Speech Lengths in Early Modern Plays

ABSTRACT

In 2005, Hartmut Ilsemann announced his discovery that until 1599, Shakespeare’s plays contained more speeches of nine words than any other length; but after 1599, that length dropped to four words. The change has been described as sudden, and Ilsemann linked it to the opening of the Globe theatre. This note shows that the change Ilsemann found in Shakespeare is also clearly visible in his contemporaries generally, dispelling the suggested link with the Globe. It shows that the change was gradual, not sudden, and suggests that it was caused by a gradual increase in the use of blank verse lines split between speakers in plays generally.

KEYWORDS:

• Early modern plays
• speech lengths
• Shakespeare

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The raw data for all figures in this note is available at http://www.shakespearestext.com/speech (accessed 4 May 2019).

2. I obtained my text for this experiment from the Folger Digital Texts API site (https://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/api, accessed 4 May 2019), which provides the texts of Shakespeare plays with formatting, stage directions and speech prefixes removed.

3. I wish to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewer whose suggestions for further work helped to make this note better.