Reappropriating the Pace-Egging Tradition: Ewan MacColl's <i>St. George and the Dragon</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Best known as a folk singer, Ewan MacColl wrote upwards of twenty plays; some of his most effective works are his adaptation plays, contemporary dramatic works using canonical playtexts as catalysts. In 1964–65 MacColl wrote a modernized version of the Lancastrian Pace-Egging Play, St. George and the Dragon. Taking this indigenous theatrical form, often associated with the industrial rather than rural landscape, MacColl wrote a play for and about the people, in a specific tradition of urban folk drama. By changing and modifying the traditional play, including new characters, and altering plot, the playwright was able to create a piece that specifically explores some of the key aspects of twentieth-century society. Furthermore, MacColl weaves in a highly politicized narrative thread that culminates in a call for revolutionary change. This unpublished play is a prime example of MacColl's “vandalism” of established forms. This article examines the play, presenting it as a key example of MacColl's experimental aesthetic, a way of appropriating techniques and narrative methods for a new audience, a new society, and a new political objective.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 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".