Ric Knowles, Ed.: The Shakespeare's Mine: Adapting Shakespeare in Anglophone Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
RIC KNOWLES, ed. The Shakespeare's Mine: Adapting Shakespeare in Anglophone Canada. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. x + 428 pp. LEANORE LIEBLEIN, ed. A Certain William: Adapting Shakespeare in Francophone Canada. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2009. xvi + 332 pp. Knowles's and Lieblein's paired collections of contemporary Canadian Shakespearean adaptations will no doubt become seminal anthologies in the rapidly growing field of adaptation criticism. Both editors encourage us to consider how these plays help Shakespearean drama take on new meaning and [...] continue to be transformed (Lieblein iv) through the adaptation process. Some Shakespeare and adaptation scholars may see these collections as only partial first folios of important Canadian adaptations--that is, as initial and necessarily incomplete anthologies that should spur further anthologization. New readers, however, and students particularly will relish new access to a wide variety of plays either out of print or not translated into English. Lieblein and Knowles focus on unique francophone and anglophone adaptations of both popular plays (Othello, Hamlet) and more uncommon examples (Julius Caesar, The Merchant of Venice). In highlighting the use-value of Shakespeare to Canadian playwrights, Knowles historicizes how playwrights from a broad spectrum of backgrounds piggyback on [Shakespeare's] cultural capital, using his name to gain access and recognition (iii). His collection starts with Ken Mitchell's Cruel Tears (1975), a prairie version of Othello replete with Ukrainian cultural intertexts and country music. Two radically different Hamlet adaptations follow: Claudius (1993) by Ken Gass and Mad Boy Chronicle (1995) by Michael O'Brien. Gass focuses his adaptation on incestuous, domestic, and sexual politics, while O'Brien's raw Viking world (145) accentuates Scandinavian history and cultural claims to Shakespeare's most famous revenge tragedy. Knowles's title, The Shakespeare's Mine, appears in Sears's Harlem Duet (1997) when Billie takes Shakespeare's collected works from her ex-husband Othello, an action mirroring how Djanet Sears at once claims Shakespeare for the people of African descent and 'talks back' to him (240). Vern Thiessen's Shakespeare's Will (2005) speculates on Shakespeare's personal reasons for leaving his second best bed to his wife Anne Hathaway. Rather than focusing on a particular play, Thiessen's exceptional one-woman show adapts our knowledge of Shakespeare's life, encouraging a reconsideration of the person behind the plays. Yvette Nolan and Kennedy C. MacKinnon's Death of a Chief(2008) adapts Julius Caesar to a First Nations context to create unexpected associations between Roman and Native social identity politics. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".