Contracted Time: Apocalypse and Identity in <i>The Merchant of Venice</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the courtroom scene of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock refers to Portia/Balthasar as “Daniel come to judgement.” This Scriptural citation is then thrown back at Shylock when the judgment turns against him: “A second Daniel, a Daniel, Jew,” says the graceless Graziano.1 In his pathbreaking Shakespeare and the Jews, James Shapiro discusses the significance this reference to the apocalyptic prophet Daniel would have had in a play about the conversion of two Jews to Christianity. As Shapiro shows, the millenarian hope for the conversion of the Jews that reached a peak with the formal readmission of Jews to England in the 1650s was “well established,” and even “flourished,” in the popular imagination by the time Merchant was first performed.2 Antonio gives voice to this hope at the beginning of the play when he agrees to Shylock’s bond: “The Hebrew will turn Christian” (1.3.175). Spurred by Paul’s remark that “all Israel shall be saved” (Romans 11.26), millenarian speculations held the conversion of the Jews to be a sign of the coming end and testament to the providential rightness of the Church of England under its Virgin Queen in the struggle against the Antichrist.3 In light of the eschatological significance of the conversion of the Jews in the Elizabethan imagination, the reference to Daniel at this climactic moment in the play, Shapiro writes, “called to mind first and foremost the Jewish prophet who foresaw the final judgement, an event precipitated by the conversion of the Jews.”4
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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 | 0.020 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".