Arden of Faversham , presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford on Avon, June to October, 2014
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Directed by Polly Findlay. With Sharon Small (Alice Arden), Ian Redford (Arden), Keir Charles (Mosby), Elspeth Brodie (Susan), Geoffrey Freshwater (Franklin), Ian Bonar (Michael), Christopher Middleton (Clarke), Jay Simpson (Will), Tony Jayawardena (Shakebag), Joe Bannister (Lord Cheyne).The title of this anonymous play, published in its first Quarto edition in 1592, unequivocally refers to the man whose scandalous murder is its main event. Structurally, however, the central figure is his wife. She it is who wants his death so that she can have unlimited access to his wealth; she it is who plans the murder with her lover Mosby; and she it is who eventually succeeds, only to experience remorse when she realizes the gravity of her crime. So much is she the central figure of the play that the Royal Shakespeare Company included it in its season of plays for the Swan Theatre in 2014 entitled 'Roaring Girls', four plays with 'powerful, fascinating women at their heart',1 which also included The Roaring Girl, The Witch of Edmonton and The White Devil.The production at the Swan updated the story to the present and made vulgarity the dominant note of its modern dress approach. In the original play, Arden is a greedy landlord profiting from the chance to own land after the dissolution of the monasteries. The play turns on the way land has become a commodity, and Arden deprives several people of their living by appropriating their land. In the production, all that survived of that realistic representation of Elizabethan middle-class life was the world of commodity (the printed programme contained a discourse on the subject, quoting Marx). Arden (Ian Redford) was a businessman selling tacky imported Japanese cats as good luck charms, items you might find in Poundland. These grotesque figures actually waved their paws in what came to seem an 'I'm gonna get you' gesture, and the play ended with a back wall of them waving collectively in a gothic horror of retribution. Everything in this world was cheap and fake and changeable, much like the marriage vows of fickle Alice (Sharon Small in a vulgar short skirt and suburban attitude), and the bling that marked her lover, Mosby (Keir Charles as an upwardly mobile, streetwise and thuggish charmer).The cats represented a world of celebrity and commodity culture where all is cheap fantasy. They suggested the world of the reality TV show The Apprentice, where what counts - all that counts - is self-presentation: Arden had become Alan Sugar (or Donald Trump in the US version). Ian Redford captured the cruelty and greed of that kind of ruthless businessman who thoroughly deserves what he gets, but the complications of the character, especially his oddly passive devotion to his wife in spite of her dalliance with Mosby, got rather lost. At the end, though, real morality somewhat oddly broke through and we heard of the Elizabethan cruelty of burning traitors and witches at the stake.The programme included a long disquisition on 'Femininity Disturbed' which reviewed the cases of modern women who commit murder, including Myra Hindley, Rose West, Joanna Dennehy and Amanda Knox. The murdering Alice of this production did not, fortunately, evoke any of those parallels, except in that she certainly had power over the men in her life: she was able as in the text of the original play, to allay her husband's suspicions about her affair with Mosby several times, even when he hears her uttering his name in her sleep - thinking quickly she first says ''Tis like I was asleep when I named him / For being awake he comes not in my thoughts' (1.67-68).2 Her husband then tells her she started up and instead of him, 'caught me about the neck' (70), but she manages to make him think that since he was the only one there, the hug was meant for him, and that in any case it was only a dream. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".