Demythologizing Nationalist Narrative: Howard Brenton’s <i>The Romans in Britain</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the context of Britain’s anxious reaffirmation of its traditional identity in the wake of the Brexit referendum, this essay calls for revisiting Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain – its import having been overlooked partly because of the legal kerfuffle over the graphic violence of one particular scene and partly because criticism has focused mainly on the now outdated British imperialist policies in Northern Ireland. By aligning Brenton’s dramaturgy with that of Bertolt Brecht, I aim to broaden this narrow message into a parabolic one that connects the play to Britain’s current chauvinistic sociopolitics. I contend that The Romans in Britain continues to function as a state-of-the-nation play, warning that today’s retreat into a distorted past to compensate for an uncomfortable present can only lead to a precarious future.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".