‘You see the times are dangerous’: The Political and Theatrical Situation of <em>The Humorous Magistrate</em> (1637)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The University of Calgary Library Special Collections holds an anonymous, untitled seventeenth-century dramatic manuscript, purchased in 1972 from antiquarian bookseller Edgar Osborne. In 2005 a U of C interdisciplinary research team began to investigate its provenance and learned that an earlier version of the same play, also in manuscript, untitled and anonymous is extant at Arbury Hall Warwickshire (though it had been given the title The Humorous Magistrate by a scholar investigating the drama-rich Arbury archives). An international collaborative research team, funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, is now investigating the provenance of this body of drama, with special attention to the satirical 'country comedy' The Humorous Magistrate. In this article, team members Mary Polito and Jean-Sébastien Windle argue that internal evidence in the manuscripts supports a date of composition after 1632 for the Arbury version and after 1640 for the revised version of the play represented in the Osborne document. They argue that the play is responding to tensions between the crown and country during the Personal Rule of Charles I and that the play is linked through setting, themes, and strikingly similar dialogue to the last play performed before the closing of the theatres in September 1642: Richard Brome’s A Jovial Crew.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.026 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".