1 . A speech in a play by Shakespeare can be as short as a word or as long as several hundred. But what is the most common length?

Staying away from Shakespeare himself for a moment, we can take Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (1606) and count the number of speeches and their lengths. The most common length is four words. The next most common length is five words. Of the other 16 Jonson’s plays, 12 also have a speech length mode (模式) of four. It was not just Jonson; it was everybody. After 1602, four-word speeches were the most common kind across all the early modern plays that survived.

The London theatre industry took off in the late 1580s and early 1590s and we see a concentration of speech length modes of nine or ten. After 1602, the mode of four predominated. If we look just at Shakespeare’s plays, we find him doing what everyone else did: changing from favoring nine-word speeches to favouring four-word speeches around 1597-1602 and never going back.

Our suggestion is that the playwrights (剧作家) learned progressively from one another how to represent more closely the speech lengths of everyday exchanges and found that audiences responded well to these. They started to focus less on strict writing rules and more on the liveliness of everyday speech.

Another way to think of this is offered by the Russian literary scholar Boris Yarkho. He put forward an “index (指数) of liveliness” — the ratio of the number of speeches to the total number of lines in a play. He researched the works of the 17th-century French playwright Pierre Corneille and found that his comedies have a higher index because of their shorter speeches. The move from a mode of nine words to a mode of four represents the shortened average speech, and thus a move to livelier drama in Yarkho’s terms.

Nevertheless, we have no record of any dramatist or playgoer reflecting on the shortening of average speech lengths; our only knowledge of it comes from counting the words in the plays for ourselves.

1. What happened in English plays around the 1600s?

A．Their storylines were about famous writers.	B．They were influenced by a poetic writing style.
C．They featured different storytelling techniques.	D．Their speeches were generally shorter in length.

2. What does the underlined word “predominated” in paragraph 3 mean?

A．Remained unique.	B．Took the leading position.
C．Disappeared slowly.	D．Played an educational role.

3. Why did playwrights change their writing styles according to paragraph 4?

A．To challenge traditional writing rules.	B．To stand out by applying their unique style.
C．To avoid being affected by social values.	D．To create realistic and acceptable speeches.

4. Which of the following is Yarkho’s opinion on the change in plays?

A．It saved actors the trouble of memorizing their lines.

B．It reflected people's preference for serious dialogues.

C．It helped present dramas in an active and pleasant way.

D．It made the characters express their feelings effectively.