The Newspaper “Trial” of Charles Macklin’s <i>Macbeth</i> and the Theatre as Juridical Public Sphere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Actor Charles Macklin’s 1773 production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth for Covent Garden Theatre manager George Colman sparked a news paper controversy over the actor’s appeal to his audience for the right to perform, even when that performance was not uni versally well received. Macklin staged a dramatic defence against bad reviews of his Macbeth in the London news papers, which, in turn, pre cipitated rioting in the theatre and Macklin’s sub sequent firing. The newspapers’ recordings of and reactions to this controversy over Macklin’s rights as an actor exploded into a larger print discussion of the rights of actors and audience members within the theatre that stressed the need for aristocratic, male representation and authority over women and their male “inferiors.” Macklin subsequently won a lawsuit against the actors who had been charged with barring him from his profession, a victory that reveals the sharp contrast between the British judicial system’s recognition of individual rights and how poorly those rights fared in the messy, subjective realm of the theatre’s class-and gender-informed “tastes.”
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
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".