"It hath no bottom" and is "beyond beyond": Shakespeare on the Mystery of Love
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This thesis examines how Shakespeare represents love. Love is resistant to definition because its experience is entirely subjective, yet Shakespeare does not retreat from any attempt to represent selfless love, which contrasts to the more easily comprehended mechanisms and effects of desire. Shakespeare’s works suggest that love can be both eros and agape at the same time. The experience of being in love constitutes one’s subjectivity: these works show that to know oneself is to know what is worth dying for, and in this regard love is stronger than death. This thesis argues that Shakespeare views love as a mystery, yet also as something profoundly real and revolutionary. Shakespeare intersects Christianity’s belief in the mystery of divine love with the experience of romantic and sexual love; he uses theology and the experiences of religious faith to express the possibilities of secular love. Shakespeare makes the sacred secular: he reinvents spiritual love as a human experience, and in turn his works elevate human love and characterize it as a religious experience. Further, these texts suggest that secular love can be an access point for the experience of divine love; that is, human love participates in the divine mystery of God’s love. The transformative possibilities that accompany moments of love are communicated through the mystery of poetry and theatrical performance: it is through artifice and illusion that we are able to understand the experience and meaning of love. In his construction of subjectivity, Shakespeare’s texts suggest that radical selflessness is paradoxically the pathway to becoming most fully the self. This thesis considers both Shakespeare’s dramatic works and his poetry. This dissertation contextualizes Shakespeare’s writing within the larger Christian culture of early modern England and also considers contemporary theory and criticism. The mysteries of love, of faith, and of the possibilities of the imagination do not merely intersect in Shakespeare’s works; these ideas gain meaning and are understood precisely through their intersections.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.003 |
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".