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Talk:Instructional technology

Untitled
Issue with definition/first citation: The citation points to a book that then attributes the definition to Seels and Richey, 1994. Not sure how this should be fixed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.235.248.10 (talk) 17:38, 4 July 2012 (UTC)

moved from main:

[Mike]Computer technology is largely ignored in public schools. To the teacher, computer technology is just one more subject, they largely do not understand and does not seem to provide any teaching benefits. It takes time away from the "normal" curriculum which is designed to cover the subjects the student must know to pass examinations. The idea of using the technology such as found in graphic games and convert the learning experience into a fun challenge is never mentioned. "Computer" is just one more subject that takes time away from more important subjects. Not surprisingly, Charter Schools and home schooling are more heavily interested in instructional technology. Imagine this: A battle against dragon and wizards is interrupted with a question and if the student gives the right answer, points are earned and the adventure continues, a wrong answer means the hero drops down into a cavern... It is all about earning points while fighting dragons. If the student gives the wrong answer, the Expert system picks the proper text to display and asks another question to try to clarify understanding of the question and the right answer and so on and so forth. With suitable database use, one game could be used for many topics structured in the same format. By changing the database a higher or a lower level could be taught with no change in the graphis or the software. It could be done.

Further, the data could be in CDs and students could carry the material home to do homework and study. Sick students, and those that must be away, could keep up by taking all the required CDs. All the textbooks should be replaced with CDs and students need only print the few pages that require special attention.

This seems POV and speculative. Evercat 20:13 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[MikeS]It is speculative, so unrealistic that little progress has been made in the Mecca of high technology: California. As noted, Charter schools and Home schooling with smart parents, are leading the field. But, how long will it take for other nations to figure out that they do not need to come to prestigious universities in the US? It is already a fact that students rejected by prestigious Universities in India, are eagerly accepted there. In short: Instructional Technology will allow any nation catch up with the latest technologies while Advanced Nations merely try to save teaching jobs. Stay tuned, financing is the other obstacle. --[MikeS]

The definition of instructional technology given by this article is rather shallow and one-dimensional. You would do better to think of it as a process for solving learning and performance problems. For a more thorough and generally accepted definition seek out the Association for Educational Communications and Technology's work on the subject at http://www.aect-members.org/standards/knowledgebase.html

For a timeline of significant events in the history of field you should seek out http://www.ittheory.com/timelin2.htm. [swh, September, 2004]

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Agree with last poster - there are better definitions of the field that are not analyzing the pros and cons like the current page.

I'll disagree that most teachers in this day and age are down on technology for the reasons you suggest - computers are quickly becoming ubiquitous within public schools. I also don't think there is evidence that homeschoolers use computers any more (or better). However, we can debate that in a sub topic; don't think it works within the definition itself.

Educational Technology vs. Instructional Technology
Current entry is: Razavi(2005) advocate that educational technology cover instructional technology. It include instructional technology and the field study in human teaching and learning. So educational technology is broader than instructional technology. Instructional technology itself is consisted from two major parts. One is teaching technology and another is learning technology.

I am going to disagree with this on two counts:

1) The Razavi reference is to a Wikipedia entry that no longer exists. If this was Razavi's distinction, it can't be validated since his entry no longer exists.

2) I contend that he had it backwards - Ed Tech is a subset of Instructional Tech. Instructional Technology goes beyond the context of educational arenas such as schools, to include corporate training. In fact, many probably would argue that Instructional Technology is itself a subset of Human Performance Technology - but that's a different discussion.

I suggest we strike the above entry in question - how do others feel?

 * IMO, any attempt to separate these terms is a semantic dichotomy that's not even wrong. In other words, your overall premise is 110% correct. Further, while I find your contention (2) makes deductive vocabulary sense (to me), and I'd maybe think of steering to that harbor if the ocean demanded respect, it's actually uncited WP:OR. So I wouldn't try to rescue this bullshit bingo upside down backwards straw dog. Edits underway. FeatherPluma (talk) 20:01, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

Prominent Figures in Instructional Technology
Could we please list why these people are prominent? What are their specific contributions? (Teryx 23:44, 26 April 2006 (UTC))

Educational Technology vs Instructional Technology
I advocate expanding instructional technology to the field of education. By concentrating on the word instructional we do not effectively communicate to the uninformed that our field goes beyond just a few new tricks for teaching. We are about using all of the resources of educational theory and practice in developing and applying internet and computer technologies. By using this word we can enhance our status and gain more respect with educators.

Har4410 (talk) 00:03, 10 November 2008 (UTC)Technology in the classroom an Educators standpoint I agree with expanding instructional technology to the field of education as long as the educators are fully trained and willing to use the technology. Teachers with computer experience are already using the technology available within their reach. There are so many teachers in the education system, that are not comfortable with technology, that pushing it into the curriculum will be impossible. Proper instruction for the teachers should be the first step.

Teaching machine
Eh? Teaching machine redirects here, where there is no mention either of "machine" or of B. F. Skinner? Jim.henderson (talk) 22:05, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Salary Source
The salary numbers are significantly higher than what's on salary.com and other industry salary surveys. A reliable source is needed to include any statistics for salaries.WeisheitSuchen (talk) 22:20, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Merger WITHOUT 30 day merge tag
I did not 30 day merge tag this article b/c there was no meat left at all  on the bones when I removed uncited content and content that was duplicative of other articles. This article even had a Refimprove tag from January 2008 i.e. over 6 years. I am following the other merge steps. FeatherPluma (talk) 21:36, 12 July 2014 (UTC)

title: Talk:Instructional technology


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Jonathan Frid

Jonathan Frid (December 2, 1924 – April 14, 2012) was a Canadian actor, best known for his role as vampire Barnabas Collins on the gothic television soap opera Dark Shadows. The introduction in 1967 of Frid's reluctant, guilt-ridden vampire caused the floundering daytime drama to soar to 20 million daily viewers. His watershed portrayal has been cited as a key influence on contemporary genre film and television series such as Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries.

Early life
Frid was born of Scottish and English ancestry in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. His birth name was John Herbert Frid. He was the youngest son of Isabel Flora (née McGregor) and Herbert Percival "H.P." Frid, a construction executive.

As a boy Frid had a natural shyness and struggled academically due to dyslexia, which was not properly understood at that time. His passion for acting began at the age of 16 when he appeared in a production of Sheridan's The Rivals at Hillfield School. The following year he joined the local community theatre, The Players' Guild of Hamilton. The theatre's leading director, American actress Gladys Gillan recognized and encouraged the young man's talent.

Frid's first years of study at McMaster University in Hamilton were interrupted when in 1944 he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II. He was a radar specialist on a battleship. When the war ended, he returned to McMaster to complete his undergraduate degree. During the second half of his tenure he was President of the Drama Club, received accolades for his performances in The Royal Family and The Barretts of Wimpole Street, and graduated in 1948 with the university's Honor Society Award for Drama.

Professional training and career
In 1949 Frid was accepted at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After two terms, Frid left and became a leading actor in repertory in Cornwall and Kent for two seasons and toured the country in the West End thriller, The Third Visitor. Returning to Canada he ventured to Toronto where he became a featured player for three consecutive seasons in the Toronto Shakespeare Festival, produced and directed by Earle Grey. He studied voice at the Lorne Greene Academy of Radio Arts, and in 1952 appeared in Crime of Passion at the Jupiter Theatre founded by Greene. He applied his training to radio spots and a few appearances on television for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, including an unusual role as a native in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

In the Fall of 1954 Frid became a graduate student at the Yale School of Drama in New Haven, Connecticut. He would earn his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Directing, however as one of the most experienced actors in the school, Frid was continually in demand for acting roles in mainstage and student productions including Caesar in Caesar and Cleopatra, and starring in the premiere of William Snyder's play A True and Special Friend.

In the summer of 1955 fresh from completing the first year of his Master's program, Frid was chosen by Director Nikos Psacharopoulos to play a pivotal role in the inaugural season of the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Frid performed leading roles in six of the ten productions including The Crucible, Time of the Cuckoo, Light up the Sky, and The Rainmaker opposite leading lady Cynthia Harris.

After receiving high praise in his second year at Yale for his portrayal of Tullus Aufidius in Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Frid was invited to join the American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. For two consecutive summer seasons, under the direction of John Houseman, Frid performed with such distinguished actors as Alfred Drake, Earle Hyman, Fritz Weaver, Sada Thompson, and Katharine Hepburn.

After earning his MFA in 1957, Frid joined Hepburn and other members of the American Shakespeare Festival on a national tour of Much Ado About Nothing. When the tour concluded Frid moved to New York City, where he made his off-Broadway debut in The Golem directed by Robert Kalfin. In 1961 he began using the stage name Jonathan Frid, first seen in the program for The Moon in The Yellow River. He continued to appear in many off-Broadway productions and in regional theatres across the United States. Among them were Front Street Theater in Memphis; Pittsburgh Playhouse; and the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. His most celebrated Shakespearean performance was the title role of Richard III at the 1965 Summer Festival of Professional Theatre at Pennsylvania State University.

Frid made his Broadway debut as an understudy, and appeared, in the 1964 play Roar Like a Dove, directed by Cyril Ritchard and starring Betsy Palmer.

Television
Frid's United States television appearances began in 1960 with his role as the Earl of Worcester in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I as part of Play of the Week. This was followed by an episode of CBS-TV's Look Up and Live, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and several episodes as a psychiatrist on the CBS-TV soap opera As The World Turns. Frid is widely known for the role of vampire Barnabas Collins in the original gothic serial Dark Shadows, which ran from 1966 to 1971.

In early March 1967 Frid was arriving at his Manhattan apartment following the completion of a National Tour of Hostile Witness with Ray Milland when he received the phone call from his agent that would change his life: a request to audition for a 13-week role as a vampire. Although planning to move to the West Coast to pursue a teaching position at a Southern California university, Frid appeased his agent by auditioning for the role that, if he got the part, would help finance his move west. He won the role of Barnabas Collins, a vampire released from a chained coffin after 175 years, on the gothic daytime serial Dark Shadows. Before taping began the producers asked the actor and the writers, including Ron Sproat, a fellow Yale alumnus, to discuss the character's development. Collaborating with the writers, Frid explained that when he played villains he invested them with an emotional life. The result was a new interpretation of a vampire: a monster depending upon blood to survive yet fighting to regain his humanity. Frid's compelling portrayal of the sympathetic vampire was so popular with audiences that his short-term contract stretched into four years and Frid scrapped his plans to move to the West Coast.

Frid appeared on The Merv Griffin Show, The Mike Douglas Show, The Dick Cavett Show, and The Tonight Show, and was even a special mystery guest on What's My Line? The iconic image of Frid as Barnabas Collins adorned comic books, paperback gothic novels, bubble gum cards and even a board game, complete with coffin. Screaming teenagers thronged to his personal appearances like he was one of the Beatles. The Dark Shadows ABC Studios in Manhattan became inundated with fan mail for Frid, at its peak reaching upwards of 5,000 letters per week.

In 1970 Dark Shadows became the first soap opera to be converted into a feature-length movie. Frid made his American feature film debut portraying his famous television character in MGM's House of Dark Shadows. While the movie script kept the same characters as the TV series, it was a bloodier, more violent story.

During the run of Dark Shadows, and particularly with the release of House of Dark Shadows, Frid was made aware of speculation he could be typecast. Both during and immediately after Dark Shadows, he worked to broaden his acting identity with theatre roles very different from television's Barnabas Collins. In 1969 he took a four-week hiatus from the show to star in the Frederick Knott play Dial M for Murder at the legendary The Little Theatre on the Square in Sullivan, Illinois.

With the announcement of the cancellation of Dark Shadows in March 1971, Frid returned to performing on stage with the role of Thomas Becket in the Off-Broadway play Murder in the Cathedral, followed by Harry Roat in Wait Until Dark at the Windmill Dinner Theaters in Fort Worth and Houston. In 1973, Frid performed a supporting role in the TV movie The Devil's Daughter starring Shelley Winters, and in 1974 starred in Oliver Stone's directorial debut, Seizure.

Frid found the role of Barnabas Collins to have many facets with a demanding range of emotions to play. Even so, the heavily promoted image of Barnabas baring his fangs left industry people, who may never have seen the show, with only a caricature of what he actually played. Frid became very conflicted about the commercial career his talent agency was offering. He did not want to become the modern-day version of Bela Lugosi, so he stepped away. For a few years he travelled, lived in Mexico for a while, and enjoyed quiet time out of the spotlight of fame.

Later career
Returning to New York, Frid began his journey back to the boards. In 1977 he accepted an invitation from Penn State College to appear in the role of Tony Cavendish in the comedy The Royal Family for their Professional Summer Series Festival. This was followed by his participation in stage readings of new plays. Enjoying the low-key, independent nature of this work, he searched for other outlets and discovered one from a very unexpected source.

Dark Shadows, which featured an undead character, was a show that refused to die. It was being shown in various markets around the country and internationally - the first soap opera ever to have been syndicated. Committed fans of the series were working to keep the show 'alive' through fan conventions and special events. Frid overcame his reluctance and appeared in 1982 at an event called Shadowcon VI in Los Angeles.

In addition to question-and-answer sessions Frid read poems and prose, and received an enthusiastic response from the fans. For a new fan event dubbed the Dark Shadows Festival, he created a special program entitled Genesis of Evil: Part I was cuttings from classic plays Frid had performed in his career; and Part II was poems and prose fans had written about Barnabas over the years.

In 1985 Frid was invited to do a fundraising television special by the New Jersey Network during which he performed Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart and a soliloquy from Richard III. Following the broadcast Jonathan met his business partner Mary O'Leary. Together they formed the theatrical production company Clunes Associates to develop a one-man show, inspired by Genesis of Evil. Jonathan Frid's Fools & Fiends had its debut at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island in October 1986.

Two months later, Frid succeeded Abe Vigoda, also a Dark Shadows alumnus, as Jonathan Brewster in the highly successful 1986–87 Broadway revival of Arsenic and Old Lace, Frid toured the country for almost a year with co-stars Jean Stapleton, Marion Ross, Larry Storch and Gary Sandy. After completing the tour of Arsenic and Old Lace, he completely focused on his one-man show Jonathan Frid's Fools & Fiends, eventually creating two more shows: Jonathan Frid's Fridiculousness and Jonathan Frid's Shakespearean Odyssey. Discovering that Reader's Theater was his favorite form of acting, he toured for the next eight years performing at numerous colleges, universities, libraries, performing arts centers and private events across the United States and some locations in Canada. While on campuses, he also conducted acting workshops with students and seminars on Shakespeare with educators, fulfilling his deep-rooted desire to teach.

In 1993 Frid welcomed an invitation from Georgia College and State University to direct The Lion in Winter. While Frid had been directing himself for years in his one-man shows, this was first time he would be directing a company of players since his days at Yale more than a quarter of a century earlier. He selected his former Dark Shadows colleague Marie Wallace to portray Eleanor of Aquitaine.

At the age of seventy, Frid moved back to Canada, where he bought his first house in Ancaster, Ontario. He was a regular visitor at the Royal Botanical Gardens (Ontario), became a member of the Richard III Society of Canada, and in 1997 was the Narrator in a production of Peter and the Wolf at the Central Presbyterian Church of Hamilton. From 1998 to 2002 under the banner of Charity Associates he occasionally performed his one-man shows for charities in Canada and the United States. In 2000, he starred as Father Tim Farley in the two-character play Mass Appeal, which enjoyed a successful, limited run in Hamilton and at the Stirling Festival Theatre in Stirling, Ontario.

In 2007 Frid returned, after more than a decade, to the Dark Shadows Festivals to celebrate the 40th anniversary of his first appearance as Barnabas Collins. Subsequently, he attended the annual festival for the next four years. In 2010 he returned to the role of Barnabas for the first time in thirty-nine years in Big Finish Productions' Dark Shadows audio drama The Night Whispers.

Along with former Dark Shadows castmates Lara Parker, David Selby, and Kathryn Leigh Scott, he spent three days at Pinewood Studios in June 2011 filming a cameo appearance as a guest in the "happening" scene for the 2012 Tim Burton Dark Shadows film, which became his final film appearance. The film's star Johnny Depp told the Los Angeles Times “Jonathan Frid was the reason I used to run home to watch Dark Shadows. His elegance and grace was an inspiration then and will continue to remain one. When I had the honor to finally meet him…he was elegant and magical as I had always imagined.”

Death and legacy
At his 1998 induction as a McMaster University Alumni Honoree, Frid said he wanted to be remembered for "creating illusion through body language and the spoken word".

Frid died at Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton, Ontario, of pneumonia and complications after a fall. While some sources at the time variously reported the date of his death as April 13 or April 14, Frid's relative, David Howitt, confirmed that Frid died in the early hours of April 14, 2012. Howitt added that while Friday the 13th "makes for good press...it's good to get it right".

Throughout his life Frid had always made himself available to support charities. He donated the bulk of his estate to the Hamilton Community Foundation, co-founded by his father H.P. Frid in 1954.

A biographical film Dark Shadows and Beyond – The Jonathan Frid Story was released in October 2021 by MPI Media Group. Film critic Dann Gire of the Daily Herald-Chicago wrote, "Dark Shadows and Beyond – The Jonathan Frid Story is directed with economy and panache by Mary O'Leary...Her biography of the popular actor evolves into a love letter for the performing arts, exemplified by a man whose devotion to his craft became the driving force in his life".

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Jonathan Frid


text:
Opinion poll

An opinion poll, often simply referred to as a survey or a poll (although strictly a poll is an actual election), is a human research survey of public opinion from a particular sample. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population by conducting a series of questions and then extrapolating generalities in ratio or within confidence intervals. A person who conducts polls is referred to as a pollster.

History
The first known example of an opinion poll was a tally of voter preferences reported by the Raleigh Star and North Carolina State Gazette and the Wilmington American Watchman and Delaware Advertiser prior to the 1824 presidential election, showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States Presidency. Since Jackson won the popular vote in that state and the national popular vote, such straw votes gradually became more popular, but they remained local, usually citywide phenomena.

In 1916, The Literary Digest embarked on a national survey (partly as a circulation-raising exercise) and correctly predicted Woodrow Wilson's election as president. Mailing out millions of postcards and simply counting the returns, The Literary Digest also correctly predicted the victories of Warren Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, Herbert Hoover in 1928, and Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.

Then, in 1936, its survey of 2.3 million voters suggested that Alf Landon would win the presidential election, but Roosevelt was instead re-elected by a landslide. George Gallup's research found that the error was mainly caused by participation bias; those who favored Landon were more enthusiastic about returning their postcards. Furthermore, the postcards were sent to a target audience who were more affluent than the American population as a whole, and therefore more likely to have Republican sympathies. At the same time, Gallup, Archibald Crossley and Elmo Roper conducted surveys that were far smaller but more scientifically based, and all three managed to correctly predict the result. The Literary Digest soon went out of business, while polling started to take off. Roper went on to correctly predict the two subsequent reelections of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Louis Harris had been in the field of public opinion since 1947 when he joined the Elmo Roper firm, then later became partner.

In September 1938, Jean Stoetzel, after having met Gallup, created IFOP, the Institut Français d'Opinion Publique, as the first European survey institute in Paris. Stoetzel started political polls in summer 1939 with the question "Why die for Danzig?", looking for popular support or dissent with this question asked by appeasement politician and future collaborationist Marcel Déat.

Gallup launched a subsidiary in the United Kingdom that was almost alone in correctly predicting Labour's victory in the 1945 general election: virtually all other commentators had expected a victory for the Conservative Party, led by wartime leader Winston Churchill. The Allied occupation powers helped to create survey institutes in all of the Western occupation zones of Germany in 1947 and 1948 to better steer denazification. By the 1950s, various types of polling had spread to most democracies.

Viewed from a long-term perspective, advertising had come under heavy pressure in the early 1930s. The Great Depression forced businesses to drastically cut back on their advertising spending. Layoffs and reductions were common at all agencies. The New Deal furthermore aggressively promoted consumerism, and minimized the value of (or need for) advertising. Historian Jackson Lears argues that "By the late 1930s, though, corporate advertisers had begun a successful counterattack against their critics." They rehabilitated the concept of consumer sovereignty by inventing scientific public opinion polls, and making it the centerpiece of their own market research, as well as the key to understanding politics. George Gallup, the vice president of Young and Rubicam, and numerous other advertising experts, led the way. Moving into the 1940s, the industry played a leading role in the ideological mobilization of the American people in fighting the Nazis and the Japanese in World War II. As part of that effort, they redefined the "American Way of Life" in terms of a commitment to free enterprise. "Advertisers", Lears concludes, "played a crucial hegemonic role in creating the consumer culture that dominated post-World War II American society."

Sample and polling methods
Opinion polls for many years were maintained through telecommunications or in person-to-person contact. Methods and techniques vary, though they are widely accepted in most areas. Over the years, technological innovations have also influenced survey methods such as the availability of electronic clipboards and Internet based polling. Verbal, ballot, and processed types can be conducted efficiently, contrasted with other types of surveys, systematics, and complicated matrices beyond previous orthodox procedures.

Opinion polling developed into popular applications through popular thought, although response rates for some surveys declined. Also, the following has also led to differentiating results: Some polling organizations, such as Angus Reid Public Opinion, YouGov, Find Out Now and Zogby use Internet surveys, where a sample is drawn from a large panel of volunteers, and the results are weighted to reflect the demographics of the population of interest. In contrast, popular web polls draw on whoever wishes to participate, rather than a scientific sample of the population, and are therefore not generally considered professional.

Recently, statistical learning methods have been proposed in order to exploit social media content (such as posts on the micro-blogging platform Twitter) for modelling and predicting voting intention polls.

Polls can be used in the public relations field as well. In the early 1920s, public relation experts described their work as a two-way street. Their job would be to present the misinterpreted interests of large institutions to public. They would also gauge the typically ignored interests of the public through polls.

Benchmark polls
A benchmark poll is generally the first poll taken in a campaign. It is often taken before a candidate announces their bid for office, but sometimes it happens immediately following that announcement after they have had some opportunity to raise funds. This is generally a short and simple survey of likely voters.

A benchmark poll serves a number of purposes for a campaign, whether it is a political campaign or some other type of campaign. First, it gives the candidate a picture of where they stand with the electorate before any campaigning takes place. If the poll is done prior to announcing for office the candidate may use the poll to decide whether or not they should even run for office. Secondly, it shows them where their weaknesses and strengths are in two main areas. The first is the electorate. A benchmark poll shows them what types of voters they are sure to win, those they are sure to lose, and everyone in-between these two extremes. This lets the campaign know which voters are persuadable so they can spend their limited resources in the most effective manner. Second, it can give them an idea of what messages, ideas, or slogans are the strongest with the electorate.

Brushfire polls
Brushfire polls are polls taken during the period between the benchmark poll and tracking polls. The number of brushfire polls taken by a campaign is determined by how competitive the race is and how much money the campaign has to spend. These polls usually focus on likely voters and the length of the survey varies on the number of messages being tested.

Brushfire polls are used for a number of purposes. First, it lets the candidate know if they have made any progress on the ballot, how much progress has been made, and in what demographics they have been making or losing ground. Secondly, it is a way for the campaign to test a variety of messages, both positive and negative, on themselves and their opponent(s). This lets the campaign know what messages work best with certain demographics and what messages should be avoided. Campaigns often use these polls to test possible attack messages that their opponent may use and potential responses to those attacks. The campaign can then spend some time preparing an effective response to any likely attacks. Thirdly, this kind of poll can be used by candidates or political parties to convince primary challengers to drop out of a race and support a stronger candidate.

Tracking polls
A tracking poll or rolling poll is a poll in which responses are obtained in a number of consecutive periods, for instance daily, and then results are calculated using a moving average of the responses that were gathered over a fixed number of the most recent periods, for example the past five days. In this example, the next calculated results will use data for five days counting backwards from the next day, namely the same data as before, but with the data from the next day included, and without the data from the sixth day before that day.

However, these polls are sometimes subject to dramatic fluctuations, and so political campaigns and candidates are cautious in analyzing their results. An example of a tracking poll that generated controversy over its accuracy, is one conducted during the 2000 U.S. presidential election, by the Gallup Organization. The results for one day showed Democratic candidate Al Gore with an eleven-point lead over Republican candidate George W. Bush. Then, a subsequent poll conducted just two days later showed Bush ahead of Gore by seven points. It was soon determined that the volatility of the results was at least in part due to an uneven distribution of Democratic and Republican affiliated voters in the samples. Though the Gallup Organization argued the volatility in the poll was a genuine representation of the electorate, other polling organizations took steps to reduce such wide variations in their results. One such step included manipulating the proportion of Democrats and Republicans in any given sample, but this method is subject to controversy.

Potential for inaccuracy
Over time, a number of theories and mechanisms have been offered to explain erroneous polling results. Some of these reflect errors on the part of the pollsters; many of them are statistical in nature. Others blame the respondents for not giving candid answers (e.g., the Bradley effect, the Shy Tory Factor); these can be more controversial.

Margin of error due to sampling
Polls based on samples of populations are subject to sampling error which reflects the effects of chance and uncertainty in the sampling process. Sampling polls rely on the law of large numbers to measure the opinions of the whole population based only on a subset, and for this purpose the absolute size of the sample is important, but the percentage of the whole population is not important (unless it happens to be close to the sample size). The possible difference between the sample and whole population is often expressed as a margin of error – usually defined as the radius of a 95% confidence interval for a particular statistic. One example is the percent of people who prefer product A versus product B. When a single, global margin of error is reported for a survey, it refers to the maximum margin of error for all reported percentages using the full sample from the survey. If the statistic is a percentage, this maximum margin of error can be calculated as the radius of the confidence interval for a reported percentage of 50%. Others suggest that a poll with a random sample of 1,000 people has margin of sampling error of ±3% for the estimated percentage of the whole population.

A 3% margin of error means that if the same procedure is used a large number of times, 95% of the time the true population average will be within the sample estimate plus or minus 3%. The margin of error can be reduced by using a larger sample, however if a pollster wishes to reduce the margin of error to 1% they would need a sample of around 10,000 people. In practice, pollsters need to balance the cost of a large sample against the reduction in sampling error and a sample size of around 500–1,000 is a typical compromise for political polls. (To get complete responses it may be necessary to include thousands of additional participators.)

Another way to reduce the margin of error is to rely on poll averages. This makes the assumption that the procedure is similar enough between many different polls and uses the sample size of each poll to create a polling average. Another source of error stems from faulty demographic models by pollsters who weigh their samples by particular variables such as party identification in an election. For example, if you assume that the breakdown of the US population by party identification has not changed since the previous presidential election, you may underestimate a victory or a defeat of a particular party candidate that saw a surge or decline in its party registration relative to the previous presidential election cycle.

A caution is that an estimate of a trend is subject to a larger error than an estimate of a level. This is because if one estimates the change, the difference between two numbers X and Y, then one has to contend with errors in both X and Y. A rough guide is that if the change in measurement falls outside the margin of error it is worth attention.

Nonresponse bias
Since some people do not answer calls from strangers, or refuse to answer the poll, poll samples may not be representative samples from a population due to a non-response bias. Response rates have been declining, and are down to about 10% in recent years. Because of this selection bias, the characteristics of those who agree to be interviewed may be markedly different from those who decline. That is, the actual sample is a biased version of the universe the pollster wants to analyze. In these cases, bias introduces new errors, one way or the other, that are in addition to errors caused by sample size. Error due to bias does not become smaller with larger sample sizes, because taking a larger sample size simply repeats the same mistake on a larger scale. If the people who refuse to answer, or are never reached, have the same characteristics as the people who do answer, then the final results should be unbiased. If the people who do not answer have different opinions then there is bias in the results. In terms of election polls, studies suggest that bias effects are small, but each polling firm has its own techniques for adjusting weights to minimize selection bias.

Response bias
Survey results may be affected by response bias, where the answers given by respondents do not reflect their true beliefs. This may be deliberately engineered by unscrupulous pollsters in order to generate a certain result or please their clients, but more often is a result of the detailed wording or ordering of questions (see below). Respondents may deliberately try to manipulate the outcome of a poll by e.g. advocating a more extreme position than they actually hold in order to boost their side of the argument or give rapid and ill-considered answers in order to hasten the end of their questioning. Respondents may also feel under social pressure not to give an unpopular answer. For example, respondents might be unwilling to admit to unpopular attitudes like racism or sexism, and thus polls might not reflect the true incidence of these attitudes in the population. In American political parlance, this phenomenon is often referred to as the Bradley effect. If the results of surveys are widely publicized this effect may be magnified – a phenomenon commonly referred to as the spiral of silence.

Use of the plurality voting system (select only one candidate) in a poll puts an unintentional bias into the poll, since people who favor more than one candidate cannot indicate this. The fact that they must choose only one candidate biases the poll, causing it to favor the candidate most different from the others while it disfavors candidates who are similar to other candidates. The plurality voting system also biases elections in the same way.

Some people responding may not understand the words being used, but may wish to avoid the embarrassment of admitting this, or the poll mechanism may not allow clarification, so they may make an arbitrary choice. Some percentage of people also answer whimsically or out of annoyance at being polled. This results in perhaps 4% of Americans reporting they have personally been decapitated.

Wording of questions
Among the factors that impact the results of Opinion Polls, are the wording and order of the questions being posed by the surveyor. Questions that intentionally affect a respondents answer are referred to as leading questions. Individuals and/or groups use these types of questions in surveys to elicit responses favorable to their interests.

For instance, the public is more likely to indicate support for a person who is described by the surveyor as one of the "leading candidates". This description is "leading" as it indicates a subtle bias for that candidate, since it implies that the others in the race are not serious contenders. Additionally, leading questions often contain, or lack, certain facts that can sway a respondent's answer. Argumentative Questions can also impact the outcome of a survey. These types of questions, depending on their nature, either positive or negative, influence respondents' answers to reflect the tone of the question(s) and generate a certain response or reaction, rather than gauge sentiment in an unbiased manner.

In opinion polling, there are also "loaded questions", otherwise known as "trick questions". This type of leading question may concern an uncomfortable or controversial issue, and/or automatically assume the subject of the question is related to the respondent(s) or that they are knowledgeable about it. Likewise, the questions are then worded in a way that limit the possible answers, typically to yes or no.

Another type of question that can produce inaccurate results are "Double-Negative Questions". These are more often the result of human error, rather than intentional manipulation. One such example is a survey done in 1992 by the Roper Organization, concerning the Holocaust. The question read "Does it seem possible or impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?" The confusing wording of this question led to inaccurate results which indicated that 22 percent of respondents believed it seemed possible the Holocaust might not have ever happened. When the question was reworded, significantly fewer respondents (only 1 percent) expressed that same sentiment.

Thus comparisons between polls often boil down to the wording of the question. On some issues, question wording can result in quite pronounced differences between surveys. This can also, however, be a result of legitimately conflicted feelings or evolving attitudes, rather than a poorly constructed survey.

A common technique to control for this bias is to rotate the order in which questions are asked. Many pollsters also split-sample. This involves having two different versions of a question, with each version presented to half the respondents.

The most effective controls, used by attitude researchers, are:

 * asking enough questions to allow all aspects of an issue to be covered and to control effects due to the form of the question (such as positive or negative wording), the adequacy of the number being established quantitatively with psychometric measures such as reliability coefficients, and
 * analyzing the results with psychometric techniques which synthesize the answers into a few reliable scores and detect ineffective questions.

These controls are not widely used in the polling industry.. However, as it is important that questions to test the product have a high quality, survey methodologists work on methods to test them. Empirical tests provide insight into the quality of the questionnaire, some may be more complex than others. For instance, testing a questionnaire can be done by:
 * conducting cognitive interviewing. By asking a sample of potential-respondents about their interpretation of the questions and use of the questionnaire, a researcher can
 * carrying out a small pretest of the questionnaire, using a small subset of target respondents. Results can inform a researcher of errors such as missing questions, or logical and procedural errors.
 * estimating the measurement quality of the questions. This can be done for instance using test-retest, quasi-simplex, or mutlitrait-multimethod models.
 * predicting the measurement quality of the question. This can be done using the software Survey Quality Predictor (SQP).

Involuntary facades and false correlations
One of the criticisms of opinion polls is that societal assumptions that opinions between which there is no logical link are "correlated attitudes" can push people with one opinion into a group that forces them to pretend to have a supposedly linked but actually unrelated opinion. That, in turn, may cause people who have the first opinion to claim on polls that they have the second opinion without having it, causing opinion polls to become part of self-fulfilling prophecy problems. It has been suggested that attempts to counteract unethical opinions by condemning supposedly linked opinions may favor the groups that promote the actually unethical opinions by forcing people with supposedly linked opinions into them by ostracism elsewhere in society making such efforts counterproductive, that not being sent between groups that assume ulterior motives from each other and not being allowed to express consistent critical thought anywhere may create psychological stress because humans are sapient, and that discussion spaces free from assumptions of ulterior motives behind specific opinions should be created. In this context, rejection of the assumption that opinion polls show actual links between opinions is considered important.

Coverage bias
Another source of error is the use of samples that are not representative of the population as a consequence of the methodology used, as was the experience of The Literary Digest in 1936. For example, telephone sampling has a built-in error because in many times and places, those with telephones have generally been richer than those without.

In some places many people have only mobile telephones. Because pollsters cannot use automated dialing machines to call mobile phones in the United States (because the phone's owner may be charged for taking a call ), these individuals are typically excluded from polling samples. There is concern that, if the subset of the population without cell phones differs markedly from the rest of the population, these differences can skew the results of the poll.

Polling organizations have developed many weighting techniques to help overcome these deficiencies, with varying degrees of success. Studies of mobile phone users by the Pew Research Center in the US, in 2007, concluded that "cell-only respondents are different from landline respondents in important ways, (but) they were neither numerous enough nor different enough on the questions we examined to produce a significant change in overall general population survey estimates when included with the landline samples and weighted according to US Census parameters on basic demographic characteristics."

This issue was first identified in 2004, but came to prominence only during the 2008 US presidential election. In previous elections, the proportion of the general population using cell phones was small, but as this proportion has increased, there is concern that polling only landlines is no longer representative of the general population. In 2003, only 2.9% of households were wireless (cellphones only), compared to 12.8% in 2006. This results in "coverage error". Many polling organisations select their sample by dialling random telephone numbers; however, in 2008, there was a clear tendency for polls which included mobile phones in their samples to show a much larger lead for Obama, than polls that did not.

The potential sources of bias are:
 * 1) Some households use cellphones only and have no landline. This tends to include minorities and younger voters; and occurs more frequently in metropolitan areas. Men are more likely to be cellphone-only compared to women.
 * 2) Some people may not be contactable by landline from Monday to Friday and may be contactable only by cellphone.
 * 3) Some people use their landlines only to access the Internet, and answer calls only to their cellphones.

Some polling companies have attempted to get around that problem by including a "cellphone supplement". There are a number of problems with including cellphones in a telephone poll:
 * 1) It is difficult to get co-operation from cellphone users, because in many parts of the US, users are charged for both outgoing and incoming calls. That means that pollsters have had to offer financial compensation to gain co-operation.
 * 2) US federal law prohibits the use of automated dialling devices to call cellphones (Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991). Numbers therefore have to be dialled by hand, which is more time-consuming and expensive for pollsters.

1992 UK general election
An oft-quoted example of opinion polls succumbing to errors occurred during the 1992 UK general election. Despite the polling organizations using different methodologies, virtually all the polls taken before the vote, and to a lesser extent exit polls taken on voting day, showed a lead for the opposition Labour Party, while the actual vote gave a clear victory to the ruling Conservative Party. In their deliberations after this embarrassment, the pollsters advanced several ideas to account for their errors, including:
 * Late swing: voters who changed their minds shortly before voting tended to favour the Conservatives, so the error was not as great as it first appeared.
 * Nonresponse bias: Conservative voters were less likely to participate in surveys than in the past and were thus underrepresented.
 * The "Shy Tory factor": Conservatives had suffered a sustained period of unpopularity as a result of economic difficulties and a series of minor scandals, leading to a spiral of silence in which some Conservative supporters were reluctant to disclose their sincere intentions to pollsters.

The relative importance of these factors was, and remains, a matter of controversy. Polling organizations have since then adjusted their methodologies and have achieved more accurate results in subsequent election campaigns. A comprehensive discussion of these biases and how they should be understood and mitigated is included in several sources including Dillman and Salant (1994).

Failures
A widely publicized failure of opinion polling to date in the United States was the prediction that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 US presidential election. Major polling organizations, including Gallup and Roper, had indicated that Dewey would defeat Truman in a landslide; Truman won a narrow victory.

There were also substantial polling errors in the presidential elections of 1952, 1980, 1996, 2000, and 2016: while the first three correctly predicted the winner (albeit not the extent of their winning margin), with the last two correctly predicting the winner of the popular vote (but not the Electoral College).

In the United Kingdom, most polls failed to predict the Conservative election victories of 1970 and 1992, and Labour's victory in February 1974. In the 2015 election, virtually every poll predicted a hung parliament with Labour and the Conservatives neck and neck, when the actual result was a clear Conservative majority. On the other hand, in 2017, the opposite appears to have occurred. Most polls predicted an increased Conservative majority, even though in reality the election resulted in a hung parliament with a Conservative plurality: some polls correctly predicted this outcome.

In New Zealand, the polls leading up to the 1993 general election predicted the governing National Party would increase its marjority. However, the preliminary results on election night showed a hung parliament with National one seat short of a majority, leading to Prime Minister Jim Bolger exclaiming "bugger the pollsters" on live national television. The official count saw National gain Waitaki to hold a one-seat majority and retain government.

Social media as a source of opinion on candidates
Social media today is a popular medium for the candidates to campaign and for gauging the public reaction to the campaigns. Social media can also be used as an indicator of the voter opinion regarding the poll. Some research studies have shown that predictions made using social media signals can match traditional opinion polls.

Regarding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a major concern has been that of the effect of false stories spread throughout social media. Evidence shows that social media plays a huge role in the supplying of news: 62 percent of US adults get news on social media. This fact makes the issue of fake news on social media more pertinent. Other evidence shows that the most popular fake news stories were more widely shared on Facebook than the most popular mainstream news stories; many people who see fake news stories report that they believe them; and the most discussed fake news stories tended to favor Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. As a result of these facts, some have concluded that if not for these stories, Donald Trump may not have won the election over Hillary Clinton.

Effect on voters
By providing information about voting intentions, opinion polls can sometimes influence the behavior of electors, and in his book The Broken Compass, Peter Hitchens asserts that opinion polls are actually a device for influencing public opinion. The various theories about how this happens can be split into two groups: bandwagon/underdog effects, and strategic ("tactical") voting.

A bandwagon effect occurs when the poll prompts voters to back the candidate shown to be winning in the poll. The idea that voters are susceptible to such effects is old, stemming at least from 1884; William Safire reported that the term was first used in a political cartoon in the magazine Puck in that year. It has also remained persistent in spite of a lack of empirical corroboration until the late 20th century. George Gallup spent much effort in vain trying to discredit this theory in his time by presenting empirical research. A recent meta-study of scientific research on this topic indicates that from the 1980s onward the Bandwagon effect is found more often by researchers.

The opposite of the bandwagon effect is the underdog effect. It is often mentioned in the media. This occurs when people vote, out of sympathy, for the party perceived to be "losing" the elections. There is less empirical evidence for the existence of this effect than there is for the existence of the bandwagon effect.

The second category of theories on how polls directly affect voting is called strategic voting. This theory is based on the idea that voters view the act of voting as a means of selecting a government. Thus they will sometimes not choose the candidate they prefer on ground of ideology or sympathy, but another, less-preferred, candidate from strategic considerations. An example can be found in the 1997 United Kingdom general election. As he was then a Cabinet Minister, Michael Portillo's constituency of Enfield Southgate was believed to be a safe seat but opinion polls showed the Labour candidate Stephen Twigg steadily gaining support, which may have prompted undecided voters or supporters of other parties to support Twigg in order to remove Portillo. Another example is the boomerang effect where the likely supporters of the candidate shown to be winning feel that chances are slim and that their vote is not required, thus allowing another candidate to win. For party-list proportional representation opinion polling helps voters avoid wasting their vote on a party below the electoral threshold.

In addition, Mark Pickup, in Cameron Anderson and Laura Stephenson's Voting Behaviour in Canada, outlines three additional "behavioural" responses that voters may exhibit when faced with polling data. The first is known as a "cue taking" effect which holds that poll data is used as a "proxy" for information about the candidates or parties. Cue taking is "based on the psychological phenomenon of using heuristics to simplify a complex decision" (243).

The second, first described by Petty and Cacioppo (1996), is known as "cognitive response" theory. This theory asserts that a voter's response to a poll may not line with their initial conception of the electoral reality. In response, the voter is likely to generate a "mental list" in which they create reasons for a party's loss or gain in the polls. This can reinforce or change their opinion of the candidate and thus affect voting behaviour. Third, the final possibility is a "behavioural response" which is similar to a cognitive response. The only salient difference is that a voter will go and seek new information to form their "mental list", thus becoming more informed of the election. This may then affect voting behaviour.

These effects indicate how opinion polls can directly affect political choices of the electorate. But directly or indirectly, other effects can be surveyed and analyzed on all political parties. The form of media framing and party ideology shifts must also be taken under consideration. Opinion polling in some instances is a measure of cognitive bias, which is variably considered and handled appropriately in its various applications. In turn, non-nuanced reporting by the media about poll data and public opinions can thus even aggravate political polarization.

Effect on politicians
Starting in the 1980s, tracking polls and related technologies began having a notable impact on U.S. political leaders. According to Douglas Bailey, a Republican who had helped run Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential campaign, "It's no longer necessary for a political candidate to guess what an audience thinks. He can [find out] with a nightly tracking poll. So it's no longer likely that political leaders are going to lead. Instead, they're going to follow."

Regulation
Some jurisdictions over the world restrict the publication of the results of opinion polls, especially during the period around an election, in order to prevent the possibly erroneous results from affecting voters' decisions. For instance, in Canada, it is prohibited to publish the results of opinion surveys that would identify specific political parties or candidates in the final three days before a poll closes.

However, most Western democratic nations do not support the entire prohibition of the publication of pre-election opinion polls; most of them have no regulation and some only prohibit it in the final days or hours until the relevant poll closes. A survey by Canada's Royal Commission on Electoral Reform reported that the prohibition period of publication of the survey results largely differed in different countries. Out of the 20 countries examined, 3 prohibit the publication during the entire period of campaigns, while others prohibit it for a shorter term such as the polling period or the final 48 hours before a poll closes. In India, the Election Commission has prohibited it in the 48 hours before the start of polling.

Opinion poll in dictatorships
The director of the Levada Center stated in 2015 that drawing conclusions from Russian poll results or comparing them to polls in democratic states was irrelevant, as there is no real political competition in Russia, where, unlike in democratic states, Russian voters are not offered any credible alternatives and public opinion is primarily formed by state-controlled media, which promotes those in power and discredits alternative candidates. Many respondents in Russia do not want to answer pollsters' questions for fear of negative consequences. On 23 March 2023, criminal case was opened against Moscow resident Yury Kokhovets, a participant in the Radio Liberty street poll. He faced up to 10 years in prison under Russia's 2022 war censorship laws.

Additional sources

 * Brodie, Mollyann, et al. "The Past, Present, And Possible Future Of Public Opinion On The ACA: A review of 102 nationally representative public opinion polls about the Affordable Care Act, 2010 through 2019." Health Affairs 39.3 (2020): 462–470.
 * Dyczok, Marta. "Information wars: hegemony, counter-hegemony, propaganda, the use of force, and resistance." Russian Journal of Communication 6#2 (2014): 173–176.
 * Eagly, Alice H., et al. "Gender stereotypes have changed: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of US public opinion polls from 1946 to 2018." American psychologist 75.3 (2020): 301+. online
 * Fernández-Prados, Juan Sebastián, Cristina Cuenca-Piqueras, and María José González-Moreno. "International public opinion surveys and public policy in Southern European democracies." Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy 35.2 (2019): 227–237. online
 * Kang, Liu, and Yun-Han Chu. "China's Rise through World Public Opinion: Editorial Introduction." Journal of Contemporary China 24.92 (2015): 197–202; polls in US and China
 * Murphy, Joe, et al. "Social Media in Public Opinion Research: Report of the AAPOR Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research." American Association for Public Opinion Research (2014). online
 * Murphy, Joe, et al. "Social Media in Public Opinion Research: Report of the AAPOR Task Force on Emerging Technologies in Public Opinion Research." American Association for Public Opinion Research (2014). online

title: Opinion poll


text:
John Webster

John Webster (c. 1578 – c. 1632) was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often seen as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. His life and career overlapped with Shakespeare's.

Biography
Webster's life is obscure and the dates of his birth and death are not known. His father, a carriage maker also named John Webster, married a blacksmith's daughter named Elizabeth Coates on 4 November 1577 and it is likely that Webster was born not long after, in or near London. The family lived in St Sepulchre's parish. His father John and uncle Edward were Freemen of the Merchant Taylors' Company and Webster attended Merchant Taylors' School in Suffolk Lane, London. On 1 August 1598, "John Webster, lately of the New Inn" was admitted to the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court; in view of the legal interests evident in his dramatic work, this may be the playwright. Webster married 17-year-old Sara Peniall on 18 March 1605 at St Mary's Church, Islington. A special licence was needed to permit a wedding in Lent, as Sara was seven months pregnant. Their first child, John Webster III, was baptised at the parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West on 8 March 1606. Bequests in the will of a neighbour who died in 1617, indicate that other children were born to him.

Most of what is otherwise known of him relates to his theatrical activities. Webster was still writing plays in the mid-1620s, but Thomas Heywood's Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (licensed 7 November 1634) speaks of him in the past tense, implying he was then dead.

There is no known portrait of Webster.

Early collaboration
By 1602, Webster was working with teams of playwrights on history plays, most of which were never printed. They included a tragedy, Caesar's Fall (written with Michael Drayton, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday), and a collaboration with Dekker, Christmas Comes but Once a Year (1602). With Dekker he also wrote Sir Thomas Wyatt, which was printed in 1607 and had probably been first performed in 1602. He worked with Dekker again on two city comedies, Westward Ho in 1604 and Northward Ho in 1605. Also in 1604, he adapted John Marston's The Malcontent for staging by the King's Men.

The major tragedies
Despite his ability to write comedy, Webster is best known for two brooding English tragedies based on Italian sources. The White Devil, a retelling of the intrigues involving Vittoria Accoramboni, an Italian woman assassinated at the age of 28, was a failure when staged at the Red Bull Theatre in 1612 (published the same year) being too unusual and intellectual for its audience. The Duchess of Malfi, first performed by the King's Men about 1614 and published nine years later, was more successful. He also wrote a play called Guise, based on French history, of which little else is known, as no text has survived.

The White Devil was performed in the Red Bull Theatre, an open-air theatre that is believed to have specialised in providing simple, escapist drama for a largely working-class audience, a factor that might explain why Webster's intellectual and complex play was unpopular with its audience. In contrast, The Duchess of Malfi was probably performed by the King's Men in the smaller, indoor Blackfriars Theatre, where it might have been appreciated by a better educated audience. The two plays would thus have been played very differently: The White Devil by adult actors, probably in continuous action, with elaborate stage effects a possibility, and The Duchess of Malfi in a controlled environment, with artificial lighting and musical interludes between acts, which allowed time, perhaps, for the audience to accept the otherwise strange rapidity with which the Duchess could have babies.

Late plays
Webster wrote one more play on his own: The Devil's Law Case (c. 1617–1619), a tragicomedy. His later plays were collaborative city comedies: Anything for a Quiet Life (c. 1621) co-written with Thomas Middleton and A Cure for a Cuckold (c. 1624) co-written with William Rowley. In 1624, he also co-wrote a topical play about a recent scandal, Keep the Widow Waking (with John Ford, Rowley and Dekker). The play is lost, but its plot is known from a court case. He is believed to have contributed to the tragicomedy The Fair Maid of the Inn with John Fletcher, Ford and Phillip Massinger. His Appius and Virginia, probably written with Thomas Heywood, is of uncertain date.

Plays

 * Westward Ho (1603–4)
 * Northward Ho (1605)
 * Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607)
 * The White Devil (1612)
 * The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13)
 * The Devil's Law Case (1616–20)
 * Anything for a Quiet Life (1621)
 * A Cure for a Cuckold (1624–25)
 * The Fair Maid of the Inn (1625-26)
 * Appius and Virginia (1625–27)

Reputation
Webster's intricate, complex, subtle and learned plays are difficult, but rewarding and are still frequently staged. Webster has gained a reputation as the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatist with the most unsparingly dark vision of human nature. Even more than John Ford, whose 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is also bleak, Webster's tragedies present a horrific vision of humanity. In his poem "Whispers of Immortality", T. S. Eliot memorably says that Webster always saw "the skull beneath the skin".

Webster's title character in The Duchess of Malfi is presented as a figure of virtue compared with her malevolent brothers. She faces death with classic Stoic courage in a martyr-like scene which has been compared to that of the king in Christopher Marlowe's play Edward II. Webster's use of a strong, virtuous woman as his main character was rare for his time and marks a deliberate reworking of some of the original historical events on which the play was based. The character of the Duchess recalls the Victorian poet and essayist Algernon Charles Swinburne's comment in A Study of Shakespeare that in tragedies such as King Lear Shakespeare had shown such a bleak world as a foil or backdrop for virtuous heroines such as Ophelia and Imogen, so that their characterisation would not seem too incredible. Swinburne describes such heroines as shining in the darkness.

Webster's drama was generally dismissed in the 18th and 19th centuries, but many 20th-century critics and theatregoers have found The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi brilliant plays of great poetic quality. One explanation for the change of view is that the horrors of war in the early 20th century had led to desperate protagonists being on stage again and understood. W. A. Edwards wrote of Webster's plays in Scrutiny II (1933–1934) "Events are not within control, nor are our human desires; let's snatch what comes and clutch it, fight our way out of tight corners, and meet the end without squealing." The violence and pessimism of the tragedies have seemed to some analysts close to modern sensibilities.

Webster in other works

 * The 18th-century play The Fatal Secret by Lewis Theobald is a reworking of The Duchess of Malfi, imposing Aristotle's 'unities' and a happy ending on the plot.
 * The short story 'A Christmas in Padua' in F. L. Lucas's The Woman Clothed with the Sun (1937) retells the final hours in December 1585 of Vittoria Accoramboni (the original of Webster's White Devil), slanting the narrative from her perspective.
 * The 1982 detective novel The Skull Beneath the Skin by P. D. James centres on an ageing actress who plans to play Webster's drama The Duchess of Malfi in a Victorian castle theatre. The novel takes its title from T. S. Eliot's famous characterisation of Webster's work in his poem 'Whispers of Immortality'.
 * Webster, a play by Robert David McDonald, was written for and premièred at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre, 1984.
 * A young John Webster, played by Joe Roberts, appears in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love. When talking to Will Shakespeare he tells him, "When I write plays they'll be like Titus... plenty of blood – that's the only writing." The scene alludes to the real John Webster's macabre work. He is also the character who reveals Viola's disguise, after watching Viola and Shakespeare making love in the theatre.
 * A fragment of Act Four, Scene Two, of The Duchess of Malfi is shown in the 1987 BBC TV film version of Agatha Christie's detective novel Sleeping Murder.
 * Webster's line, "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young", is used in the novel Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice, and in Sleeping Murder.
 * Mike Figgis's 2001 film Hotel involves scenes from The Duchess of Malfi.
 * The antagonist in Paul Johnston's 'The Death List' and 'The Soul Collector' mimics The White Devil in character-names and actions.
 * In Episode 11, Season 2 of HBO's Boardwalk Empire, The White Devil is discussed in a Princeton classroom during a scene that takes place in Jimmy Darmody's past. At the end of the scene the teacher quotes the line "What, because we are poor shall we be vicious?" to which Jimmy responds "Pray what means have you to keep me from the galleys, or the gallows?" Later in the episode, the teacher refers to Jimmy's life as Jacobean.
 * Webster and his works The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi are mentioned in the lyrics to the song My White Devil by Echo & The Bunnymen, included on their 1983 album Porcupine.

title: John Webster


text:
Kate Jackson

Lucy Kate Jackson (born October 29, 1948) is an American actress and television producer, known for her television roles as Sabrina Duncan in the series Charlie's Angels (1976–1979) and Amanda King in the series Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983–1987). Her film roles include Making Love (1982) and Loverboy (1989). She is a three-time Emmy Award nominee and four-time Golden Globe Award nominee, and Photoplay (magazine) award winner for "Favorite TV Actress" 1978.

Jackson began her career in the late 1960s in summer stock, before landing major television roles in Dark Shadows (1970–71), Bonanza (1972), and The Rookies (1972–1976). She also appeared in the film Night of Dark Shadows (1971). The huge success of her role as Sabrina Duncan on Charlie's Angels saw her appear on the front cover of Time magazine, alongside co-stars Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith, while her role as Mrs. King won her Germany's Bravo Golden Otto Award for Best Female TV Star three times (1986–1988). She then continued to star in numerous television films, including Quiet Killer (1992), Empty Cradle (1993) and Satan's School for Girls (2000), a remake of the 1973 TV film of the same name in which she also starred.

Early life and career
Jackson was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of Ruth (née Shepherd) and Hogan Jackson, a business executive. She attended The Brooke Hill School for Girls while residing in Mountain Brook. Jackson went on to enroll at the University of Mississippi as a history major where she was a member of the Delta Rho chapter of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. Halfway through her sophomore year, she transferred to Birmingham–Southern College, a liberal arts college, taking classes in speech and history of the theatre. At the end of the academic year, Jackson became an apprentice at the Stowe Playhouse in Stowe, Vermont, and then moved to New York City to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.

Initially, Jackson worked as an NBC page and tour guide at the network's Rockefeller Center before landing a role as the mysterious, silent ghost Daphne Harridge on the 1960s supernatural daytime soap opera Dark Shadows. In 1971, Jackson had a starring role as Tracy Collins in Night of Dark Shadows, the second feature film based on the daytime serial. This film was more loosely based on the series than the first feature film, and it did not fare as well at the box office. The same year, she appeared in two episodes of the short-lived sitcom The Jimmy Stewart Show.

She then appeared as nurse Jill Danko for four seasons on the 1970s crime drama The Rookies. A supporting cast member, Jackson filled her free time by studying directing and editing. She also appeared in several TV films during this period. Jackson's performance was well received in the 1972 independent film Limbo, one of the first theatrical films to address the Vietnam War and the wives of soldiers who were POWs, MIA or killed in action. She also appeared in Death Scream, a 1975 television dramatization of the circumstances surrounding the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese.

Career

In 1975, Jackson met with Rookies producers Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg to discuss her contractual obligation to star in another television series for Spelling/Goldberg Productions upon that show's cancellation. Goldberg told her of a series that was available—because "every network has passed on it," The Alley Cats. Spelling said that when he told Jackson the title of the series had to be changed and asked her what she would like to call it, she replied "Charlie's Angels," pointing to a picture of three female angels on the wall behind Spelling. Jackson was originally cast as Kelly Garrett (which ultimately went to her co-star Jaclyn Smith), but decided upon Sabrina Duncan instead. The huge success of the show saw Jackson, Smith and Farrah Fawcett-Majors (who played Jill Munroe) appear on the front cover of Time magazine. The show aired as a television film on March 21, 1976, before debuting as a series on September 22, 1976. Because Jackson was considered the star of Charlie's Angels following her experience and four years on The Rookies, her original role of Kelly Garrett was featured prominently in the pilot film.

Jackson hosted the thirteenth episode of season four of Saturday Night Live which aired in February 1979. During her monologue, she referred to being an NBC page ten years earlier where she led tours of the studio. At the beginning of the third season of Charlie's Angels, Jackson was offered the Meryl Streep role in the feature film Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), but was forced to turn it down because Spelling told her that the show's shooting schedule could not be rearranged to give her time to do the film. At the end of the third season, Jackson left the show saying, "I served it well and it served me well, now it's time to go." Spelling cast Shelley Hack as her replacement.

Jackson starred alongside Harry Hamlin and her Rookies co-star Michael Ontkean in the feature film Making Love (1982), directed by Arthur Hiller. It was a film some considered to be ahead of its time, and attempted to deal sensitively with the topic of homosexuality. However, it received tepid reviews and did poorly at the box office.

In 1983, Jackson had a starring role in Scarecrow and Mrs. King, a one-hour action drama in which she played housewife Amanda King opposite Bruce Boxleitner's spy, code-named "Scarecrow." Jackson also co-produced the series with Warner Brothers Television through her production company, Shoot the Moon Enterprises. During this time she developed an interest in directing. Scarecrow and Mrs. King aired for four seasons from 1983 to 1987.

During filming of the show's fourth season, in January 1987, Jackson had a mammogram for the first time, which found a small malignant tumor. Her series' producer—the only person she told about the diagnosis—rescheduled her work on the show. She checked in to a hospital under an alias to have a lumpectomy. Jackson returned to the series a week later, working with the aid of painkillers through five weeks of radiation treatments.

After undergoing breast cancer treatment, Jackson followed up on Scarecrow and Mrs. King by taking on the main role in Baby Boom, a 1988 TV sitcom version of a 1987 film of the same name. The series lasted less than one season, canceled with episodes left unaired.

In 1989, Jackson starred in the film Loverboy, directed by Joan Micklin Silver.

In September 1989, another mammogram indicated residual breast cancer that the previous operation had missed. Jackson had a partial mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. Jackson's Charlie's Angels colleague Jaclyn Smith made statements indicating her support of Jackson.

In 1995, Jackson was diagnosed as having been born with an atrial septal defect that had previously gone undetected. Jackson underwent open-heart surgery to correct the defect.

Jackson spoke publicly about breast cancer and heart health and received the "Power of Love" award in 2003 from the American Heart Association for raising awareness among the public regarding those issues.

In 2004, the television film Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie's Angels aired, with actress Lauren Stamile portraying Jackson. In August 2006, Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith, the three original Angels, made a surprise appearance together at the 58th Primetime Emmy Awards in a tribute to the recently deceased Angels creator Aaron Spelling.

In 2007, Jackson played the mother of FBI agent Emily Prentiss on Criminal Minds, her last acting role to date. In August 2008, she was a guest judge on an episode of Jaclyn Smith's Bravo reality series Shear Genius, presiding over a hairdressing competition to update the original trio's signature hairdos.

On August 3, 2010, Gallery Books announced a contract with Jackson to publish her memoirs. The book, expected in 2011, has been repeatedly delayed, with the latest update reporting a scheduled release for two days before 2021.

She has not appeared in film or television since 2009.

Personal life
Jackson lived with, and was engaged to, actor Edward Albert in the mid-1970s. She was then linked romantically to producer Robert Evans, stuntman Gary Quist and actors Dirk Benedict, Nick Nolte and Warren Beatty. After a six-month courtship, Jackson married actor Andrew Stevens (the son of actress Stella Stevens) in August 1978. The couple divorced in 1981. After her divorce from Stevens, Jackson said, "I felt as if my ex-husband drove up to my bank account with a Brink's truck." Jackson was then linked with actor Gary Pendergast and screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz. She married New York businessman David Greenwald in 1982, and they formed 'Shoot The Moon Productions' together, the company that produced Jackson's series Scarecrow and Mrs. King. The couple divorced in 1984.

After the divorce, Jackson was frequently seen with dermatologist Arnold Klein. While recovering from her second bout with breast cancer and on vacation in Aspen, Colorado, in 1989, Jackson met Tom Hart, the owner of a Utah ski lodge, and the pair married in 1991. The couple lived both in Los Angeles and Park City, Utah. Jackson and Hart divorced in 1993. In 1995, Jackson adopted a son.

In May 2010, Jackson sued her financial advisor, Richard B. Francis, claiming his actions cost her more than $3 million ($ million today) and brought her to financial ruin. The parties reached an undisclosed settlement in December 2010.

In August 2023, after many years out of the public eye, Jackson appeared as a guest at a wedding hosted by Jaclyn Smith for Smith's son Gaston in Los Angeles

title: Kate Jackson


text:
Tulip Time Festival

Tulip Time Festival is an annual festival held in Holland, Michigan. Tulip festivals are held in many cities around the United States of America that were founded or largely inhabited by Dutch settlers. It has been held every year (except 2020) in mid-May since 1929 and is currently the longest running tulip festival in the United States. The festival currently runs from the first Saturday in May through the second Sunday.

Activities at the celebration include three parades, fireworks, a Dutch Market, various shows and concerts, a craft fair, klompen dancing, and street scrubbing. The city of Holland has thousands of tulips lining the streets and in special tulip gardens throughout the city.

History
Tulip Time's roots can be traced to a 1927 community beautification project. Lida Rogers, a biology teacher at Holland High School, suggested Holland adopt the tulip as its flower due to the city's close ties to The Netherlands. In 1928, City council approved funding to import 100,000 tulip bulbs from the Netherlands and plant them in city parks. The next year, the city invited visitors to come during the week including May 15. The success prompted an annual event to be born. During World War II, Tulip Time was scaled back, returning with a four-day festival in 1946.

The 1947 festival was geared towards celebrating Holland, Michigan's centennial. A tradition was started that year when Michigan's governor, Kim Sigler, donned a Dutch costume and took part in the festivities. As America celebrated its bicentennial in 1976, Tulip Time was honored with the presence of President Gerald R. Ford, a Michigander who had formerly represented nearby Grand Rapids in the United States Congress.

The reconstruction of the authentic 200-year-old "De Zwaan" windmill on Windmill Island in 1965 added another tourist attraction.

In 1991, Tulip Time expanded from four to ten days. In 2001, the festival was shortened to eight days and moved up a week to better coincide with when the tulips were in bloom. A carnival was added in 2003.

In 2008, the outdoor concert series, renamed Tulipalooza, was moved to the Sixth Street Stage at 6th street and College Ave.

The 2020 festival was canceled for the first time due to the COVID-19 crisis. In 2021 the festival was resumed virtually, and in 2022 the festival returned to in-person activities.

Performances and appearances
The Tulip Time festival has hosted performances and appearances by many well known artists and public figures.

1977 featured Johnny Cash

2000 featured a concert by pop star Christina Aguilera.

2001 featured O-Town.

2006 featured performances by Frankie Avalon, The Oak Ridge Boys, Jars of Clay and AG Silver.

2007 featured Bruce Hornsby.

2008 featured entertainment included Jonny Lang, Tony Orlando, and Ronnie Milsap.

2009 featured Jan Mulder, 1964 The Tribute, Bobby Vinton, and The Oak Ridge Boys.

2010 featured The Coasters, The Drifters, & The Platters, Starship featuring Mickey Thomas (singer), and a seminar by former Blackwater Worldwide CEO and Holland native Erik Prince.

2014 featured comedian Bill Cosby.

In popular culture
The festival is mentioned in The Simpsons episode "Mobile Homer" as one of the places that Homer wishes he could take his RV.

It was also featured in the 1942 film "Seven Sweethearts".

title: Tulip Time Festival


text:
User talk:MikeS

Hi, and welcome. I tidied up your addition to lifting body (mainly by removing your name - we don't sign in articles themselves). By the way, perhaps that content would better fit into X-24 since lifting body seems to be a generic term.

However, your edit to Instructional technology seemed to be particularly POV (slang around here for "personal opinions"). While this sort of thing can be included if attributed to a source (e.g. "Professor X of Y university believes that IT is neglected in schools... etc") it's best to avoid (and in fact, Wikipedia policy forbids) giving personal opinions as if they're absolutely true.

As for logic, I thought your edit was meandering and vague, dealing with too many subjects at once. Sorry. Actually, having said that, it could probably fit quite well into Aristotelian logic itself, I'll add it there.

Finally, do you have a source for the Air Engine Hybrid? It seems a plausible idea, but if it's just your own idea then again it's dodgy, I'm afraid.

Evercat 20:26 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I am sorry if I seemed to be picking on you there. I seem to be picking up a habit of treading on people's toes around here. Please forgive me. Evercat 23:05 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

title: User talk:MikeS


text:
Thomas Dekker (writer)

Thomas Dekker (c. 1572 – 25 August 1632) was an English Elizabethan dramatist and pamphleteer, a versatile and prolific writer, whose career spanned several decades and brought him into contact with many of the period's most famous dramatists.

Early life
Little is known of Dekker's early life or origins. From references in his pamphlets, Dekker is believed to have been born in London around 1572, but nothing is known for certain about his youth. His last name suggests Dutch ancestry, and his work, some of which is translated from Latin, suggests that he attended grammar school.

Career
Dekker embarked on a career as a theatre writer in the middle 1590s. His handwriting is found in the manuscript of Sir Thomas More, though the date of his involvement is undetermined. More certain is his work as a playwright for the Admiral's Men of Philip Henslowe, in whose account book he is first mentioned in early 1598. While there are plays connected with his name performed as early as 1594, it is not clear that he was the original author; his work often involved revision and updating. Between 1598 and 1602, he was involved in about forty plays for Henslowe, usually in collaboration. To these years belong the collaborations with Ben Jonson and John Marston, which presumably contributed to the War of the Theatres in 1600 and 1601. But Dekker is credited as the sole author of The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), his acknowledged masterpiece – a boisterous, rowdy comedy of London life as seen through the eyes of a romanticist. Francis Meres includes Dekker in his list of notable playwrights in 1598.

For Jonson, however, Dekker was a bumbling hack, a "dresser of plays about town"; Jonson lampooned Dekker as Demetrius Fannius in Poetaster and as Anaides in Cynthia's Revels. Dekker's riposte, Satiromastix, performed both by the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the child actors of Paul's, casts Jonson as an affected, hypocritical Horace.

Satiromastix marks the end of the "poetomachia"; in 1603, Jonson and Dekker collaborated again, on a pageant for the Royal Entry, delayed from the coronation of James I, for which Dekker also wrote the festival book The Magnificent Entertainment. After this commission, however, the early Jacobean period was notably mixed for the author. In late 1602, he appears to have broken his association with Henslowe, for unknown reasons. He wrote for Worcester's Men for a time, then returned to the Admiral's Men (now patronized by Prince Henry) to produce The Honest Whore, an apparent success. But the failures of The Whore of Babylon (1607) and If This Be Not a Good Play, the Devil is in It (1611) left him crestfallen; the latter play was rejected by Prince Henry's Men before failing for Queen Anne's Men at the Red Bull Theatre.

Legal troubles
In 1612, Dekker's lifelong problem with debt (he had earlier, 1599, been imprisoned in Poultry Compter) reached a crisis when he was imprisoned in the King's Bench Prison on a debt of forty pounds to the father of John Webster. He remained there for seven years, and despite the support of associates such as Edward Alleyn and Endymion Porter, these years were difficult; Dekker reports that the experience turned his hair white. He continued as pamphleteer throughout his years in prison.

Later years
On release, he resumed writing plays, now with collaborators both from his generation (John Day and John Webster) and slightly younger writers (John Ford and Philip Massinger). Among these plays is one, Keep the Widow Waking (1624, with Ford, Webster, and William Rowley), which dramatized two recent murders in Whitechapel. In the latter half of the decade, Dekker turned once more to pamphlet-writing, revamping old work and writing a new preface to his most popular tract, The Bellman of London.

Death
Dekker published no more work after 1632, and he died in 25 August 1632 and then was buried at St James's Church, Clerkenwell that year.

Drama

 * Old Fortunatus (1599)
 * The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599)
 * Lust's Dominion (1600)
 * Satiromastix (1601)
 * Blurt, Master Constable (1601–02)
 * The London Prodigal (1603)
 * Patient Grissel (1603) (co-written with Henry Chettle and William Haughton)
 * The Merry Devil of Edmonton (1604)
 * The Honest Whore (1604) (co-written with Thomas Middleton)
 * Westward Ho (1604) (co-written with John Webster)
 * Northward Ho (1607) (co-written with Webster)
 * Sir Thomas Wyatt (1607) (co-written with Webster)
 * The Bloody Banquet (1608–09) (co-written with Middleton)
 * The Roaring Girl (1607–10) (co-written with Middleton)
 * Match Me in London (1611)
 * The Tragical History of Guy Earl of Warwick (1620)
 * The Virgin Martyr (1620) (co-written with Philip Massinger)
 * The Witch of Edmonton (1621) (co-written with William Rowley and John Ford)
 * The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622)
 * The Spanish Gypsy (1623) (co-written with Rowley, Middleton and Ford)
 * The Sun's Darling (1624) (co-written with Ford)

When Dekker began writing plays, Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge were still alive; when he died, John Dryden had already been born. Like most dramatists of the period, he adapted as well as he could to changing tastes; however, even his work in the fashionable Jacobean genres of satire and tragicomedy bears the marks of his Elizabethan training: its humour is genial, its action romantic. The majority of his surviving plays are comedies or tragicomedies.

Most of Dekker's work is lost. His apparently disordered life, and his lack of a firm connection (such as Shakespeare or Fletcher had) with a single company, may have militated against the preservation or publication of manuscripts. Close to twenty of his plays were published during his lifetime; of these, more than half are comedies, with three significant tragedies: Lust's Dominion (presumably identical to The Spanish Moor's Tragedy, written with Day, Marston, and William Haughton, 1600), The Witch of Edmonton (with Ford and Rowley, 1621), and The Virgin Martyr (with Massinger, 1620).

The first phase of Dekker's career is documented in Henslowe's diary. His name appears for the first time in connection with "fayeton" (presumably, Phaeton) in 1598. There follow, before 1599, payments for work on The Triplicity of Cuckolds, The Mad Man's Morris, and Hannibal and Hermes. He worked on these plays with Robert Wilson, Henry Chettle, and Michael Drayton. With Drayton, he also worked on history plays on the French civil wars, Earl Godwin, and others. In 1599, he wrote plays on Troilus and Cressida, Agamemnon (with Chettle), and Page of Plymouth. In that year, also, he collaborated with Chettle, Jonson, and Marston on a play about Robert II. 1599 also saw the production of three plays that have survived. It was during this year that he produced his most famous work, The Shoemaker's Holiday, or the Gentle Craft, categorised by modern critics as citizen comedy. This play reflects his concerns with the daily lives of ordinary Londoners, and contains the poem The Merry Month of May. This play exemplifies his intermingling of everyday subjects with the fantastical, embodied in this case by the rise of a craftsman to Mayor and the involvement of an unnamed but idealised king in the concluding banquet. Old Fortunatus and Patient Grissel, the latter on the folkloric theme treated by Chaucer in The Clerk's Tale. In 1600, he worked on The Seven Wise Masters, Fortune's Tennis, Cupid and Psyche, and Fair Constance of Rome. The next year, in addition to Satiromastix, he worked on a play possibly about Sebastian of Portugal and Blurt, Master Constable, on which he may have worked with Thomas Middleton. In 1602 he revised two older plays, Pontius Pilate (1597) and the second part of Sir John Oldcastle. He also collaborated on Caesar's Fall, Jephthah, A Medicine for a Curst Wife, Sir Thomas Wyatt (on Wyatt's rebellion), and Christmas Comes But Once a Year.

Except for Blurt, which was performed by the Blackfriars Children, the earlier of these works were performed at the Admiral's Fortune Theatre. After 1602, Dekker split his attention between pamphlets and plays; thus, his dramatic output decreased considerably. He and Middleton wrote The Honest Whore for the Fortune in 1604, and Dekker wrote a sequel himself the following year. The Middleton/Dekker collaboration The Family of Love also dates from this general era. Dekker and Webster wrote Westward Ho and Northward Ho for Paul's Boys. The failures of the anti-Catholic Whore of Babylon and tragicomic If This Be Not... have already been noted. The Roaring Girl, a city comedy that incorporates the real-life contemporary figure 'Moll Cutpurse', otherwise known as Mary Frith, was a collaboration with Middleton in 1611. In the same year, he also wrote another tragicomedy called Match Me in London.

During his imprisonment, Dekker did not write plays. After his release, he collaborated with Day on Guy of Warwick (1620), The Wonder of a Kingdom (1623), and The Bellman of Paris (1623). With Ford, he wrote The Sun's Darling (1624), The Fairy Knight (1624), and The Bristow Merchant (1624). He also wrote the tragicomedy The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622) and later reworked material from this play into a comedic form to produce The Welsh Ambassador (1623). Another play, The Late Murder of the Son upon the Mother, or Keep the Widow Waking, a dramatization of two recent murders in Whitechapel, occasioned a suit for slander heard in the Star Chamber. That play is lost.

Dekker's plays of the 1620s were staged at the large amphitheatres on the north side of London, most commonly at the Red Bull; only two of his later plays were seen at the more exclusive, indoor Cockpit Theatre, and these two were presumably produced by Christopher Beeston, who operated both the Red Bull and the Cockpit. By the 1620s, the Shoreditch amphitheaters had become deeply identified with the louder and less reputable categories of play-goers, such as apprentices. Dekker's type of play appears to have suited them perfectly. Full of bold action, careless about generic differences, and always (in the end) complementary to the values and beliefs of such audiences, his drama carried some of the vigorous optimism of Elizabethan dramaturgy into the Caroline era.

Prose
He exhibited a similar vigour in his pamphlets, which span almost his whole writing career, and which treat a great variety of subjects and styles.

Dekker's first spate of pamphleteering began in 1603, perhaps during a period when plague had closed the theaters. His first was The Wonderfull Yeare, a journalistic account of the death of Elizabeth, accession of James I, and the 1603 plague, that combined a wide variety of literary genres in an attempt to convey the extraordinary events of that year ('wonderful' meaning astonishing, not excellent). It succeeded well enough to prompt two more plague pamphlets, News From Gravesend and The Meeting of Gallants at an Ordinary. The Double PP (1606) is an anti-Catholic tract written in response to the Gunpowder Plot. News From Hell (1606) is an homage to and continuation of Nash's Pierce Penniless. The Seven Deadly Sins of London (1606) is another plague pamphlet.

After 1608, Dekker produced his most popular pamphlets: a series of "cony-catching" pamphlets that described the various tricks and deceits of confidence-men and thieves, including thieves' cant. These pamphlets, which Dekker often updated and reissued, include The Belman of London (1608, now The Bellman of London), Lanthorne and Candle-light, Villainies Discovered by Candlelight, and English Villainies. They owe their form and many of their incidents to similar pamphlets by Robert Greene.

Other pamphlets are journalistic in form and offer vivid pictures of Jacobean London. The Dead Term (1608) describes Westminster during summer vacation. The Guls Horne-Booke (1609, now The Gull's Hornbook) describes the life of city gallants, including a valuable account of behaviour in the London theatres. Work for Armourers (1609) and The Artillery Garden (1616) (the latter in verse) describe aspects of England's military industries. London Look Back (1630) treats 1625, the year of James's death, while Wars, Wars, Wars (1628) describes European turmoil.

As might be expected, Dekker turned his experience in prison to profitable account. Dekker His Dreame (1620) is a long poem describing his despairing confinement; he contributed six prison-based sketches to the sixth edition (1616) of Sir Thomas Overbury's Characters; and he revised Lanthorne and Candlelight to reflect what he had learned in prison.

Dekker's pamphlets, even more than his plays, reveal signs of hasty and careless composition. Yet the best of them can still entertain, and almost all of them offer valuably precise depictions of everyday life in the Jacobean period.

Dekker's poetry entered into modern popular song (although almost unnoticeably) when some of the lyrics of the poem "Golden Slumbers", from Dekker's play Patient Grissel, were included by Paul McCartney in the Beatles' 1969 song "Golden Slumbers".

title: Thomas Dekker (writer)