“Something in me dangerous”: <i>Hamlet</i>, melancholy, and the early modern scholar
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay situates Hamlet in the history of theatrical representations of melancholy. Traditionally, early modern stage melancholics were dramatically distanced from other characters on stage either by the isolating effects of their condition, or by the dramatic irony that made their lack of self-awareness ridiculous, as with the melancholy Jaques. Hamlet, uniquely, assigns dramatic control over this curious dramatic space to the melancholic himself. In exaggerating his melancholy, Hamlet manipulates stage conventions associated with melancholy to exploit this dramatic space as a protective form of privacy from authority, even in that authority's surveilling midst. This exaggerated version of “the scholar's disease” links Hamlet with the rebellious Earl of Essex, whom Francis Bacon counselled to “pretend to be as bookish and contemplative as ever you were” in order to disarm Elizabeth's growing distrust. Hamlet's metatheatrical representation of melancholy, and its relevance to Essex's rebellion, partakes in the collapse of melancholy's medical conception and the diffusion of its signification into literary, social and political realms. It also dramatizes how this concept's collapse and diffusion could be exploited by disaffected scholars as a means of concealing resistance to authority as apolitical disposition or disease.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".