What check can an agent run at each beat to decide what the audience knows and whether it should know it, using Archer's 1912 reasoning on secrecy and dramatic irony?
Synthesis from Archer's chapters XVII and IX (1912 stage practice). Archer's irony thesis (ch. IX) says the audience's lasting pleasure lies in knowing what characters do not (the screen scene in Sheridan's play); withholding removes that irony (ch. XVII). His ch. XVII cases yield per-beat checks: for every fact, record who knows it (audience, each character) and run five questions on each withheld row: is the reveal worth waiting for, can the character's ignorance be kept without the audience's, would one short exchange give the audience the fact and what irony would that add, is the delay short and ended by a placed slip, and is an unpaid promise tolerable in this genre. A separate pass checks that the beat reads both to a viewer who knows nothing outside the play and to one who knows the twist. A proviso from ch. IX: irony needs plausible action and characters worth caring about. Archer gives no scoring method; the ledger and its questions are the worker's proposal, not his.
Structured fields
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- [sourced_fact] Synthesis from Archer's chapters XVII and IX (1912 stage practice). Archer's irony thesis (ch. IX) says the audience's lasting pleasure lies in knowing what characters do not (the screen scene in Sheridan's play); withholding removes that irony (ch. XVII). His ch. XVII cases yield per-beat checks: for every fact, record who knows it (audience, each character) and run five questions on each withheld row: is the reveal worth waiting for, can the character's ignorance be kept without the audience's, would one short exchange give the audience the fact and what irony would that add, is the delay short and ended by a placed slip, and is an unpaid promise tolerable in this genre. A separate pass checks that the beat reads both to a viewer who knows nothing outside the play and to one who knows the twist. A proviso from ch. IX: irony needs plausible action and characters worth caring about. Archer gives no scoring method; the ledger and its questions are the worker's proposal, not his. · locator: candidate evidence excerpts source
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