Blasphemy in John Osborne's <i>A Subject of Scandal and Concern</i> and <i>Luther</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
John Osborne's early plays, A Subject of Scandal and Concern and Luther, emerged out of the author's anti-nuclear activism and his anger regarding the role of Britain's political leaders in the escalation of Cold-War tensions that led to the Berlin Crisis of 1961. An effort to examine and redefine blasphemy in personal terms led Osborne to dramatize the trials of two historical figures – George Holyoake and Luther – whose conscientious objections against orthodox belief led to their being put on trial for blasphemy. These plays suggest that Osborne came to view blasphemy as a form of hurtful speech (blasphemia) used by Church and State to silence and punish those who speak out conscientiously against orthodox religious belief. The manner in which Osborne dramatizes the unhappy domestic lives of Holyoake and Luther, read in the context of the playwright's own troubled relationships, suggests that he recognized that the crime of blasphemy also resulted when personal conviction or conscientious action brought suffering upon friends and family. Despite electing to dramatize historical cases of blasphemy, Osborne wanted his audiences to recognize that both the charge and offence of blasphemy and submission to orthodox viewpoints had very dangerous consequences in the Cold-War era.
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.000 | 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".