"Courtiers of Beauteous Freedom": <i>Antony and Cleopatra</i> in its Time
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In terms of the political culture of the early Stuart period, Antony andCleopatra's account of the shift from the magnificent but senescent Egyptian past to the pragmatic but successful Roman future can be seen as a critical register of the symbolic constructions and political ramifications of the shift from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean style of rule.In this paper, I want to suggest that the meanings of the play in 1606-1607 were on the whole more political and certainly more topical than they are now.To locate Antony and Cleopatra in the linguistic, symbolic, and literary fields which comprised the context for the play's first audiences will require a survey of a broad range of texts-some literary, some political, some constructed as triumphal arches in the streets of London.In such terms, Antony and Cleopatra emerges as both contribution to and critique of the emerging Jacobean political culture.I want to argue, then, that the Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra possessed a level of political meaning which the twentieth-century Antony and Cleopatra does not possess.This does not mean that the modern play is in any sense poorer than its seventeenth-century counterpart.Probably we appreciate the play's metatheatricality more than the first audience did;' possibly we respond more seriously to the play's interest in gender and power.^Accordingly, the Jacobean Antony and Cleopatra-the play I will try to recreate in some measure-cannot claim to be better than our Antony and Cleopatra; it can only claim to be different.Taking the measure of that difference is the principal purpose of this essay.The contextualization of Antony and Cleopatra will reveal the politicized resonances of the play's language, characterization, and handling of sources.Contextualization suggests that Shakespeare's poetic styles are themselves politically meaningful.Pompey's gorgeous phrase, "courtiers of beauteous freedom," so long as it is interpreted without reference to the political connotations of Jacobean language, can be little more than gorgeous (and a Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, XXVI, 1 (1991) 1 little puzzling: what have courtiers to do with freedom?); however the phrase can be recast in an historicized linguistic field in order to clarify both the connotative range of each word and the relationship between the words."Courtiers of beauteous freedom" is the crowning phrase in Pompey's verbal attack on the triumvirate.Pompey denigrates his enemies by opposing the mercantile and political present (Antony, Caesar, and Lepidus are "senators" and "factors"; Julius Caesar's ghost saw them "laboring" atPhilippi) to the aristocratic and chivalric past ("all-honor' d, honest" Brutus, Cassius, and the "armed rest" were "courtiers" who, when moved "to con- spire" by their dedication to freedom, "drenched" the Capitol with Caesar's
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".