'An honest dog yet': Performing <em>The Witch of Edmonton</em>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The demonic Dog who binds together the three major plots of Dekker, Ford, and Rowley’s 1621 domestic tragedy The Witch of Edmonton tends to be a favourite with theatrical audiences. Critics who read the play as an example of early modern domestic realism often view him with more ambivalence. This essay examines the Dog’s fortunes both on the modern stage and within his original performance context in order to argue that he exemplifies, rather than compromises, the play’s complex and sophisticated approach to the mimesis of everyday life. It explores the ways in which the early modern theatre might have represented the Dog, the town he invades, and the Morris Dance at which he fiddles while the town burns, and considers the haunting impact these representations might have had on early modern spectators steeped in demonology. A recent production of The Witch of Edmonton at Dalhousie University shows one way in which similar effects can be achieved on the modern, post-Stanislavskian stage. The Witch of Edmonton’s intricate performative theology, in which the supernatural is a vital part of the quotidian and real demons peek from behind overtly artificial masks, retains its vitality in contemporary performance.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
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".