"The Amusement World": Theatre as Social Practice in Eighteen-Nineties Toronto
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis places a selection of performances that took place in Toronto’s commercial theatres during the eighteen nineties in their historical context in order to consider determinants of meaning that influenced the social practice in one Canadian city - Toronto. These performances are selected to explore a range of performance activity across the decade and include: the debut performance by Canadian violinist Nora Clench at the Academy of Music in 1889; a fund-raising amateur “entertainment” The Marriage Dramas, performed for local adolescents at the Grand Opera House in 1892; The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, an example of the touring legitimate drama, performed by veteran acting couple the Kendals in 1894; another touring performance , in this instance a popular- theatre favorite, True Irish Hearts, by Dan McCarthy at the Toronto Opera House in 1893 and a rare example of Canadian playwriting from the decade, a performance of Catherine Nina Merritt’s United Empire Loyalist history play When George the Third was King in 1897. The analysis of all performances in this dissertation considers a range of determinants of meaning that Toronto audiences may have drawn upon when viewing a given performance and argues that the following constraints not only influenced the construction of a situated identity in Toronto but also suppressed domestic professional theatre production: a) a system of patronage that stigmatized the professional commercial theatre as frivolous or decadent; b) a utilitarian bias that was at odds with the post-materialist sensibilities of newer and more innovative forms of the late nineteenth-century drama; c) an economic and business practice that centralized production outside of the country to assure profit; and perhaps most significantly: d) a cultural hegemony that deemed Canadian drama to be immature and thus deterred works of aesthetic expression. This thesis is further informed by an understanding that history is written under the influence of the author’s own situated set of determinants and its goal in conducting an associative reading of Toronto’s nineties theatre practice is to locate theatre and performance history as part of a struggle among social, economic, cultural and political hierarchies.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 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".