Preliminary Bouts: Shakespeare on American Radio Before the Battle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SHAKESPEARE WAS NOT an obvious source of programming for commercial radio. The higher the ratings, the more a network could charge for airtime, but ratings for cultural programs were expected to be low. Networks eventually met the obligation to broadcast sustaining programs with bravado, producing the best educational, public affairs, and arts shows they could, including adaptations of plays. A 1942 article in Time magazine complained, “last week, for the first time in more than twelve radio seasons, neither NBC (the old Red network) nor the Blue Network broadcast an hour-long adaptation of a stage play. Possibly not many millions of listeners noticed this, but it meant that the book was closed on an era of radio.” The article looks back to what it identifies as the first Shakespeare broadcast, a NBC production of The Tempest in 1928, and then describes some of the playwrights whose works were broadcast including Henrik Ibsen, John Galsworthy, James M. Barrie, and George S. Kaufman. NBC producers and directors blamed the demise of these adaptations on a trend toward original radio scripts. There are three qualifications the writer might have made, but did not: original radio scripts much predated 1942, adaptations of plays were still being broadcast— just not that week, and local stations presented plays five years before there the networks were organized. Understanding the formats of previous Shakespeare broadcasts will explain why the Battle programs were severely abridged. This chapter will therefore survey past programs. We will probably not survey everything. Susanne Greenhalgh writes, “research on radio thus offers that rare phenomenon in Shakespeare studies, a history still in the process of being outlined and documented.” Please remember this as I describe all known American Shakespeare broadcasts until the Battle begins, local and network. I have not yet researched the years 1923– 1926, though I did stumble upon some local productions from 1924. There are almost certainly more to be found. Shakespeare on Local Stations It has long been believed that the first Shakespeare broadcast and the first dramatic broadcast of any kind was a program presenting three Shakespearean scenes, heard February 16, 1923 on the BBC.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.045 | 0.009 |
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".