A New Chronological Indicator for Shakespeare's Plays and for Hand D of Sir Thomas More
MACD. P. JACKSON · Notes and Queries · 2007
USING a sophisticated computer programme that analyses various structural features of Shakespeare's plays, Hartmut Ilsemann counted the number of words in every speech in the entire dramatic works.1 He discovered that in plays written up till about 1599 the speech-length most frequently used was of nine words and that thereafter it fell to four words. He connects this change with the opening of the Globe and Shakespeare's greater artistic involvement in productions. He suggests ‘that rhetoric and declamations receded and were replaced by refined acting using the spatial dimensions of the stage and speeding up events by shorter speeches.’ As he remarks, ‘In the face of a general shift towards shorter speeches, soliloquies and monologues gained new qualities.’ The idea that becoming co-owner of the Globe and writing his plays for that theatre affected Shakespeare's dramaturgy in such a specific way is a fascinating one. But the data may require rather more complex interpretation. The move to higher proportions of short speeches was more gradual than one might gather from Ilsemann's figures for most frequently occurring speech lengths (the mode, rather than the mean or median). We can see this if we place the plays in their chronological order according to the Oxford Textual Companion and calculate for each group of six (or for the last group seven) consecutive plays the percentage of speeches 3–6 words long of all speeches 3–10 words long.2 (See Table 1).