‘Not One Thing Exactly’: Gender, Performance and Critical Debates over the Early Modern Boy‐Actress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Coined by Harley Granville Barker, the term ‘boy‐actress’ describes young male actors, probably aged between 10 and 22 years, who appeared in women's roles on the early modern stage of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. These boys, their techniques, and their cultural meanings have recently become the subjects of heated critical debate. In our time as in their own, the impact of their onstage cross‐dressing on their gender identities and on the sexual desires of their spectators has proved particularly controversial. This essay outlines key early modern sources for our knowledge of the boy‐actress before considering the conflicting ways in which scholars have interpreted this evidence. Critical debates about the early modern boy‐actress may have as much to teach us about our own era's constructions of gender, sexuality and performance as about the realities of the Shakespearean stage.
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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 | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.076 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".