Shaw’s Totalitarian Drama of the Thirties; or, Shaw and the Dictators: Geneva, The Millionairess, The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Shaw followed Back to Methuselah with one of his greatest plays, Saint Joan (1924). 1 For our purposes the play is notable for its depiction of the singular inspired heroic figure infusing religion and politics in an effort to lead the nation toward its glorious promise. Joan is in the thrall of the Life Force, and the salvation of France depends on its military and political leadership placing blind trust in this visionary outsider. Indeed, in Germany Max Reinhardt produced both Saint Joan and Shaw’s following play, The Apple Cart (1929)—another play that pins the fate of the nation on one superior individual—and according to Michael Holroyd both productions “fed the atmosphere that … was lifting the Nazi regime into power.” 2 Holroyd goes on to say that Hitler himself declared Shaw’s version of Joan superior to Schiller’s, as the Reinhardt version emphasized the mystical nature of power vested in someone physically so unimpressive yet gifted with the oratorical magic of patriotic ‘voices’. It was this version of Shaw’s play that prompted William Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada, to express the conviction that spiritually Hitler ‘will one day rank with Joan of Arc’. 3 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.002 |
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".