Book Review: Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson (eds.). <em>Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama</em>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
difficult questions regarding continuity and consistency within them remain, and it would be valuable to take account of these questions.The study might also have been strengthened by further shifts in emphases.For example, Cox underestimates the political concerns of John Heywood, whose plays are intimately related to the public events of the early 1530s, especially those surrounding the divorce.In Four PP, the Pardoner recounts a visit to hell, where he found the somewhat Henrican chief devil watching the souls play at 'racket ' (ll.881-8).The treatment of the Vice is also open to question.Cox does not always discriminate accurately between the stage convention commonly called 'the Vice' by theatrical practitioners and publishers for a period of about thirty years, and vices in general (often part of the Seven Deadly Sins, and lasting for much longer in the history of the early drama), though he is aware that there is a difference.The important thing for this study is that 'the Vice' was a stage convention, used for all sorts of practical staging necessities in a period when acting companies were small and players had to make the most of a key player whose professional skills had high entertainment value.He was usually so busy that it was impossible to double his part.If the devil did have an emotional impact, as I have suggested, the Vice invariably did not: his expressions of emotion are always comically insincere.For a time he must have been an indispensable element in the business of making a profit.In places the conduct of Cox's argument could also be tighter.For example the function of Fansy and Foly in Skelton's Magnyfycence is not addressed, and yet the play is considered as though devils were present.As an historical survey, however, this study has much in its favour.It is notably effective in showing the long-term continuity of the devil on the stage, especially by illuminating many manifestations in seventeenth-century plays.This aspect has not previously been treated in such detail, and as such it is a significant contribution, and one which will, one would hope, stimulate further investigation.
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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) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.074 | 0.077 |
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".