Thou comest on over and hear me speak

An entertaining exploration of Elizabethan English structure and practice.  From What people get wrong about Elizabethan English by Colin Gorrie.  The subheading is How to sound like Shakespeare.  

In today’s English, we have it easy: the pronoun you serves for basically everyone, no matter how humble or exalted their position within society. It serves equally well in addressing strangers, intimate friends and in formal correspondence with ministers of state.

But this was not true in Elizabethan England. There were two separate words corresponding to our modern you word: you and thou.

Originally, in the early Middle Ages, thou was a singular form and you a plural, like yous or y’all in some modern dialects.

But towards the end of the Middle Ages, thou acquired some new connotations. It remained exclusively singular, but it became used when there was an emotional charge to the relationship, either positive or negative: in other words, thou began to signal either familiarity or contempt.

You, on the other hand, started to be used in the singular as well, indicating a lack of familiarity, or a lack of the more negative connotations that thou had started to pick up. You was, in a word, the polite form.

Eventually, thou dropped out of the language. But it was alive and well in the Elizabethan period, and it had all the strong connotations I mentioned above. In other words, the choice of thou vs you almost always means something, although what precisely it means depends on the social context.