Clown Shows: Anti-Theatricalist Theatricalism in Four Twentieth-Century Plays
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metatheatre is an old practice but a comparatively recent critical interest. It attained momentum among cri tics in the early 1960s, stirred partly by Lionel Abel's brief essays in Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form. Abel claimed that a new dramatic "form" had arisen in the English renaissance and the Spanish Golden Age. "[T]ragedy would be replaced by metatheatre" in the theatres of Shakespeare and Calderon, Abel argued, after whom extended a lineage that stretched to Pirandello, Genet, Brecht, and Beckett. These plays had not been recognized as a distinct form, Abel said, and had no name: "I shall presume to designate them. I call them metaplays, works of metatheatre". Though the study of Shakespeare's metadrama, along with its upper-caste cousin, the dream play, has had a robust critical career, beginning even before Abel's large claim and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s, there has been little continuing effort to work out a general theory of metatheatrical dramatic form or to trace its development over time as a unified field. An exception is Richard Hornby's essay "Varieties of the Metadramatic"; Homby's primary interest here, however, is less critical than taxonomic.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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; 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".