Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: In 1823, Richard Brinsley Peake, a forgotten “hack” playwright, adapted Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the melodramatic stage and produced the image of the monster that has dominated since. Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein and its lead actor, T.P. Cooke, introduced the convention of playing Shelley’s creature as an inarticulate beast. The few scholarly works on Presumption accuse Peake of merely silencing and thereby dehumanizing Shelley’s expressive creation. Yet the production radically reinterpreted the monster by way of the most sympathetic and articulate role of the melodramatic stage: the voiceless but virtuous mute. “Frankenstein and the Mute Figure of Melodrama” traces the way Presumption appropriates and adapts the conventions of melodramatic muteness. It shows how Peake physically constructed Shelley’s monster as both victim and villain, juxtaposing the creature’s innocence, expressed in mute gesture, with the inhumanity conveyed by Cooke’s makeup and costume, thus compelling nineteenth-century theatregoers to locate both within a single character. Such a conclusion suggests not only a radical re-evaluation of Peake’s engagement with Shelley: it implies as well a revised and much richer history, even at this early date, of the valence and operations of melodramatic muteness as well as the ostensible moral legibility of melodramatic drama.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".