Shaw's "Shakespear": The Influence of William Shakespeare on Bernard Shaw's Dramaturgy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
George Bernard Shaw (1856 -1950) had a lifelong fascination with William Shakespeare (1564 -1616).First as a student and critic, and then as a playwright, Shaw saw in Shakespeare both a dramatic idol and teacher -and a competing rival to be challenged, and overcome.This feeling that Shakespeare was an opponent to be defeated is made most explicit in the miniature play Shaw originally intended to be his final dramatic statement, at the end of his professional life: Shakes Versus Shav (1949), a novelty marionette play, in which puppet figures of Shaw and Shakespeare literally fight, or spar, comparing their dramatic achievements, with puppets representing and quoting some of their iconic characters.The onstage fight is warm-hearted, the competition good-natured, and the respect mutual, between the two playwrights.Of course -Shaw himself wrote this text, and so was able to manipulate this brotherhood, according to his own needs, and assert his ownership of the competition on his own terms.Shaw's pleas, in that and many other plays, to Shakespeare to clear out of the way and allow his own body of work to have its due credit, without suffering under Shakespeare's shadow, is the critical problem I am exploring, following his earlier boast of having taught Shakespeare's characters some reason, to go with their deep feeling.This chronological suspension and confusion illustrates a paradoxical attitude towards his dramatic predecessor -simultaneously resenting and revering him -that colored Shaw's I wish to thank my adviser, Sebastian D. G. Knowles, for his intellectual support, encouragement, enthusiasm, and good humor which made this dissertation possible, and for his patience in correcting both my stylistic and theoretical errors.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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".