Playing ‘Polly’: The Aesthetic Influence of Eighteenth-Century Actress Lavinia Fenton
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For centuries, critics have viewed Polly Peachum as the moral centre of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). Actress Lavinia Fenton’s (1708-1760) influence on interpretations of Polly’s character may be tracked in eighteenth-century sources and continues to be discussed in contemporary criticism. Common across these discussions is the suggestion that Fenton’s performance embodied an innocent Polly possessed with moral virtue. This thesis argues that the misreading of Polly is largely owing to critics’ projection of aspects of Lavinia Fenton’s offstage experience onto Polly, and that this interweaving has had the effect of limiting our view of the actress, the character she made famous, and the creative agency it took to create the relationship between them. Rather than accepting and reiterating this outdated contextual frame, this thesis rereads several of Polly’s airs in The Beggar’s Opera as well as eighteenth-century accounts of Lavinia Fenton’s stage presence as preserved in reviews, ‘Polly’ fanfictions, and ‘Polly’s’ costume, to argue that it is more critically interesting, and more accurate, to focus on the pragmatic duplicity of these figures. Doing so sheds light on Fenton's significant literary and cultural contributions to The Beggar's Opera by establishing her investments in a campy performance style. This thesis also models a strategy for performance history that entails reading between the lines of historical sources in order to recreate the actions and motives they describe without the bias of sexism.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".