Profane, Steal, or Usurp: Kingship, Divine Right, and Regicide in Shakespeare's Macbeth and Richard II
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A year ago Rachael Hencher was a student in my Shakespeare class (English 2214X/Y). The term paper she wrote in the second term was the first draft of the essay she presents here under the title, “Profane, Steal, or Usurp.” Those three words by themselves are a clever indication of the problem Rachael has identified, namely, how do you change the government in a society accustomed to monarchy, and where monarchs believe (or at least say they believe) they are anointed by God and rule by divine right? Rachael shows with great subtlety how and why this question is troublesome when we’re interpreting a tragedy like Macbeth or a history play like Richard II. The essay she has written speaks for itself, and all I can do here is recommend it to you. And I can add, with admiration, that Rachael remains firmly aware of the differences which separate the two texts she is studying. “In Macbeth ,” she writes in her final paragraph, “the audience sees a man of certain ambition rise to the greatest heights of power by compromising his conscience, only to be torn down due to his illegitimate claim”; in Richard II , by contrast, we witness a struggle between “a legitimate king who is a weak ruler, and an illegitimate usurper who is a strong leader.” What Rachael’s analysis offers us is an appreciation of Shakespeare’s willingness to wrestle with these ambiguities. Dr. Ronald Huebert
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 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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
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".