“Or It Might Be You”: Audiences in and of T. S. Eliot's <i>Sweeney Agonistes</i><sup>1</sup>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article investigates T. S. Eliot's use of metatheatre in his first verse drama, Sweeney Agonistes (1932). In Sweeney, Eliot crafts a drama that enacts his theory about the nature of theatre, which he locates in theatre's fundamental but obscured roots in ritual practice. Eliot composed a play that not only embodied this dramatic theory but that also sought to teach his contemporary audience how to engage with a ritual form that required heightened participation from spectators. As I argue, the characters Doris and, to a lesser extent, Dusty are both figures in the drama and an audience of it. They dramatize both the call to greater audience participation and the reluctance of the audience to do so. I also analyse the presentation of these metatheatrical cues in Rupert Doone's 1934 staging of Sweeney Agonistes and argue that Doone preserved Sweeney as metatheatre while also protecting the audience from the dramatic violence with which it is threatened in Eliot's script.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".