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 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".