Tragedies of the Mind: Emotion, Cognition, and Motivation in Four Early Modern Tragedies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation sets early modern tragedy in dialogue with current research in cognitive psychology in order to study the cognition and behavior of four tragic heroes of the greatest early modern tragedies: William Shakespeare's Othello and Titus Andronicus, Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, and Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy.These plays have been selected as objects of analysis because, as especially revealing examples of what I am calling tragedies of the mind, they dramatize fundamental characteristics and biases of human cognitive functioning in especially acute form.In each play, the playwright's interest in highlighting a protagonist's catastrophic errors in judgment leads to especially subtle and penetrating anatomizations of the interplay between emotion and cognition, motivation and decision-making, desire and action.More than most other plays of the period, these plays are preoccupied with exploring not just the mental and emotional states of the protagonists in the process of their downfall, but also with understanding the very nature of these operations.As I argue, the relation between emotion and cognition is perhaps the most important issue in the study of motivation and decision-making in early modern tragedy because a careful analysis of pertinent works by Shakespeare, Kyd, and Marlowe reveals that these tragedians produced dramatizations of human motivation and action that seem intuitively to anticipate a great deal about contemporary insights and approaches within cognitive psychology.Since an outstanding feature of these early modern tragedies is their preoccupation with human nature-that is, with the fundamental moral and intellectual capacities of the human being-a referential framework drawn from cognitive psychology offers a potentially illuminating way of further clarifying the dramatized thought and behaviors of these tragic heroes.Such an 10 David F. Hoeniger seeks to explain the medical theories and practices of the Renaissance era for nonmedical readers.He provides an intellectual context and a physiological or psychological vocabulary for the historical account of medical practice in Elizabethan England
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".