The media players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the idea of news
Bibliographic record
Abstract
I argue that the early modern theatre made a significant contribution to the development of a new, more complex, idea of news that began to take root in the early seventeenth century. Unlike other means of representing current events, theatrical discourse did not present itself as true—it depended for effect on a knowing disengagement from reality, an implicit awareness that Burbage was not really Richard III and the Globe theatre was not really Bosworth Field. Compounding this formal barrier to reality, dramatists of the period typically approached topical concerns from an oblique angle, or from behind the guise of a sophisticated conceit, thus making the connection to news a matter of imaginative interpretation, or play. Paradoxically, however, such techniques did not fence the theatre off from news culture but in fact made it a unique space where formative thinking about the news could flourish, a space where the concept of news could become manifest from an elucidating distance and could accrue value in an emotionally and intellectually resonant register. Chapter One offers a parallel history of theatre and news and then moves to a discussion of how both forms contributed to a shift in early modern publicity. In the three chapters that follow, this historical and theoretical framework is applied to readings of The Winter's Tale (Shakespeare), A Game at Chess (Middleton), and The Staple of News (Jonson). Overall, the analysis shows how the theatre of Shakespeare, Middleton, and Jonson enriched news culture by providing a forum where a rigorous, but playful, re-thinking of news could develop—thereby opening up new opportunities for participation in public life.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".