An Effigy of Empire: A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Canadian Imperial Nationalism During the Second Boer War
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On October 31, 1899, as a part of undergraduate University of Toronto Halloween celebrations, a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at The Princess of Wales Theatre on King Street West was interrupted by shouts from the gallery calling for the death of “Oom” Paul Kruger, the leader of the South African Republic, who had recently declared war on the British Empire. The student demonstration was not, in itself, seen as objectionable or surprising—a similar interruption by Trinity students at convocation on October 25 was lauded in The Globe as “Patriotic.” What was unusual to the Toronto newspapers that spent the next week decrying the demonstration was the students’ lack of decorum at a Shakespeare performance. In this contribution, Andrew Bretz looks at the tension between how paratextual signifiers such as costuming choices, lighting, and the theatre space itself constructed the Halloween 1899 performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an imperial text, and how Shakespeare as “high culture” moderated the ways in which individuals could express imperial allegiances. This alignment of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Canadian and British imperial projects may serve to explain why the students chose a performance of that particular play to enact their patriotic violence, yet the condemnation of the event by the daily newspapers troubles the relationship between imperial identity, partially predicated on a sanitized vision of Shakespeare, and the enacting of violence against the colonized other. For the newspapers, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as a representation of paternalistic British culture and identity, ultimately could not be reconciled with the bald violence of a jingoistic imperialism.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.055 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".