Alden T. & Virginia Mason Vaughan. <em>Shakespeare in America</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp xii, 220.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1752 America's first theatre company, led by Lewis Hallam, was in colonial Williamsburg.A playbill for their performance of The Merchant of Venice included an announcement that Mr. Adcock, who played Lorenzo, would sing 'songs in character'.It was a common enough practice in the eighteenthcentury theatre: Thomas Arne had made a setting of 'Lorenzo's Serenade' for the famous 1741 Merchant in which the actor Macklin transformed the concept of Shylock.The authors of this recent book in the Oxford Shakespeare Studies series describe the Hallam troupe's performance as 'a musical version' as if it were a Broadway show.They are perhaps too eager to establish a distinctly American Shakespeare.This is not the first time the title Shakespeare in America has been adopted, not to mention titles roughly similar, as the Vaughans freely acknowledge in their useful annotated bibliography.Over a century ago George B. Churchill contributed a lengthy article entitled 'Shakespeare in America' to the German academic annual Jahrbuch der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft expressing pride in the part Shakespeare played in American education but less happiness with the American theatre's treatment of his plays.A significant book by Esther Cloudman Dunn appeared in 1939.Her Shakespeare in America remains a lively, perspicacious study of Shakespeare's plays on the American stage; of schoolbooks containing choice extracts for use as exercises in elocution and to reinforce moral education; of Shakespeare's influence on significant American politicians, preachers, and men of letters; and of editions, designed sometimes for the general reader and sometimes for the scholar in the library.Dunn also took account of the authorship argument, giving a vivid and touching account of Delia Bacon, the pioneering advocate of the theory that a 'butcher's son' could not have been the author of the plays and poems attributed to him.The Vaughans also devote substantial space to the authorship question, pointing out how ironic it was that Americans, wholeheartedly committed to self-education and the admiration of self-made men, should have adopted with such enthusiasm the view that only an aristocrat could have written the plays.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.171 | 0.069 |
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".