So we counted them
Almost every page in this search asserts a length in its title and gives no timing for any individual piece. That is checkable, so we checked it.
The method was dull and that is the point. We loaded each page, pulled the text, stripped the stage directions and counted the words with a script, then converted at a hundred and fifty words a minute. Anyone can repeat it.
Claimed against measured, September 2026Word counts are ours, and mechanical
A diary piece on a sixty-second listThe biggest brand in the category
2:18
346 words. Two minutes eighteen at a hundred and fifty a minute, and two minutes forty at a slower delivery. Between two and three times its billing, on a page that states no timing anywhere.
A memoir piece on the same listSame page
1:20
199 words. A third over. So on a five-item list, two items are materially wrong and one is wrong by more than double.
The other three on that listSame page
0:48–0:53
121 to 133 words. Slightly under, which is fine. The list is not uniformly wrong, and that is what makes it dangerous.
The same brand’s thirty-second listSix pieces, five of them films
0:20–0:36
49 to 90 words, median almost exactly on target. Much more honest than its own sixty-second page, which is worth saying.
A one-minute page with a published ruleEleven original pieces
0:48–0:52
The page states that every piece is a hundred and thirty words or fewer. We counted all eleven and got 119 to 131, so exactly one is a single word over. Real editorial discipline.
A database tagged one minuteTwo samples from a tag holding 176 pieces
0:36–0:44
89 and 111 words. Materially under, which nobody ever warns about. Filling a sixty-second slot with thirty-six seconds is its own kind of failure.
Two things follow, and the second one is the one nobody mentions.
Being over is the obvious risk. An actor who took that sixty-second page at its word and walked into a sixty-second slot would be a minute and a half long. Nothing on the page would warn them.
Being under is a real risk too, and the whole category ignores it. A piece that runs thirty-six seconds in a sixty-second slot has given away two-fifths of the only time you were allocated.
So the useful instruction is not aim shorter. It is find out what the piece actually runs, which takes about forty seconds and which no list will do for you.
Credit where it is due, and one wrinkle.
One site in this entire search publishes a rule that can be falsified, and then honours it. A hundred and thirty words or fewer, and it holds across all eleven pieces. That is better practice than every trade title in the category.
The wrinkle is that the same site says elsewhere that two hundred and twenty-five words is the top of two minutes. That implies a much slower rate than its own one-minute rule. The most rigorous page in the search is internally inconsistent by about fifteen per cent, and it never states a rate at all. Which is really the whole problem in miniature.
How long a minute actually is
Every timing on this page rests on a rate, so here is the rate, where it comes from, and how much it can honestly move.
The most cited figure for ordinary spoken English is about a hundred and fifty words a minute. The broadcast trade agrees with it from a completely different direction. A sixty-second commercial script is written to roughly a hundred and fifty words, and a thirty-second one to about seventy-five.
The range around it is real. Audiobook narration runs a hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty. Five measured conference talks averaged a hundred and seventy-three, from a hundred and fifty-four to two hundred and one. Below a hundred and twenty you are declaiming.
The conversion, and where each number comes fromUse one rule rather than two
Thirty secondsThe band nobody actually asks for
70–75 w
About ten lines of verse. Seventy-five is the broadcast figure for a thirty-second spot, which is the hardest number in the field because scripts are literally written to it.
Sixty secondsThe commonest real requirement
145–150 w
About nineteen or twenty lines of verse. This is the one to memorize.
Ninety secondsThe other commonest
215–225 w
About twenty-eight to thirty lines of verse.
Two minutesThe drama school standard
290–300 w
About thirty-eight to forty lines of verse.
The single rule to actually useWorks for verse and prose alike
÷ 145
Count the words and divide by a hundred and forty-five. That gives you minutes, and it sits within seven per cent of every convention in use.
Why one rule rather than the two you will see quoted.
The two conventions in circulation are three seconds a verse line and a hundred and forty words a minute for prose, and they do not agree with each other.
We measured the whole of Shakespeare to find out by how much. An audition-length verse speech averages 7.78 words to the line, so three seconds a line is really a hundred and fifty-six words a minute. Applying that to verse and a hundred and forty to prose times identical material about twelve per cent apart.
Words divided by a hundred and forty-five splits the difference and applies to both. If you would rather count verse lines, use three point two seconds a line, which is the same thing said differently.
Two honest caveats on any figure of this kind. Individual speeches vary by about eight per cent either side in how densely the lines are packed. So a twenty-line speech runs anywhere from a hundred and forty-eight to a hundred and seventy-two words. Genre and gender make no useful difference at all, which we also checked.
And the bigger variable, which is you.
Read flat and played are not the same length, and there is real data on the gap. Measured reading aloud gives a real figure for this. The proportion of time spent in pauses runs from about nine per cent at a fast read to nearly twenty-three per cent at a slow one.
Hold the words constant and that alone moves a hundred and thirty-word piece from about forty-nine seconds to about fifty-eight. Play it with real beats in it and sixty to sixty-five is entirely plausible for the same text.
Which is why an accurate word count gets you close and a stopwatch gets you there. The count tells you whether a piece is in the right band. Only saying it out loud tells you the number.
One thing a word count cannot see at all. A speech can carry silent business that eats the clock without using a syllable. We found a piece tagged as one minute that runs a hundred and eleven words. Its stage directions carry seven physical actions, including crossing the room, opening a window, and going out and coming back. None of that is words and all of it is time.
There is no such thing as a thirty-second audition
We went looking for an institution that asks for one. We did not find a single one, and that turns out to be the honest answer to the search.
What is actually required, checked September 2026Each school’s own published wording
A regional professional auditionScreening video
60 sec
One monologue, sixty seconds maximum. The tightest published figure we have found anywhere.
NYU TischTwo contrasting, both contemporary
Under 90
Each under ninety seconds. For one round it is a single sixty-second piece inside a two-minute video.
American Academy of Dramatic ArtsTwo contrasting
60–90
Sixty to ninety seconds each, fully memorized.
JuilliardFour memorized monologues
~2 min
About two minutes each, and they ask you to respect it.
A large American conservatoireTwo contrasting
4 min total
A combined cap rather than a per-piece one, which is a different instruction and changes how you cut.
Anybody at allThirty seconds
None
We could not find one school, casting body or competition specifying thirty seconds. Every published figure we located is sixty, ninety or a hundred and twenty.
So where does the term come from? Two real places, and neither is a drama school.
The first is social media, and the biggest site in the category says so itself. Its own thirty-second page concedes that monologues more commonly run closer to sixty or ninety seconds. It then lists capturing your followers’ attention as a reason to want a short one.
The second is pageant and children’s competition work, which does commission at that length. Several thirty-second pieces we found carry a note saying they were originally commissioned by a pageant organisation.
That is not a reason to avoid short pieces. A genuinely thirty-second speech is an excellent thing to own. It works for a tape, for a class, for a general meeting, and for the moment somebody asks whether you have anything shorter. It is a reason not to build your audition book around a length nobody is asking for.
Does the clock include your slate?
Nobody in this search asks. The schools answer it, they answer it differently, and the difference is the whole distinction between a room and a tape.
In a live room the timing is a courtesy. Juilliard says plainly that it does not use a timer in the audition room. It asks you to respect the limit, and adds that slightly under or a few seconds over two minutes is fine.
On a self-tape it is absolute. One school requires a sixty-second monologue inside a video that must not exceed two minutes in total, with your name and where you are from inside that cap. Videos over the limit cannot be considered. So on tape the slate absolutely eats the clock.
The practical version, and it is not the same instruction in both places. On tape, time the whole file. Slate, breath, speech, and the beat before you stop recording. Build the slate into your rehearsal rather than discovering it costs you eight seconds. In a room, time the speech and leave a margin. Nobody is holding a stopwatch, but running two and a half minutes when you were asked for two is a decision you have made about somebody else’s schedule, and it will read as one.
Four bands, counted rather than labelled
Every line count and word count below was computed from a marked-up text of the whole canon. Verse is timed at three point two seconds a line and prose at a hundred and forty-five words a minute.
One finding before the list, because it inverts what the advice usually says. Short material is not scarce. It is by far the largest pool. Around nine hundred and fifty self-contained Shakespeare speeches sit in the thirty-second band. Against that there are about a hundred and seventy-five at sixty seconds, sixty at ninety and twenty-four at two minutes.
Genuinely thirty secondsEight to eleven verse lines, or about seventy words of prose
CleopatraAntony and Cleopatra 5.2, to her women
8 lines
59 words, about 25 seconds. Plays 30 to 45. She talks herself past despair and into the decision to die.
BrutusJulius Caesar 1.2, to Cassius
8 lines
71 words, about 26 seconds. Plays 35 to 50. He invites the conspiracy without ever admitting he knows what it is.
DesdemonaOthello 4.3, to Emilia
8 lines
73 words, about 27 seconds. Plays 18 to 28. She explains a song she cannot stop hearing, and hears her own death in it.
HelenaA Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1, to Demetrius
9 lines
78 words, about 29 seconds. Plays 18 to 25. She offers herself as his dog and dares him to refuse.
HamletHamlet 1.2, to Gertrude before the court
11 lines
86 words, about 32 seconds. Plays 20 to 30. He refuses to let his mother reduce his grief to a performance. A Hamlet nobody brings.
Antipholus of SyracuseThe Comedy of Errors 4.3, alone
11 lines
84 words, about 32 seconds. Plays 20 to 30. He inventories a morning of strangers being kind to him and concludes the town is bewitched.
BeatriceMuch Ado About Nothing 2.1, to her uncles
Prose 79w
About 33 seconds. Plays 20 to 30. She refuses marriage with a joke that keeps escalating.
FalstaffHenry IV Part One 5.3, to Hal, who leaves
Prose 62w
About 26 seconds. Plays 45 to 60. He chooses to stay alive and dresses it up as philosophy.
Genuinely sixty secondsEighteen to twenty-two verse lines, or about a hundred and forty-five words of prose
EmiliaOthello 4.3, to Desdemona
18 lines
158 words, about 58 seconds. Plays 30 to 45. She argues that wives who fall were pushed. Start at the line about husbands’ faults; the line before it is prose.
PetruchioThe Taming of the Shrew 4.3, to Katherina
20 lines
159 words, about 64 seconds. Plays 25 to 40. He insists they travel in rags and turns it into a moral principle.
PortiaThe Merchant of Venice 4.1, to Shylock
22 lines
172 words, about 70 seconds. Plays 20 to 30. A legal argument that mercy is a duty rather than a concession. Everybody knows it, so know that too.
JulietRomeo and Juliet 2.2, to Romeo below
22 lines
183 words, about 70 seconds. Plays 14 to 20. She abandons the courtship rules and asks him to commit.
EdmundKing Lear 1.2, alone
22 lines
164 words, about 66 seconds. Plays 20 to 30. He announces that he will take by fraud what birth denied him.
IagoOthello 1.3, alone
22 lines
185 words, about 70 seconds. Plays 28 to 40. He assembles the plot out loud and enjoys how easy it is.
RosalindAs You Like It 4.1, to Orlando
Prose 140w
About 58 seconds. Plays 18 to 25. She demolishes the idea that anyone ever died of love. Prose, so it fails a verse requirement.
FalstaffHenry IV Part One 5.1, alone before battle
Prose 149w
About 62 seconds. Plays 45 to 60. He cross-examines the word honour until it evaporates.
Genuinely ninety secondsTwenty-eight to thirty-two verse lines, or about two hundred and twenty words of prose
LucianaThe Comedy of Errors 3.2, to the wrong man
28 lines
225 words, about 90 seconds. Plays 18 to 28. She coaches a man she thinks is an adulterer on how to cheat more considerately.
HelenaA Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.2, to Hermia
28 lines
215 words, about 90 seconds. Plays 18 to 25. She accuses her oldest friend of joining a conspiracy to humiliate her.
JaquesAs You Like It 2.7, to the whole company
28 lines
210 words, about 90 seconds. Plays 30 to 50. He turns a dinner remark into a seven-part demonstration that nothing matters. Very heard, very good.
WolseyHenry VIII 3.2, to Cromwell
30 lines
266 words, about 96 seconds. Plays 45 to 65. He hands over his life’s advice to the one man still in the room.
HelenAll’s Well That Ends Well 3.2, alone with a letter
31 lines
256 words, about 99 seconds. Plays 18 to 28. She reads his rejection back at herself and decides to disappear.
BerowneLove’s Labour’s Lost 3.1, alone
32 lines
245 words, about 102 seconds. Plays 20 to 30. He confesses to being in love and hates himself for it.
Lady AnneRichard III 1.2, halting a funeral
32 lines
248 words, about 102 seconds. Plays 18 to 30. She stops a corpse in the street to curse the man who made it one.
Genuinely two minutesThirty-eight to forty-two verse lines, or about two hundred and ninety words of prose
TitaniaA Midsummer Night’s Dream 2.1, to Oberon
37 lines
274 words, about 118 seconds. Plays 25 to 45. She blames the collapse of the seasons on his jealousy.
John of GauntRichard II 2.1, to York
38 lines
284 words, about 122 seconds. Plays 55 to 75. He uses a dying man’s licence to indict the King.
Queen MargaretHenry VI Part Three 5.4, to a beaten army
38 lines
314 words, about 122 seconds. Plays 30 to 45. She rallies them with a shipwreck metaphor she sustains for the whole speech.
CassiusJulius Caesar 1.2, to Brutus
42 lines
350 words, about 134 seconds, so trim it. Plays 35 to 50. He recruits him by proving Caesar is physically an ordinary man.
The Jailer’s DaughterThe Two Noble Kinsmen 2.6, alone
39 lines
347 words, about 125 seconds. Plays 16 to 25. She confesses she has freed a prisoner and is going back to him. Note the play is a collaboration and these scenes are usually credited to Fletcher.
BenedickMuch Ado About Nothing 2.3, alone in the orchard
Prose 310w
About 128 seconds. Plays 28 to 40. He mocks his friend for falling in love and then specifies his own impossible terms. Cutting the last two sentences brings it to 122.
Launcelot GobboThe Merchant of Venice 2.2, to the audience
Prose 271w
About 112 seconds. Plays 18 to 30. He stages a three-way argument between himself, his conscience and the devil.
Two things the count turned up that are worth knowing before you go looking.
Only about one Shakespeare speech in ten is long enough to be a monologue at all. Of thirty-two thousand speeches in the canon, around three and a half thousand reach eight verse lines or sixty words of prose.
The scarcity is gendered and it gets worse as the piece gets longer. Women hold about nineteen per cent of the self-contained thirty-second material, fifteen per cent at sixty seconds and fourteen per cent at ninety.
One specific gap is stark. There is no female prose speech anywhere in Shakespeare between a hundred and ninety and three hundred and forty-five words. The longest is Mistress Page at two hundred and fifty-five. There are twenty-two male prose speeches over a hundred and ninety.
Four long speeches, with the line to come in on and the line to go out on
Every cut below is one contiguous run of the real text. Nothing is spliced and nothing is invented, because two schools ban stitched pieces by name.
Where the cut actually landsComputed, not guessed
Hamlet, rogue and peasant slaveFull: 58 lines, about 3 minutes
To 60s
In on O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I, out on Am I a coward? That is 22 lines and 174 words, about 66 seconds. Dropping the two lines before it removes the only text needing a departing Player.
The same speechThe longer cut
To 90s
Same opening, out on Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain. 32 lines, 258 words, about 96 seconds.
Richard III, the winter of our discontentFull: 43 lines, about 2 minutes 9
To 90s
In on Now is the winter of our discontent, out on I am determined to prove a villain. 30 lines, 219 words, ninety seconds almost exactly, and on the best button in the speech.
The same speechThe short cut
To 60s
In on But I, that am not shap’d for sportive tricks, out on And hate the idle pleasures of these days. 18 lines, 132 words, about 56 seconds. The last three lines are the Clarence cue and go regardless.
Juliet, the potion speechFull: 45 lines, about 2 minutes 15
To 60s
In on Farewell. God knows when we shall meet again, out on And there die strangled ere my Romeo comes. 22 lines, 175 words, about 66 seconds.
The same speechThe braver cut
To 90s
In on What if it be a poison which the friar, out on As with a club, dash out my desp’rate brains. 31 lines, 249 words, about 96 seconds. It gives up the famous opening to keep the whole escalation and end on the strongest question.
Katherina, the final speechFull: 44 lines, about 2 minutes 12
To 60s
The obvious cut is the first 19 lines. The better one starts at I am asham’d that women are so simple and runs to the end, because it is the only version that finishes on the play’s real last beat. 19 lines, 160 words.
The rule that comes out of doing this four times.
Cut from the middle, not from the end. Every one of these speeches has a button, and it is nearly always the last thing in it. A cut that saves ten seconds by removing the ending has cost you the reason to do the speech.
And time the cut, do not trust the line count. Every one of these cuts runs ten to fifteen per cent longer if you speak it at prose tempo rather than at three seconds a line. An actor who cuts to ninety by counting lines and then plays it slowly arrives at a hundred and five.
Grading the sources
This page is almost entirely numbers, so the method matters more here than on anything else we publish.
The claim, and where it came fromWhat we found
Every word count of a competitor’s pieceCounted by script
Measured
Text pulled from the page, stage directions stripped, tokens counted mechanically. We first tried asking a summarising tool to count and it returned numbers suspiciously clustered on the site’s own claim, so we discarded those and counted ourselves.
Every Shakespeare line and word countA marked-up corpus of thirty-nine plays
Computed
32,523 speeches parsed, verse and prose read off the markup rather than judged. The corpus had 577 fused-word defects, about seven hundredths of one per cent, which were detected and corrected.
The speaking ratesPublished figures
Primary
A voice research body for conversational speech, and the broadcast convention for spot lengths. Two independent traditions landing on the same number is why we use it.
The pause figuresA peer-reviewed study, 2020
Primary
Measured pause proportions in read-aloud speech. Our extension of it to a performed piece is our own inference and is labelled as such above.
Line referencesThe corpus numbering
Caution
The edition we counted numbers prose differently from the standard ones, so its line numbers drift. Find each speech by act, scene and opening words rather than by line number.
Playing agesOur own judgement
Editorial
The corpus carries no age data. Everything else in those tables is measured; the ages are opinion.
That nobody requires thirty secondsA search for a counter-example
Absence
We checked the schools and casting bodies we could reach and found none. An absence is weaker than a finding, so if you know of one, we would like to hear about it.
Four sites we could not measureGated, PDF-only or blocked
Untested
A subscription database, two download-only libraries and one marketplace. None of them appears in any accuracy figure here, and our finding about one of them is about its labelling only.
Where we differ from the standard account
Is a one-minute monologue one minute?
Commonly saidAsserted in the title and never checked, on almost every page in the category.
What we foundWe counted. One piece on a sixty-second list runs two minutes eighteen, and one database sample runs thirty-six seconds.
How do I know how long my speech is?
Commonly saidTwo sites give per-piece timings. Nobody gives a method you can apply to a piece you found elsewhere.
What we foundCount the words and divide by a hundred and forty-five. It works for verse and prose alike and it is checkable.
Is three seconds a verse line right?
Commonly saidUsed alongside a hundred and forty words a minute for prose, as though the two agree.
What we foundThey are twelve per cent apart. An audition-length verse speech averages 7.78 words a line, so three seconds is really a hundred and fifty-six.
Who asks for thirty seconds?
Commonly saidImplied by confident page titles across the whole category.
What we foundNo school or casting body we could find. The real referents are social media and pageant work, and one site admits it.
Does the clock include my slate?
Commonly saidNever asked by any content page in the search.
What we foundOn tape, yes, absolutely. In the room, one school says it does not even use a timer. It is two different instructions.
Is short material hard to find?
Commonly saidImplied by how thin the short lists are.
What we foundThe opposite. Thirty-second material outnumbers two-minute material by roughly forty to one in Shakespeare alone.
Should I worry about running short?
Commonly saidNot mentioned anywhere. The whole category worries only about running over.
What we foundBoth samples we took from one large database were materially under. Thirty-six seconds in a sixty-second slot is a real loss.
Where should the cut come from?
Commonly saidOne page in the whole search addresses cutting at all, in a single line.
What we foundFrom the middle. The button is nearly always the last thing in the speech and it is the reason you chose it.
So do the arithmetic before you do anything else. Count the words and divide by a hundred and forty-five. Find out whether the piece you like is even in the right band before you spend a fortnight on it. Then say it out loud with a stopwatch running, because the count gets you close and only your own mouth gets you the number.
