Plays segmented into three periods.

Since 2007 a number of investigators have compiled statistics on the length in words of speeches in plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, focusing on a change to shorter speeches around 1600. In this article we take account of several potentially confounding factors in the variation of speech lengths in these works and present a model of this variation in the period 1538–1642 through Linear Mixed Models. We confirm that the mode of speech lengths in English plays changed from nine words to four words around 1600, and that Shakespeare’s plays fit this wider pattern closely. We establish for the first time: that this change is independent of authorship, dramatic genre, theatrical company, and the proportion of verse in a play’s dialogue; that the chosen time span can be segmented into pre-1597 plays (with high modes), 1597–1602 plays (with mixed high and low modes), and post-1602 plays (with low modes); that some additional secondary modes are evident in speech lengths, at 16 and 24 words, suggesting that the length of a standard blank verse line (around 8 words) is an underlying unit in speech length; and that the general change to short speeches also holds true when the data is viewed through the perspective of the median and the mean. The change in speech lengths is part of a collective drift in the plays towards liveliness and verisimilitude and is evidence of a hitherto hidden constraint on the playwrights: whether or not they were aware of the fact, playwrights as a group were conforming to a structure for the distribution of speech lengths peculiar to the era they were writing in. The authors hope that the full modelling of this variation in the article will help bring this change to the attention of scholars of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

自2007年起，已有多位研究者针对威廉·莎士比亚及其同时代剧作家戏剧台词的词长展开统计研究，重点聚焦1600年前后台词向更短篇幅演化的现象。本文针对上述作品中台词长度变异的多项潜在混淆变量进行系统考量，并通过线性混合模型（Linear Mixed Models）构建了1538年至1642年间该变量变化的分析模型。本研究证实，1600年前后英国戏剧的台词长度众数从9词降至4词，且莎士比亚的戏剧完全契合这一整体演化趋势。本文首次明确以下结论：第一，该变化与作者身份、戏剧体裁、演出剧团以及剧本对话中的韵文占比均无关联；第二，所选取的时间跨度可划分为三个阶段：1597年之前的戏剧（台词众数较高）、1597年至1602年的戏剧（台词众数高低混杂）以及1602年之后的戏剧（台词众数较低）；第三，台词长度存在16词与24词的次要众数，这表明标准无韵诗行（blank verse）的长度约为8词，是台词长度的底层构成单元；第四，无论以中位数还是平均数视角审视数据，台词向短篇幅整体转变的结论均成立。台词长度的变化是戏剧整体向生动性与逼真性演进的一部分，同时也揭示了此前未被关注的剧作家创作约束：无论剧作家是否自觉，整体而言他们都遵循了其所处时代特有的台词长度分布结构。本文作者期望，通过本文对该变量变异的完整建模分析，能够推动这一演化现象受到莎士比亚及其同时代戏剧研究者的关注。