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Record W255146724

Rescripting Shakespeare (and Others) in 2005

2005· article· en· W255146724 on OpenAlexaboutno aff
Alan C. Dessen

Bibliographic record

VenueShakespeare bulletin · 2005
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicShakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTempestGlobeArtPityVisual artsArt historyDanceHistoryLiteratureMedia studiesSociologyPsychology
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Playgoing in summer 2005 yielded a mixed bag of hits and misses. Given the vagaries of repertory scheduling, I was unable to get to The Tempest at the Globe, a controversial production with only three actors, or the RSC Twelfth Night and As You Like It. Nonetheless, I did see the four Gunpowder plays at the Swan (fresh material for the jaded Shakespeare playgoer), two shows at the Globe, and a variety of other items that included four productions in Stratford, Ontario. Such playgoing yielded a combination of the familiar (been there, done that) and the offbeat along with some surprises and one special treat, Jonson's Sejanus at the Swan. A significant hurdle at many venues when staging a Shakespeare play is theatrical exigency, most commonly a shortage of personnel. A 2005 director at the Festival Theatre in Stratford, Ontario need not economize on actors (especially given the availability of singers and dancers from Hello Dolly), so that in As You Like It, 2.5, Le Beau and Charles could reunite with other banished courtiers and in The Tempest the act four masque could have ten nymphs and reapers--as opposed to other productions where Ferdinand and Miranda had to be enlisted in the dance. Smaller companies, however, must confront significant logistical problems that in turn lead to changes in the script, with such rescripting most common in productions of non-Shakespeare items. For example, the production of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at London's Southwark Theatre, with a cast of nine, omitted Bergetto, Philotis, Richardetto, and Grimaldi (in 1.2 Vasques fought with Donado, not Grimaldi) with the same actor playing Donado and the Cardinal. The result was a gain in intensity and pace (the show including interval lasted less than two-and-a-half hours) but at a price (gone were the unintended death of Bergetto and the Cardinal's shielding of Grimaldi), and in the final moments the Cardinal was literally the only figure left standing. Many other challenges await today's director. Jupiter's descent sitting upon an eagle (Cymbeline, 5.4.92.s.d) is a perennial problem when staging this script, but that problem was compounded for Rachel Kavanaugh outdoors in Regents Park with no acting area above. Her solution: she eliminated Jupiter completely so that one of the ghosts produced and then delivered to Posthumus the tablet with the prophecy. A problem involving doors and sightlines is posed by The Comedy of Errors, 3.1 where Antipholus of Ephesus is denied entry to his own house by Dromio of Syracuse. Nancy Meckler's solution: drop a sheet in lieu of a real door so that both inside and outside were clearly visible, a choice that allowed Dromio of Ephesus (Forbes Masson) to be used as battering ram head-first against the sheet-door. The climactic image in the script of Marlowe's Edward II is the juxtaposition of Mortimer's severed head with Edward II's coffin, but the appearance of a property head can elicit laughter that in turn subtracts from the effect. To forestall such a response at the Studio Theatre in Stratford, Ontario Richard Monette added stage business to two previous scenes so that first Gaveston and later three of the barons were taken off to their deaths (we heard the offstage chopping sounds) with their heads then brought back in bloody bags to be kicked or thrown off by first Warwick, then Edward. Onstage sexual assault was very visible in 2005. Yes, in their second meeting in Measure for Measure (2.4) the actor playing Angelo often gropes or otherwise manhandles Isabella, but at the climax of a very strong scene in Stratford Festival Canada Jonathan Goad threw Dana Green's Isabella onto a table, tore at her clothes, and nearly raped her. Similarly, in 2.2 of Cavanaugh's Cymbeline Simon Day's Iachimo straddled a sleeping Imogen and barely restrained himself from consummating the act. Oberon's application of the love-juice to Titania's eyes can become an intimate moment, but in Gregory Doran's RSC production the playgoer heard the speech but actually saw a huge shadow in the background first zap a small fairy shadow and then perform the action (so that this Oberon lived up to his title of king of shadows--[3. …

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow), Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.742
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0300.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.219
Teacher spread0.195 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2005
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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