‘Animal Spirits are Everything!’: Robinson Crusoe Pantomimes and the Child of Nostalgia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The song ‘ Robinson Crusoe ’ began appearing quite regularly in such popular print media as garland chapbooks and broadsheets at about the same time that Crusoe began appearing on the popular stage. Indeed so reliable a source as Iona and Peter Opie suggest, as noted in Chapter 3, the song and the stage show have a shared history. Robinson Crusoe made his theatrical debut in a Richard Sheridan pantomime first performed at the Theatre Royal in 1781, which quickly became one of the most regularly-staged afterpieces of the late eighteenth century. 1 Taking the stage after the evening’s main drama or comedy, Robinson Crusoe was a musically-accompanied dumb-show with elaborate set designs depicting the novel’s principal events and ending with pantomime’s conventional ‘transformation scene’ and harlequinade. In the words of the author of a contemporary account of the performance: ‘ Friday , being invested with the powers of Harlequin, after many fanciful bistresses [ sic ], and the usual pantomimical revolutions, receives the final reward in the hand of Columbine’ ( A Short Account 20). Striking, perhaps, to modern readers of Defoe’s novel is the fact that Friday, rather than the protagonist Crusoe, should be transformed into the pantomime hero Harlequin. More striking, to those familiar with its twentieth-century critical reception, is that the work Ian Watt identified as setting the novelistic standards for ‘formal realism’ and as capturing the modern sensibility of individualism should be recast into a form whose conventions were already so standardized and familiar that they could be sufficiently captured for late eighteenth-century readers with the phrase ‘usual pantomimical revolutions.’ 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".