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Chapter 12

Stress Maximum in the Fifth Position
Rhythmical Performance


This page contains the sound files of the readings discussed in Chapter 12, and the respective texts.





BealeGraph
Figure 2Wave plot and pitch contour of "I, that am curTAIL'D of this fair proportion". read by Simon Russel Beale



Listen to the line "I, that am curTAIL'D of this fair proportion"." read by Simon Russel Beale


StephensGraph
Figure 3Wave plot and pitch contour of "I, that am curTAIL'D o...". read by Robert Stephens


Listen to the line "I, that am curTAIL'D of this fair proportion" read by Robert Stephens.


HolmGraph
Figure 4Wave plot and pitch contour of "I, that am curTAIL'D o...". read by Ian Holm


Listen to the line "I, that am curTAIL'D of this fair proportion" read by Ian Holm.


Listen to a doctored version of the line "I, that am curTAIL'D of this fair proportion" read by Ian Holm. Although a 763-msec pause has been deleted after "I", the iambic character of the line has not been altered—as compared to the genuine version.
BranaghGraph
Figure 5Wave plot and pitch contour of "I, that am curTAIL'D o...". read by Kenneth Branagh


Listen to the line "I, that am curTAIL'D of this fair proportion" read by Kenneth Branagh.


EaglesGraph
Figure 6Wave plot and pitch contour of "I, that am curTAIL'D o...". read by Rufus Eagles


Listen to the line "I, that am curTAIL'D of this fair proportion" read by Rufus Eagles.



Long after having submitted this paper to Versification, I ran on the internet into Laurence Olivier's and Ian McKellen's film versions of Richard III. Neither of them faces up to the complexities of this line. Olivier inverts the stress on "cúrtail'd":


McKellen simply skips the line.



Figure 7Wave plot and pitch contour of two tokens of "curtail", one read
                  by a male reader in the audio version of Merriam-Webster's
                  Collegiate Dictionary, and one excised from Gloucester's soliloquy.


Listen to two tokens of "curtail", one read by a male reader in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, and one excised from Gloucester's soliloquy.





Figure 8Wave plot and spectrogram of the two readings represented in Figure 7



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