Listening Cherry 19 – Shakespeare’s sonnet for ‘and’ nerds

Image from here.

I find the word ‘and’ fascinating – indeed I am something of an ‘and’ nerd. The word features in Chapter 8 of Phonology for Listening, in a short recording of spontaneous speech in which six of the eight speech units begin with ‘and’ – with five different sound shapes.

Recently I became aware  recently that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 66 has ten of the fourteen lines beginning with the word ‘and’:

Tir’d with all these, for restful death I cry,
As, to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm’d in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly (doctor-like) controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall’d simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

It’s not the easiest of his sonnets to understand, but basically it’s a complaint about the injustices of a world where deserving virtuous people are downtrodden/displaced by undeserving non-virtuous people (the long list beginning in line 2 and ending with line 12). The list of examples of the triumph of the undeserving is framed by a wish for death (lines 1 and 13) which is then tempered by the realisation (line 14) that death will mean separation from the loved one. Enough of explication.

I have three recordings of this Sonnet by Dame Edith Evans (1888-1976), Sir Anthony Quayle (1913-1989), and David Shaw Parker, who is still working as an actor and voice artist.

And (of course!) I am interested in the different soundshapes of the word ‘and’ across the three recordings.

Here are the ten ‘and’s from Dame Edith Evans

and and and and and and and and and and

Here are the ten ‘and’s from Sir Anthony Quayle

and and and and and and and and and and

Here are the ten ‘and’s from David Shaw Parker

and and and and and and and and and and

I don’t have dates for the recordings, but I think it is safe to assume that the order in which I have listed them is the order in which the three recordings were made. To my ears the earliest recording, by Edith Evans, uses a smaller range of sound shapes than the second recording by Anthony Quayle, who in turn uses fewer than the last recording by David Shaw Parker.

These being recordings of poetry read aloud, I had expected less variation than one would find in recordings of spontaneous speech. This seems to be so for the earliest of the three recordings, by Dame Edith Evans but not for the second (Anthony Quayle) and third (David Shaw Parker).

I am not a trained phonetician, so I do not dare publicise my attempts at capturing the different sound shapes of ‘and’ in phonetic transcription. But if you have an advanced phonetics class, and you are as much of an ‘and’ nerd as I am, you can download a worksheet here and  have the class do transcriptions. If you have the expertise and time to do an authoritative transcription yourself – please tell me, and send it to me! richardcauldwell@me.com