A Comedian on Tragedy: Colley Cibber’s <i>Apology</i> and <i>The Rival Queans</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While eighteenth-century actor and theatre manager Colley Cibber is most frequently discussed within the context of sentimental comedy, this article addresses the comedian’s writing for and about the tragic stage. The neoclassical establishment consistently argued for the propriety of tragedy; however, actor and manager Cibber in his 1740 autobiography makes a case for the ludic qualities of successful tragic performance which, he insists, produces pleasure not tied to moral improvement. Moreover, Cibber embraces, rather than bemoans, the destabilization of social hierarchies that attends confessed generic hybridity. In an analysis of the comic burlesque The Rival Queans, a parody of Nathaniel Lee’s earlier tragedy The Rival Queens, I show how Cibber’s tragic stage was less concerned with categories of masculinity and femininity than in the sheer fluidity of gender. Experimenting with gender and genre in light of the period’s changing notions of sexual difference, the comedian revalues mixed genres and gender confusion as a site of illicit pleasure, providing an affective yet ephemeral other against which tragedy’s formidable narratives about gender and nation took shape.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".