Bibliographic record
Abstract
The study focuses on the social, literary, and psychological significance of the brother-sister relationship to a broad range of Renaissance tragedy and tragicomedy. After a brief historical analysis of siblings, the thesis considers the brother-sister relationship as an important means for dramatists to explore questions of identity, of gender conflict, and of differing understandings of family. It also examines the relationship as a developing literary tradition in the drama of the Stuart period, a tradition which culminates in the works of John Ford. The first half of the study surveys a large range of non-Shakespearean revenge tragedy and tragicomedy. In revenge tragedy, violent brother-sister strife serves as a symbol of the self in turmoil, as an image of a disordered family and society, and as a focal point for tension over the nature of women. Brothers also subvert traditional family roles in their relationships with their sisters. The avenging brother and sister, joined in shared loyalty to their house, mount a legitimate challenge to the authority of husband and king; pandar brothers become diabolical inversions of father and husband. Proceeding to tragicomedy, the thesis analyzes the brother as a figure of illegitimate authority and considers the privileged position gained by royal sisters, whose noble blood renders them the equal of their brothers. The latter half of the dissertation reinterprets the plays of John Webster and John Ford. In The Duchess of Malfi, the royal siblings' similarity, close blood tie, and high rank overturn gender difference and affirm the intimate connection between the sexes. The study considers the importance of blood family to the Duchess' self-conception and examines Ferdinand's attempts to create identity by usurping the place of his sister's husband. Ford's two plays 'Tis Pity She's A Whore and The Fancies Chaste and Noble stand as the culmination of dramatic treatments of idealized and antagonistic brother-sister relationships alike. Both works contrast the opposing nature of physical and familial love and elevate asexual love above sexual passion, presenting a sibling tie which undermines the bond between husband and wife.
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 | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".