Theatre and/as Witchcraft: A Reading of <em>The Late Lancashire Witches</em> (1634)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Richard Brome and Thomas Heywood's The Late Lancashire Witches (1634) is a journalistic play so clearly inspired by judicial records of the contemporary trial that it has been characterized as a commission from the privy council, destined to further the case of the prosecution — but opinions diverge as to the authors’ obedience to or challenge of political authority. This close reading re-examines the ambiguous subversiveness of the play, highlights the pervasive destabilization of patriarchal authority, and shows how by equating witchcraft with theatre the play may expose the fictitious bases of the trial. On the other hand, the reciprocal notion that theatre is witchcraft epitomizes the playwrights’ exploitation and promotion of the public theatre’s resources.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".