The Title-Page of The World Tossed at Tennis: A Portrait of a Jacobean Playing Company?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE title page of The World Tossed at Tennis, a masque performed by Prince Charles's Men in 1620 and published in the same year, features a woodcut depicting some of the characters (see Figure 1).1 R. A. Foakes has shown that the image represents a specific scene in the masque.2 However, the woodcut may be of further interest: the images of the characters may be intended as portraits of the actors who performed them. Only two of these actors can now be identified, but this playtext may be unique in being marketed with portraits of more than one of its performers. The first actor who can be identified is William Rowley. As the company's clown actor,3 Rowley would have played the role of Simplicity, who appears on the right-hand side of the image. The costume is that of a traditional stage clown,4 but the artist has taken the trouble to give the image at least one of Rowley's distinctive quirks. Rowley was fat,5 and although Simplicity's torso is not represented as remarkably large, his legs are noticeably plumper than those of the other characters. This indicates that the artist was trying to draw a recognizable image of Rowley, and suggests that Simplicity's other distinctive features (the short beard and the strangely closed eyes) may refer to other physical characteristics of Rowley.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.064 | 0.011 |
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".