In Hamlet, Shakespeare uses discordant second person pronouns to express Hamlet's antagonism

towards his mother.

QUEEN GERTRUDE: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended..

HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended.

Politeness in Early Modern English: the second person pronouns

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, the singular and plural Middle English pronouns had
developed an additional pragmatic function, controlled more by social concerns than by
grammatical ones. In other words, the choice of pronouns was not determined solely by the
grammatical designation of person (first, second, third) or number (singular, plural). Instead,
what somebody chose in order to address another person signified her assessment of that person's
status and relationship with her.

As early as the thirteenth century, the choice of you to address an individual signified the
speaker's high regard for the addressee as one of equal or superior social status. Because you
tended to be the preferred option mainly in upper-class or courtly contexts in the Middle English
period, thou increasingly came to be associated with lower status. The status-oriented distinction
of second person pronoun usage is by no means unusual. In many languages, like German and
French, there is still a regular pragmatic distinction between the polite so-called "V" option (Sie,
Vous, Usted, Lei/Loro ) and the more familiar "T" option (du, tu, tu, voi) to address an
individual.

By the fifteenth century, the use of you/ thou was an established index of social status. But it
also acted as a marker of interpersonal relationships. (Notions of superiority/ inferiority were not
solely dependent on rank or social class, but were applied to family groups too.) The choice
of you/ thou during this time was governed by more contingent, context-dependent pragmatic as
well as established social rules -- requiring a certain sensitivity of judgment on the part of the
speaker. In fact these rules still hold; think about your response to the ways different people use
your name. For instance, if your name happens to be James Penberthy, how would you react to
being called 'Jimmy' or 'Penners' by a person you'd just been introduced to? In other words, the
hearer can quite accurately calculate the speaker's attitude towards him by her choice of address
form (whether name or pronoun). Consequently, the socially-oriented contrast of you/ thou
developed interpersonal meanings.
 · You came to be associated with respect and formality in its appropriate public setting;
but …
· You could signify distance even coldness in emotional terms if used inappropriately or
unexpectedly.
· Thou was used to address one's social inferiors, but…
· Thou was also used reciprocally between equals in a private setting. So it became
established as a marker of familiarity or intimacy.
For example: A wife might signal her recognition of her husband's legal pre-eminence as the
head of household by addressing him as you in public contexts, but in private, thou would be
the most usual marker of reciprocal intimacy. Thou could carry negative connotations however,
to convey contempt or scorn:

you thou
address to social superiors <-----> address to social inferiors
address to social equals <-----> address of social equals
(upper class) (lower class)
address in public <-----> address in private
formal or neutral address <-----> familiar or intimate address
respect, admiration <-----> contempt, scorn

By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the system was becoming unstable, increasingly
vulnerable to pragmatically subtle manipulation. In addition to pragmatic factors, the choice of
pronoun was also subject to a degree of grammatical conditioning, so that thou seems to have
been favoured as the subject of auxiliaries (can, may, shall, will) while you was preferred with
lexical verbs (want, think, do, prepare).
In Shakespeare's Richard III, for example, the use of thou illustrates asymmetrical relations of
status (that is, superior to inferior) as well being used to signal heightened emotional tone and
intimacy, strongly influenced by register, topic, the relationship between interlocutors, and quite
a number of other factors having little to do with status or power.
But literary texts do not mirror real life directly; they combine observation of everyday human
behaviour with poetic expression which results in the subjective construction of a fictional world.
So in trying to investigate the loss of thou in the Early Modern period, it is necessary to look for
other types of evidence which might lead to a more promising answer. Data like court records,
which are more or less faithful transcripts of speech, give some idea of the social constraints
operating between speakers from a wide cross-section of social backgrounds.