Deconstructing the "Fourth Wall": Metatheatricality in Plautus' Miles Gloriosus and Osofisan's Tegonni
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Roman theatrical tradition owes a great deal to the spirit of Greek theatre in antiquity, particularly as pioneered by Menander in New Comedy. The reception and subsequent reputation of the Greek theatrical convention among Plautus’ audience, has recently been attributed to his skilful re-theatricalisation of the alien drama through the use of what scholars have variously identified as metatheatre, -the self-referentiality of drama. The use of this technique has called attention to the highly metafictional world of Plautine drama and in this case, his Miles Gloriosus, which has also been emphasized as metatheatrical. The contemporary Nigerian theatre practitioner/playwright, Femi Osofisan, has also shown metatheatrical moments in his works. Osofisan’s Tegonni, has betrayed a reception of such metatheatricality as identified in Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus. But beyond hosting own critique, both plays portray an undercurrent of events privileging a socio-cultural hermeneutics, whose currency subsists even in contemporary climes. The paper examines the reception of Plautine metatheatrical techniques and its attendant socio-cultural interpretations in Miles Gloriosus, and in post-colonial Nigerian drama through a reading of Femi Osofisan’s Tegonni, an African Antigone.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".