Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay considers consider four of James Austen’s early prologues and epilogues (written for family theatricals between the ages of seventeen and twenty-two) in terms of his engagement with debates both ancient and early modern over the nature of drama and the place of spectacle. More specifically, these paratexts document his ongoing concern with theorizing the ideal theatre: one in which the things of the stage serve their proper role. The discourse of antitheatricality has long associated theatrical performance with such unvirtuous qualities as artifice, dishonesty, and deception, and in his "Prologue to the Tragedy of Matilda" (1782), Austen associates the concrete objects of the stage with all that should be feared and devalued: pure, ancient theatre has been degraded by such things as the “scene gay painted” and the “canvas Palace” (8, l. 3, 5). In his "Prologue to The Rivals" (1784), by contrast, the things that signify theatrical artifice—the mask, the painted scene—are only metaphorical and thus innocuous. By 1788 Austen comes to see theatrical performance as a sign of English virtue, associated with the Restoration when “Charles, & loyalty & wit returned” (“Prologue to The Wonder,” 1788, l. 40) and reframes the "things" of the stage as objects made sacred by tradition and, specifically by association with the Christmas season.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".