Sheffield Hallam University Journals
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Personality Traits: The link between women on upper echelon and financial performance: Automatic recognition of personality traits
Full text linkThis paper has explored how the personality traits of women in upper echelon impact the financial performance of FTSE 350 companies in the United Kingdom leveraging new insight from computational social scientist who adopted machine learning to extract personality traits scores from transcript of earnings call of women Chief Executive Officers and Chief Financial Officers with the analysts. The personality traits of these top executives will be automatically recognised from the transcript of their spoken communications during the earnings call. The Open Language Chief Executive Tool will be executed on Phyton to produce output of their personality scores. Subsequently, the impact of these top executives on company’s financial performance will be established using ordinary least square regression analysis to examine the relationship between the personality scores and financial performance using Statistical Package for the Social Science
A Tragic Hero in Epic: Satan’s Relapse into Hamlet’s ‘Problems’ in Paradise Lost
Full text linkThis paper reconsiders the infamous ‘problems’ of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet through Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Theodor W. Adorno’s conception of the emergent self and Rachel Eisendrath’s understanding of aesthetic form. Building on Eisendrath’s claim that ‘the play [Hamlet] points toward a coherence that lies, paradoxically, beyond the play itself’ (595) and Curtis Perry’s assertion that ‘what Shakespeare does in Hamlet is better understood as part of a complex intertextual conversation than as an isolated lightning strike of appropriative genius’ (81), I show that this coherence lies in a future literary work – in this case, John Milton’s Paradise Lost – that can better, but never completely because literature is process, contain that coherence. Specifically, Satan’s tragic template is a throwback to the secular revenge hero, which is in the process of being outmoded by the Christian epic heroism that Adam and Eve represent. There is a kind of chasm between Hamlet and Satan: Hamlet’s incongruity with his setting looks forward to a more advanced, introspective (in a word, ‘modern’) kind of tragic heroism but which his secular world is unable to accommodate, and Satan’s incongruity with his setting looks back to a heroism being superseded and which is now become tragic. Further, Milton’s constellation with Shakespeare ex post facto claims a kind of Christianity in Hamlet. My analysis of these two hyper-canonical texts reveals that the ‘secularism’ of Hamlet and Satan that critics such as Harold Bloom have marked as prescient of our modern subjectivities has all along been misleading
Natalia Pikli, Shakespeare’s Hobby-Horse and Early Modern Popular Culture (Routledge, 2022). 272 pp. ISBN 9780367515195
Full text linkLorna Hutson, England’s Insular Imaginings: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland (Cambridge University Press, 2023). xii+322pp. ISBN 978 1 009 25357 4.
Full text linkDavid Anonby, Shakespeare on Salvation: Crossing the Reformation Divide (Pickwick Publications, 2024). xiii+292pp. ISBN 979-8-3852-0299-7; Hardcover 979-8-3852-0300-0; Ebook 979-8-3852-0301-7
Full text linkThe Heretical Foreign Woman, the ‘Raging Turk’, and Martial Figures in Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed and The Island Princess
Full text linkJohn Fletcher’s The Tamer Tamed (1609-11), a farcical domestic comedy, and The Island Princess (1619-21), a romantic tragicomedy and travel drama, share several structural similarities despite their generic differences. In a domestic setting, the earlier play presents a reverse taming narrative while also giving voice to the rampant misogyny of the would-be wife-tamer and his allies. Set in the islands of Ternate and Tidore, The Island Princess stages Malukan resistance to European resource exploitation while also portraying the Portuguese colonizers’ vituperative contempt for the islanders and their religion. The similar attitudes of patriarchs and colonizers in these plays exemplify the interconnectedness, which scholars have long pointed out, of gender and colonial discourse. This discursive connection alone, however, does not account for specific plot similarities between the plays, nor do the source materials that the plays draw upon. These similarities include the lead female character’s attempt to convert a male love interest to her ‘faith’ and the male character’s disproportionate rage in response. In each play, the male character – Petruchio in The Tamer Tamed and Armusia in The Island Princess – receives advice from his allies to rape Maria and Quisara respectively. Each play ends with the male character’s mock martyrdom and the ambiguous restoration of gender and colonial hierarchy. I argue that theatregrams are behind these structural parallels, namely, the tropes of the heretical foreign woman and of the “raging Turk.” Apart from Quisara in The Island Princess, Fletcher’s use of characters not overtly identified as a heretic or “Turk” as iterations of these well-worn tropes in effect destabilizes the tropes themselves. This destabilization, however, fails to undo the associated constructions of race as they apply to women. In each play, moreover, a civilian character appropriating a military identity embodies one of these two tropes, which contributes to the increasingly complex and varied representations of martial identity in the period
Edward II, directed by Daniel Raggett for the RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 12 March 2025
Full text linkReview of Daniel Raggett's RSC production of Edward II
Darren Freebury-Jones, Shakespeare’s Borrowed Feathers: How early modern playwrights shaped the world’s greatest writer (Manchester University Press, 2024). ISBN 978-1-5261-7732-2
Full text linkDido, Queen of Carthage and the Contradictions of Sovereignty
Full text linkThis essay argues that Marlowe's portrait of monarchy in Dido, Queene of Carthage both invites but ultimately defeats an attempt to read it directly through contemporary ideological contexts. While the play was written at a time of heightened debate surrounding the powers of princes, to which Dido herself gestures in a climactic moment of the action, the chief components of its idea of monarchy are rather the erotics of the gaze and a fantasy of self-sovereignty and illimitable autonomy. The former depends on, and probably derives from, the interaction between charismatic performers and an attentive audience within a playhouse, with the play both presuming and requiring that the boy-actor playing Aeneas is especially 'lovely' to look at, and blonde. The latter, contrastingly, possibly reflects an emerging discourse of political and especially monarchical sovereignty in the period, particularly in the wake of Jean Bodin's influential Six Livres de la République (1576), but translates the ideological into the personal and psychological in such a way as to defuse much of its political content or applicability. The collapse of the play's model of eroticised sovereign self-hood is highly traumatic, suggesting that it is rather a deeply invested fantasy than an attempt at subversion. Though highly distinctive, the play's understanding of monarchy occurs in many other works traditionally attributed to Marlowe and suggests his artistic influence on their composition, even if the extent to which he wrote the actual words, in the texts' final published form, can be disputed