in Elizabethan English?

Answer 1

The Elizabethans used the word "you" exactly the same way we do now. Some examples from Shakespeare: "You are not wood, you are not stones, but men." -Julius Caesar. "Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue"-Hamlet. "Pray, have you not a daughter called Katharina, fair and virtuous?"-Taming of the Shrew.

Sometimes when only one person in being addressed, and that person is a lover, a child, an animal, or an inferior, an obsolete set of pronouns are used, which use a different set of verb forms. In these forms, the word for "you" is "thou" if the person is the subject of the sentence and "thee" if the object. (This is the same difference as that between "he" and "him" or between "I" and "me"

E.g. 1. "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Romeo is Juliet's beloved and there is only one of him, so he uses "thou" Notice that the verb form "art" is used, rather than "are"

2. "Thou art a villain." Tybalt uses this form to show that Romeo is an inferior.

3. "Oh, Proteus, let this habit make thee blush" Julia (in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) is addressing her lover Proteus, but because it is the object of the sentence, she uses "thee"

4. "Of all men else have I avoided thee" Macbeth is the king so everyone is his inferior; he therefore uses this form with Macduff.

Answer 2

"You" in English was and is "you"

e.g. "Speak the speech, I pray YOU as I pronounced it to YOU, trippingly on the tongue; but if YOU mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines." (Hamlet)

"More than prince of cats, I can tell YOU." (Romeo and Juliet)

"I pray, sir, can YOU read?" (Romeo and Juliet)

"It is not meet YOU know how Caesar loved YOU. YOU are not wood, YOU are not stones, but men." (Julius Caesar)

In the examples from Caesar and Hamlet the speaker is addressing more than one person. In these cases, no other form was possible.

Where one person was addressing another person, there was an alternative and older form. In older English this form was the only one possible but by Shakespeare's day it was going out of use, except where a person was speaking to a lover, a good friend, a child, or a pet.

So: "I did love you once" (Hamlet) and "I would not for the world they saw thee here." (Romeo and Juliet). "Are you not Kent?" (King Lear) and "Thou hast been as one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing." (Hamlet).

Note that both thou (nominative) and thee (accusative) are replaced by the same word, you. So Hamlet's "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" is the same as "Get you to a nunnery: why would you be a breeder of sinners?"

As the specialized pronouns fell out of use, the verb endings and forms that went with them went too. These were usually forms ending in -st and a number of irregular forms (thou hast, thou art, thou wilt)