Staging Sociability in <i>The Excursion</i>: Frances Brooke, David Garrick, and the King’s Theatre Coterie
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While previous critics have classified Frances Brooke’s novel The Excursion (1777) as a moral tale aligned with either the sentimental or pastoral tradition, this article makes the case for interpreting The Excursion as a political satire directed against corrupt theatre politics. Reading the plot in the context of contemporary letters, periodicals, and theatrical miscellanies reveals a thick weave of topical allusions to the 1770s London stage and uncovers a buried homage to celebrity actress Mary Ann Yates, Brooke’s friend and business partner. Brooke leverages her novel to promote the interests of her theatrical circle and her own claim to be recognized as one of the great theatre managers of the day—specifically, as the equal to David Garrick. As a satire of theatre politics, The Excursion allows Brooke to map out a specific vision for what constitutes good acting, how the government should reform its theatre policy, and why accessible theatre is especially crucial for women, creative professionals, and audience members alike.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".