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Kim Colyvas, Research Assistant, University of Newcastle

Around 1600, speeches in English plays suddenly got shorter – and no one knows why

Shakespeare Ben Jonson Nim Wikimedia Commons
Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4 – Robert Thew and Henry Fuseli (1796). Wikimedia Commons.

A speech in a play by Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries can be as short as a word or as long as several hundred, or anything in between. But what is the most common length?

There is an interesting new story emerging about the lengths of speeches in early modern plays. Staying away from Shakespeare himself for a moment, we can take Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (1607) and count the number of speeches and their lengths. The most common length is four words.

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