"Moving Graces": Forms of Religious Persuasion in Early Modern Drama
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How does one reach the hearts of others? This thesis situates the question in early modern England by investigating the activity of persuasion on the commercial stage, contending that, when plays sought to represent persuasion or be persuasive themselves, many of their tactics were borrowed from religious sources. The ongoing process of Reformation in England required an investment in persuasive methods for the purposes of religious education and conversion. Protestant reform may have instigated the persuasive practices, but the ensuing heterogeneity of belief enabled multiple confessional perspectives to compete for hearts and minds, creating a “culture of persuasion” that profoundly influenced early modern modes of communication, including dramatic ones. While religious conversion strategies could not be reproduced directly on the stage, I claim that playwrights made use of the form of such strategies. Overlaying these various forms with content relevant to the play, they capitalized on the persuasive meanings inherent in the forms without offending the censors or derailing the story. Chapter One begins with an investigation into the evangelical metrical psalms. I argue that the shape, sound and meaning of a musical psalm reverberates in a drinking song in The Shoemaker’s Holiday, evoking an exploration of the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the creation of community identity. In Chapter Two, the Duke’s interactions in the jail in Measure for Measure follow the same scripts as the private conferences associated with the Jesuits, prompting questions about the ethical limits of efficacious persuasion. Chapter Three explores the goodnight ballad, considering the appearance of one in Eastward Ho as central to the play’s ongoing negotiation between sincerity and satire. My historical formalist examination of theatrical appearances of now-unfamiliar forms of religious persuasion contributes to conversations about the operation of religious meaning on the stage and the role of the commercial theatre in a religious culture. When found in various theatrical guises on the stage, these forms retain their persuasiveness and act as dramatic agents of political, social, institutional and personal strategy, deployed both within the dramatic arc of the story and beyond to work on the emotions of the audience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".