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Record W4323529333 · doi:10.1093/escrit/cgad007

Kisses and Comedy in <i>Astrophil and Stella</i>

2022· article· en· W4323529333 on OpenAlex
John Leonard

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueEssays in Criticism · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicContemporary Literature and Criticism
Canadian institutionsWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsKISS (TNC)STELLA (programming language)SonnetSanderArt historyLiteratureArt

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

HOW MANY KISSES HAPPEN in Astrophil and Stella? I have always assumed that there is just one, in the Second Song. Astrophil kisses Stella while she is asleep, then flees when she awakes. The Second Song is followed by a group of sonnets that exult over the stolen kiss and fantasise about consensual kisses that might follow, but these other kisses remain fantasy. Stella never kisses Astrophil of her own free will. That at least has been my inference, reinforced by generations of critics who have referred to ‘the kiss’ (singular). So far as I am aware, no one has elaborated a case for there being just one kiss, but until now no one has felt the need to. William Ringler, in his magisterial 1962 edition, had no doubt that the Second Song ‘describes the stealing of the kiss which is celebrated in sonnets 73, 74, and 79-82’.1 Ann Howe, writing two years after Ringler, agreed that ‘the succeeding sonnets celebrate’ ‘the kiss’.2 This assumption was still unquestioned in 2012, when Margaret Simon thought it obvious that the Second Song is followed by ‘a cluster of baiser sonnets … that celebrate the kiss that has alienated Stella’.3 But one year after Simon wrote those words, Melissa E. Sanchez published an important essay that took a different view. Where previous critics had referred the baiser sonnets back to the stolen kiss, Sanchez sees a cluster of new kisses that are both consensual and intimate: ‘Stella not only eschews the role of victim, but also kisses Astrophil of her own accord in sonnets 80 through 82. And, as James J. Scanlon observes with horror, these are not chaste pecks but passionate “ tongue kisses”’.4 In her 2019 book Queer Faith, Sanchez reaffirms her view that Stella gives Astrophil ‘several … passionate “tongue kisses”’, and again names Scanlon in support of this reading, though she now downgrades his ‘horror’ to ‘distaste’.5 She does not share Scanlon’s ‘distaste’ (let alone ‘horror’). Her whole point is to put in a good word for sexual desire – both Astrophil’s and Stella’s. Where previous critics had seen Stella as a virtuous ice queen, Sanchez sees her as a flesh-and-blood woman with needs of her own, trapped (like her real-life counterpart, Lady Penelope Rich) in an unhappy marriage that makes her susceptible to temptation.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.884
Threshold uncertainty score0.836

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.016
GPT teacher head0.210
Teacher spread0.194 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it