Pierre Corneille's <i>Le Cid</i> in Colonial Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In April 1652, the fledgling French settlement of Quebec saw a performance Pierre Corneille's famous tragicomedy Le Cid. Interpreting the play in light of the social and political context of this performance, this article argues that audience members must have found something very familiar about Corneille's drama of domestic politics in medieval Castile, set against the backdrop of a threat of surprise attack by an army of Moors lurking downriver from the city of Seville. At the very moment the play was staged in Quebec, the St. Lawrence River also seemed, to chroniclers of colonial life, to be teeming with aggressive cultural Others awaiting opportunities to launch surprise attacks on the vulnerable French: the Iroquois. This article examines three aspects of Castile's conflict with the Moors in Le Cid—the vulnerability associated with proximity to a river, the enemy's stealth, and the way Castilians meet the challenge—and argues that the play would have reflected to audience members both their own dangerous situation and their unique relationship to royal authority. Comparison of this analysis to existing scholarly interpretations of the play shows how accounting for colonial experiences of French literature may bring fresh perspective both to individual texts and to the relationship between France and its colonies more broadly.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".