James Fletcher
speaker
208 appearances
7 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2014
last heard Sep 2014
James Fletcher’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I've got a question for you.
Which of these do you think has more literary merit?
This?
What a piece of work is a man.
How noble in reason.
How infinite in faculty.
Well, Tim, I think that's a bit wishy-washy.
This is more or less, I want to see the numbers.
Where's your evidence base for saying Shakespeare is so great?
Where is it?
Well, here's a suggestion from a loyal listener in northern China.
Now, students everywhere are probably going to be familiar with this.
Literary merit is very hard to quantify, but this is an exception, an objective reason why Shakespeare sits at the very pinnacle of English literature, that he had the largest English vocabulary of any writer in history.
But
Alex got in touch with us because he's worried.
So what's caused Alex to lose faith?
Well, he saw a chart which was doing the rounds on the internet earlier this year comparing the vocabulary sizes of various rappers.
It was the brainchild of data scientist and hip-hop fan Matt Daniels.
And while his main purpose was to compare the rappers to each other...
he thought it would be good to throw in Shakespeare too.
Showing 1–20 of 208 · page 1 of 11
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