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Record W7132970675

Backstage Texts and the Editing of Shakespeare

2025· dissertation· W7132970675 on OpenAlexafffund
Arlynda Boyer

Bibliographic record

VenueTSpace · 2025
Typedissertation
Language
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicShakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
FundersJackman Humanities Institute, University of TorontoUniversity of Toronto
KeywordsCollationReading (process)Scripting languageFocus (optics)ParatextPublishingScholarship
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This dissertation argues that the notebooks and scripts belonging to directors and actors, stage managers’ scripts, and other documents of working theatre are the materials that make performances of Shakespeare. While literary-minded editors focus on Shakespeare’s print history and performance theorists operate metaphorically, reading entire productions as texts, these little-seen backstage documents comprise theatre’s textual history, the only written history of performance as it is created. This is an immense amount of material that is currently missing from academic investigation, critical consideration, and potential use in the classroom. I assert that it has untapped potential for two areas in particular: pedagogy and editing.Typically, editors guide readers through Shakespeare’s text in part by helping them to imagine it being staged. I believe the same aim might be achieved—more effectively—by incorporating the work of practitioners into scholarly editions. Scholars including Barbara Hodgdon, Peter Holland, M. J. Kidnie, and W. B. Worthen have incisively critiqued traditional editing practices as anti-theatrical, especially against modern performance; they have sought but—lacking extensive experience with and reliable access to backstage texts—have not conclusively found ways that editing might better capture modern performance. My thesis is that an editor should have a few specific, recent productions in mind when producing an edition of a play and that they should use those performances and the working backstage texts that created them as an explicitly stated basis of their text, incorporating the notes of directors and actors in a paratextual performance apparatus akin to bibliography’s collation band. Part I of my thesis, “Backstage Texts,” lays out the archival evidence and trains readers to identify the ownership and the use of a script, while Part II, “The Editing of Shakespeare,” critiques current editorial approaches and examines how backstage texts may be brought into the editorial project in order to forge closer collaboration between editors of early modern drama and theatre practitioners. This is a completely new kind of editorial grammar, so in my final chapter I offer my own annotative practice to illustrate how this new integration—page by way of stage— might be achieved.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.004
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: Qualitative
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.010
Threshold uncertainty score0.025

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0040.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0080.012
Scholarly communication0.0100.006
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.295
Teacher spread0.271 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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