This thesis is an examination of reader or audience response to Shakespeare’s tragedies. Primarily, it identifies key pleasures that Shakespeare’s King Lear and Othello offer. The complementary nature of these two plays is such that the analysis of their various pleasures allows for an in-depth treatment of the topic and also reflects the diversity of emotional response elicited by Shakespeare’s tragedies. The kinds of pleasure addressed in this study are catharsis as explained by Aristotle, the delight of violent passion as advocated by DuBos, pleasure from details in the work, satisfaction from the coherence of the tragedy, and pleasure in the idealization of tragedy.

Att "smarta" brädspelande datorprogram har blivit mycket bättre under de senaste årtiondena har väl knappast kunnat undgå någon. Med brädspel menar jag spel såsom Go, Othello, Backgammon och Schack. Idag spelar program, som körs på en reguljär PC, bättre än de flesta människor. Vad är det som gör dessa program så bra? Hur kan man lära en dator att spela ett så pass komplext spel som Othello på en sådan nivå att ingen människa har en chans att vinna? I detta examensarbete kommer jag att försöka förklara mekanismerna bakom ett toppspelande Othelloprogram. Jag har dessutom implementerat ett eget Othellospelande program som jag använt som testapplikation för att prova olika sökmetoder, metoder för att öka exekveringshastigheten och tekniker för att öka spelskickligheten. Jag kommer att presentera empiriska data där jag utvärderar och jämför flera andra program med mitt eget.

This study was undertaken with the idea of determining to some extent the contribution of Shakespeare's linguistic peculiarities to his effectiveness.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第21167号 / 人博第839号 / 新制||人||202(附属図書館) / 29||人博||839(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生文明学専攻 / (主査)教授 水野 眞理, 教授 髙谷 修, 准教授 桒山 智成, 教授 丸橋 良雄 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM

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Careful feature engineering is an important factor of artificial intelligence for games. In this thesis I investigate the benefit of delegating the engineering efforts to the model rather than the features, using the board game Othello as a case study. Convolutional neural networks of varying depths are trained to play in a human-like manner by learning to predict actions from tournaments. My main result is that using a raw board state representation, a network can be trained to achieve 57.4% prediction accuracy on a test set, surpassing previous state-of-the-art in this task.  The accuracy is increased to 58.3% by adding several common handcrafted features as input to the network but at the cost of more than half again as much the computation time. / Noggrann funktionsteknik är en viktig faktor för artificiell intelligens för spel. I dennaavhandling undersöker jag fördelarna med att delegera teknikarbetet till modellen i ställetför de funktioner, som använder brädspelet Othello som en fallstudie. Konvolutionellaneurala nätverk av varierande djup är utbildade att spela på ett mänskligt sätt genom attlära sig att förutsäga handlingar från turneringar. Mitt främsta resultat är att ett nätverkkan utbildas för att uppnå 57,4% prediktionsnoggrannhet på en testuppsättning, vilketöverträffar tidigare toppmoderna i den här uppgiften. Noggrannheten ökar till 58.3% genomatt lägga till flera vanliga handgjorda funktioner som inmatning till nätverket, tillkostnaden för mer än hälften så mycket beräknatid.

Teen Shakespeare films have largely been dismissed as films which “dumb down” Shakespeare’s original texts and which are marketed in a manipulative way in order to sell teens fantasies that appeal to them. Among the most popular and recognizable actresses of this genre is Julia Stiles, known for her leading roles in 10 Things I Hate About You, O, and Hamlet. Several scholars have critiqued Stiles’s films for the ways that they depict feminism and American teen girlhood. In this thesis, I argue that Stiles’s films present a spectrum of, an admittedly limited, feminism that becomes increasingly more progressive. By exploring Stiles’s portrayal of feminism in these films, the hope is to move away from the idea of teen Shakespeare films as merely dumbed down versions of the plays and to, instead, move towards an understanding of the political and social role of this generic category.

La tesi investiga la critica shakespeariana di Hazlitt, concentrandosi sulle analisi alle quattro maggiori tragedie del bardo, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet e King Lear. Uno dei i principali e più importanti obiettivi della tesi è quello di dimostrare come la critica shakespeariana di Hazlitt si discosti da quello che è solitamente conosciuto come “character criticism”, mettendo in luce l’interesse del critico romantico non soltanto per i personaggi, ma anche per la trama e la struttura generale dei drammi, e per le interpretazioni teatrali dei drammi stessi. Il capitolo uno riunisce le recensioni, i saggi, le lezioni e le pubblicazioni che costituiscono il vasto apparato critico shakespeariano di Hazlitt, fornendo un’interessante ed ampia panoramica delle principali fonti della sua critica shakespeariana. I capitoli due e tre presentando un’analisi puntuale delle letture hazlittiane delle quattro grandi tragedie di shakespeare, rispettivamente di Macbeth e Othello, Hamlet e King Lear. Vengono evidenziati gli elementi che permettono di inserire Hazlitt fra i maggiori esponenti del Romanticismo critico inglese e di proporlo come acuto precursore di argomentazioni novecentesche su Shakespeare. / The dissertation investigates Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism, focusing mainly on his analysis of Shakespeare’s major tragedies, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and King Lear. One of the main and most important objectives of the dissertation is that of demonstrating that Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism differs from what is usually known as “character criticism”, underlining the critic’s interest not only for the characters, but also for the plot and the general structure of the plays, and for the theatrical interpretations of the plays themselves. Chapter one collects the reviews, the essays, the lectures and the many publications that constitute Hazlitt’s vast Shakespearean criticism. It provides an interesting and wide overview of the main sources of Hazlitt’s Shakespearean criticism. Chapters two and three present an accurate analysis of Hazlitt’s readings of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, respectively Macbeth and Othello, Hamlet and King Lear. These chapters bring to light the elements that allow Hazlitt to be included among the major English Romantic critics and that establish him as acute forerunner of twentieth-century Shakespearean theses.

Relationships between the terms culture and education are often taken for granted in educational research. This study challenges some of the taken for granted assumptions around the term culture in educational contexts, particularly in secondary language arts education. It examines these assumptions through an analysis of three debates from the contemporary culture wars in education. The implications of these debates on uses of the term culture in secondary language arts education are examined through Othello as a secondary school text. I am arguing that these debates, namely, on the literary canon, multicultural education, and cultural literacy, represent intractable conflicts over definitions of the term culture. In light of these conflicts, the aim of this study is to provide language arts educators with analytical tools for developing greater theoretical rigour when defining the term culture in language arts education. Drawing on recent theoretical writings on culture, concepts of cultural capital, cultural rights, and cultural reproduction are proposed as analytical tools. I then apply these to develop a methodological approach by which to structure my analysis of Othello as a school text. The study makes a theoretical contribution by bringing into sharper focus ways in which the ideological opposition between expressions of cultural right versus cultural left perspectives is articulated in language arts education, as well as illustrating that claims about culture in the canon debate reflect competing normative assumptions; in the multicultural education debate they reflect competing essentialist constructions; and in the cultural literacy debate they reflect competing empowerment goals. Such cultural debates have a long history and thus the study also situates the contemporary culture wars in education within a wider historical context by tracing related conflicts in the history of literary criticism on and performances of Othello over the past four centuries.

Relationships between the terms culture and education are often taken for granted in educational research. This study challenges some of the taken for granted assumptions around the term culture in educational contexts, particularly in secondary language arts education. It examines these assumptions through an analysis of three debates from the contemporary culture wars in education. The implications of these debates on uses of the term culture in secondary language arts education are examined through Othello as a secondary school text. I am arguing that these debates, namely, on the literary canon, multicultural education, and cultural literacy, represent intractable conflicts over definitions of the term culture. In light of these conflicts, the aim of this study is to provide language arts educators with analytical tools for developing greater theoretical rigour when defining the term culture in language arts education. Drawing on recent theoretical writings on culture, concepts of cultural capital, cultural rights, and cultural reproduction are proposed as analytical tools. I then apply these to develop a methodological approach by which to structure my analysis of Othello as a school text. The study makes a theoretical contribution by bringing into sharper focus ways in which the ideological opposition between expressions of cultural right versus cultural left perspectives is articulated in language arts education, as well as illustrating that claims about culture in the canon debate reflect competing normative assumptions; in the multicultural education debate they reflect competing essentialist constructions; and in the cultural literacy debate they reflect competing empowerment goals. Such cultural debates have a long history and thus the study also situates the contemporary culture wars in education within a wider historical context by tracing related conflicts in the history of literary criticism on and performances of Othello over the past four centuries.