Pulcinella’s Mouthfuls: The pulcinellate of Carlo Sigismondo Capece and the Language of Otherness
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Carlo Sigismondo Capece, a member of the classicizing Arcadian Academy in Rome, was among the most influential librettists of ‘Arcadian’ opera in the 1710s and 1720s. He also wrote dozens of pulcinellate, or ‘Pulcinella plays.’ My article centers on these Pulcinella comedies. Capece’s Pulcinella, as part of a Plautine lineage of food-obsessed parasites, consistently fumbles foreign words and recasts them in culinary terms. I argue that Capece deploys the Neapolitan zanni as a marker of linguistic difference, pointing to the misunderstandings and language barriers that, in Arcadian terms, defined the city and its vulgar populace. By exploring the role of a commedia dell’arte character in academic circles in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, I tease out the connectivity between popular and elite traditions during the Baroque period, and locate strangeness in the language between them.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".