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. |
| A．Remained unique. | B．Took the leading position. |
| C．Disappeared slowly. | D．Played an educational role. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
2 . Adaptations are the currency of the movie industry. It’s common to see that the latest hit movie or thrilling drama is inspired by a novel, video game, or perhaps even a comic book. The journey of the page being adapted to the screen has been covered a lot. But little is the process spoken about in reverse.
The most well-known version of a film making its way into the publishing industry is through the classic novelization. Movie novelizations went through a popular period before the Internet existed. Fans wanted to keep learning more about the fictional worlds they had stepped. into and needed to experience the story again in a new way. They couldn’t simply google it, nor could they immediately get the production on tape. Therefore, the novelization was a great solution.
Novelizations were usually written by authors who were not in the movie-making process. Instead, they would receive the most complete version of the screenplay to hand and would begin to write their adaptation based on that document. Although changes could be made, there were times where a novelization didn’t actually reflect what happened on the screen because scenes could be cut or replaced and the novelizations were left outdated. But there’s also an advantage. The novelizations were a small piece of movie-making history in their own right. Massive films like Star Wars, ET, Back To The Future, and Alien all received their own page adaptation. It was a completely unique experience before the films were even available to watch. For a time, they were everything for cinema lovers.
Regardless of the influences on the tales, movie adaptations provide a creative outlet for new concepts to be developed. That’s a wonderful idea. which should be encouraged for those movies that never got a chance to continue on their path.
1. What does the underlined phrase “in reverse” in paragraph 1 mean?
| A．Equally. | B．Oppositely. | C．Similarly. | D．Completely. |
| A．They took the place of productions on tape. |
| B．They were adapted from up-to-date novels. |
| C．They satisfied fans’ curiosity in a different way. |
| D．They created a fictional world for people to first step in. |
| A．Its choosing the wrong story. |
| B．Its missing the point of the screenplay. |
| C．Its cutting and replacing movie scenes. |
| D．Its failing to match the original movie. |
| A．Novel-based Movies. | B．Fast-developing Industries. |
| C．Film-to-book Adaptations. | D．Well-known novelizations. |
Nowadays, many films are based on novels and comic books. It is hard to say if the viewers like it or not. Some examples of books that have been turned into films include the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings, and the James Bond series. There are many more that you may know.
In your writing, discuss:
Is it better to read a story in a book or watch it in a film? Which do you prefer and why?
Include specific examples to illustrate your answer.
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