Reading (and writing) the ethics of authorship: Shakespeare in Love as postmodern metanarrative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Answer me only this: are you author of plays of William Shakespeare? -Viola De Lessups to Will Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love Although Shakespeare in Love (1998) enjoyed rave reviews in popular press, some critics in intelligentsia question artistic significance of film's postmodern aspirations. In an article in Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, Martin Harries reserves special disdain for intrusion, via series of anachronisms, of popular culture into film's screenplay, written by Marc Norman and playwright Tom Stoppard.1 Harries ascribes these textual gestures to desire on filmmakers' part to pander to Hollywood narcissism: The anachronisms give comforting illusion of closeness, Harries writes, but this closeness can never overcome distance between entertainment as industry and more fragile and, finally, more mysterious business of Globe, Rose, and Theater (B9). For Harries, Norman and Stoppard's screenplay only succeeds in satisfying Hollywood's ostensible yen for reinvisaging itself, rather implausibly, as an Elizabethan theatrical enterprise. A. O. Scott similarly derides Shakespeare in Love as a frisson of self-congratulatory pleasure. A Senior Editor of Lingua Franca, Scott devotes particular attention to problematizing Stoppard's obvious role in construction of film's anachronistic puns, linguistic games, and witty textual paradoxes. What we get is mostly less than meets eye: erudition of cocktail party and emotional range of good TV sitcom, middlebrow pleasures dressing up in trappings of high learning, Scott writes. Troubled by what they perceive to be film's intellectual masquerade, Harries and Scott essentially misconstrue narrative structure of Norman and Stoppard's screenplay as mere product of linguistic high jinks and textual diversions, rather than as carefully constructed and highly literate text that offers valuable insight into contemporary conceptions of authorship, semantics of love, and humanistic possibilities of postmodernity. In fact, Scott even refuses to acknowledge Shakespeare in Love's explicitly postmodern narrative design, preferring instead to refer to John Madden's Academy-Award-winning film as brain-teaser and as without difficulty. Clearly, modernism implies literary tradition that essentializes art forms through its adherence to universal belief system founded upon logic, rationality, and existence of moral center. Scott's flawed terminology hardly begins to account for postmodern narrative philosophy that undergirds Shakespeare in Love. Availing themselves of such techniques as metanarration and parody in their screenplay, Norman and Stoppard recognize indeterminacy of language and multivocality inherent in kinds of intertextual discourse evinced by such Stoppard plays as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1967) and Travesties (1974). As with Shakespeare in Love, latter play argues for elasticity of history as Stoppard stages an imaginary encounter in early twentieth-century Zurich that features Lenin, James Joyce, and Dadaist Tristan Tzara. In Sequel to History: Postmodernism and Crisis of Representational Time (1992), Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth observes that the best definition of postmodern narrative might be precisely that it resolutely does not operate according to any of historical time, that is, representational time, and in many cases directly parodies or disputes that time and generalizations it allows to form (43). Postmodernists such as Stoppard deliberately flaunt constructed nature of history and sanctity of historical truth in their texts. Shifting back and forth across arbitrary borders of linear time, such writers embrace resulting multiplicity of cultural perspectives that negation of history necessarily allows. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Stoppard challenges modernist notions of authorship by narrating Shakespeare's Hamlet from play's textual margins. …
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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 | 0.013 |
| 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 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.027 | 0.008 |
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".