Engel, William E., and Grant Williams, eds. The Shakespearean Death Arts: Hamlet Among the Tombs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this edited collection, William E. Engel and Grant Williams, the editors, begin by defining their terms: "This volume takes as its point of departure the assumption that 'the death arts' designates a historical category vital for understanding early modern social interaction and cultural production" (1).They use negative definition but also positive definition as in the following: "[O]ur engagement with the death arts seeks principally to acknowledge the enduring legacy of the medieval ars moriendi, which instructed the dying person (the moriens) and their family in how to prepare for a religiously auspicious passing-that is, a 'good death' " (1-2).In the introduction, Engel and Williams identify and contextualize "the Shakespearean death arts" (19).This background sets the framework for the various contributions.Part 1, "Staging the Death Arts, " examines aspects of death in various plays.Discussing Shakespeare's ars moriendi, Andrew D. McCarthy makes a number of perceptive points, including the following: "Shakespeare's use of the ars moriendi to structure King Lear becomes explicit as Lear's behavior-and much of the language that describes it-draws repeated attention to the sin of impatience, one of the final sins the dying Christian is cautioned against" (43), and, to end the essay, "perhaps the playwright's greatest achievement is that he taught-and continues to teach-his audiences how to die" (45).There is a moral and didactic element to Shakespeare's art.Brian J. Harries interprets the dead and corpses, begins and ends with the death and discovery of the historical Richard III, observing, for example: "In the anonymous play Locrine, and in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Hamlet, surviving enemies of deceased figures frequently use a moment of remembrance not to denigrate a quondam adversary, but rather to recast them in a positive light" (50; see also 49, 62).Looking at death and bodies in 2 Henry IV, Eileen Sperry concentrates on that play "and Hal's misrecognition of his father's death in Act 4. In this moment, Shakespeare uses both the tu fui and the related language of the sovereign's two bodies to engage the play's concerns with lineage and continuity in the face of certain death" (69).In Antony and Cleopatra, Grant Williams explores exemplum, posterity, and the dramatic.He argues that Shakespeare shows more
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 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".