Chapter 3. Gender, genre, and prescriptivism

Abstract

This paper extends our previous study of you was and you were in eighteenth-century English drama, examining trends following Robert Lowth’s proscription of you was in his grammar (1762) and complementing Tieken-Boon van Ostade’s (2002) and Laitinen’s (2009) studies of different genres. Comparing close readings of plays by four female playwrights to the same writers’ novels, we find you was used increasingly after 1762 to indicate negative emotion and moments of dramatic significance, not unlike contemporary theatrical thou (Nonomiya 2021). Qualitatively, we confirm that you was had specifically theatrical functions, signalling deception and provocation (often by younger characters) and loss of control (often by older characters). We identify these disparate but recurrent meanings and personae with Eckert’s (2008) concept of the indexical field.