Bernard Shaw’s Cruise Tale: Village Wooing Decoded by Large Language Models

Poster Session
Kay Li  

This poster shows analyses by large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, of Bernard Shaw ‘s play Village Wooing (1933) when he was on a world cruise on board the Empress of Britain, finishing the play at the Sunda Strait on 27th January 1933. The LLMs pinpoint how the play provides not just the cruise experience never found in Shaw’s plays, but is also a serious contemplation on migration, resilience, and cultural hybridity unleashed by the cruise journey on the eve of World War II. A study of the neural networks reveals that the cruise ship setting mirrors the Empress of Britain, the largest, fastest and most luxurious ship sailing between the United Kingdom and Canada at that time. The LLMs show that the upper-class man and the working-class woman both experience boredom and paralysis of creativity barring them from purpose and action. LLMs trained by prompt engineering focusing on migration, resilience, and cultural hybridity. While an untrained LLM only detects the courtship between the female protagonist, a lower-class rural telephone operator, and the male protagonist, an upper-class writer, a LLM trained by prompt engineering uncovers a reverse migration of the listless upper-class to the common sense of the lower-class. It shows the resilience of the latter redeeming the boredom of the upper-class with a vigorous work ethics and Shavian vitality. The courtship symbolizes a need for cultural hybridity that rejuvenates and rekindles creativity to restore hope and purpose to confront the looming world war.