<i>The Merchant of Venice</i> and <scp>S</scp>hakespeare's sense of humour(s)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines a crucial and often overlooked dimension of The Merchant of Venice as it pertains to both its performative and critical histories; namely, how the presence of a melancholic character problematizes the play at its core. This essay argues that the tonal dissonance created by Antonio's melancholy represents an integral component of its comic progression and, in doing so, construes the play as representative of S hakespeare's idiosyncratic brand of comedy. I maintain that, in relying on a melancholic protagonist who defies comic classification – much like the play itself – the comedy eschews both the Galenic understanding of humoural theory, predicated on an imbalance of bodily substance, as well as the Jonsonian style of humour plays, where each absurd affect is expected to yield mockery and laughter. Rather than consider Antonio's melancholy as a critical springboard, however, I discuss its impact within the comedy it inhabits, reading the merchant as the dramatic intersection through which the play's multiple plots and characters converge. Though he is in no way the play's antagonistic figure, Antonio represents a considerably dissonant note that jeopardizes the concretization of the romantic plot, hence his ostensible exclusion at the end of the comedy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".