P5: Recommandations pour l'encodage et l'échange de textes électroniques

Performance texts are not only printed in books to be read, they are also performed. It is common practice therefore to include within the front matter of a printed dramatic text some brief account of particular performances, using the following element:

• performance (représentation) contient une partie de la préface ou de la postface décrivant comment la pièce de théâtre doit être jouée normalement ou comment elle a été jouée à telle ou telle occasion particulière.

The performance element may be used to group any and all information relating to the actual performance of a play or screenplay, whether it specifies how the play should be performed in general or how it was performed in practice on some occasion.

Performance information may include complex structures such as cast lists, or paragraphs describing the date and location of a performance, details about the setting portrayed in the performance and so forth. (See the discussion of these specialized structures in section 7.1 Front and Back Matter above.) If information for more than one performance is being recorded, then more than one performance element should be used, wherever possible.

Names of persons, places, and dates of particular significance within the performance record may be explicitly marked using the general purpose name, <rs type="place"> and date elements described in section 3.5.4 Dates and Times. No particular elements for such features as stagehouses, directors, etc., are proposed at this time.

A cast list is a specialized form of list, conventionally found at the start or end of a play, usually listing all the speaking and non-speaking roles in the play, often with additional description (‘Cataplasma, a maker of Periwigges and Attires’) or the name of an actor or actress (‘Old Lady Squeamish. Mrs Rutter’). Cast lists may be encoded with the general purpose list element described in section 3.7 Lists, but for more detailed work the following specialized elements are provided:

• castList (distribution ) contient la distribution ou la liste des personnages.
• castGroup (liste de personnages ) dans une distribution, catégorie qui rassemble un ou plusieurs personnages.
• castItem (personnage) dans une liste de personnages, entrée décrivant un rôle en particulier ou une liste de rôles muets.

  type	caractérise le personnage.

A castItem element may contain any mixture of elements taken from the model.castItemPart class, members of which (when this module is included) are:

• role (rôle) le nom d'un rôle au théâtre tel qu’il est donné dans la distribution.
• roleDesc (description du rôle ) décrit le rôle d'un personnage dans une pièce de théâtre.
• actor Nom d'un acteur apparaissant dans une distribution.

Cast lists often have an internal structure of their own; it is quite usual to find, for example, nobility and commoners, or male and female roles, presented in different groups or sublists. Roles are also often grouped together by their function, for example:

• Sons of Cato:
  • Portius
  • Marcus

The global xml:id attribute may be used to specify a unique identifier for the role element, where it is desired to link speeches within the text explicitly to the role, using the who attribute, as further discussed in section 7.2.2 Speeches and Speakers below.

In the example above, the div2 element has been used to represent the ‘French scene’ convention, (where the entrance of each new set of characters is marked as a distinct unit in the text) and the div1 element to represent the acts into which the play is divided. The elements chosen are determined only by the hierarchic position of these units in the text as a whole. If the text had no acts, but only scenes, then the scenes might be represented by div1 elements. Equally, if a play is divided only into ‘acts’, with no smaller subdivisions, then the div1 element might be used to represent acts. The type should be used, as above, to make explicit the name associated with a particular category of subdivision.

For further discussion of the use of numbered and unnumbered divisions, see section 4.1 Divisions of the Body.

The following elements are used to identify speeches and speakers in a performance text:

• sp (langue orale) monologue dans un texte écrit pour la scène ou, passage présenté sous cette forme dans un texte en prose ou en vers.
• speaker forme particulière de titre ou de marque qui donne le nom d'un ou de plusieurs locuteurs dans un texte ou dans un fragment de texte écrit pour le théâtre.

As noted above, the structure of many performance texts may be analysed as multiply hierarchic: a scene of a verse play, for example, may be divided into speeches and, at the same time, into verse lines. The end of a line may or may not coincide with the end of a speech, and vice versa. Other structures, such as songs, may be discontinuous or split up over several speeches. For some purposes it will be appropriate to regard the verse-structure as the fundamental organizing principle of the text, and for others the speech structure; in some cases, the choice between the two may be arbitrary. The discussion in the remainder of this chapter assumes that it is the speech-based hierarchy which most prominently determines the structure of performance texts, but the same mechanisms could be employed to encode a view of a performance text in which individual speeches were entirely subordinate to the formal units of prose and verse. For more detailed discussion and examples of various treatments of this fundamental issue, refer to chapter 20 Non-hierarchical Structures.

The sp and speaker elements are both declared within the core module (see section 3.12 Passages of Verse or Drama).

This module makes available the following additional element for handling groups of speeches:

• spGrp (speech group) contains a group of speeches or songs in a performance text presented in a source as constituting a single unit or ‘number’.

Both between and within the speeches of a written performance text, it is normal practice to include a wide variety of descriptive directions to indicate non-verbal action. The following elements are provided to represent these:

• stage (indication scénique) contient tout type d'indication scénique à l 'intérieur d'un texte ou fragment de texte écrit pour le théâtre.

  type	indique le type d'indication scénique

• move/ (mouvement) signale l'entrée ou la sortie d'un ou de plusieurs personnages sur la scène.

  type	caractérise un mouvement , par exemple une entrée ou une sortie.
  where	indique la direction d'un mouvement sur scène.
  perf	(jeu) identifie la ou les représentations au cours desquelles s'est effectué le déplacement décrit.

The stage element may also be used in non-theatrical texts, to mark sound effects or musical effects, etc., as further discussed in section 7.3 Other Types of Performance Text.

The move element is intended to help overcome the fact that the stage directions of a printed text may often not provide full information about either the intended or the actual movement of actors on stage. It may be used to keep track of entrances and exits in detail, so as to know which characters are on stage at which time. Its attributes permit a relatively formal specification for movements of characters, using user-defined codes to identify the characters involved (the who attribute), the direction of the movement (type attribute), and optionally which part of the stage is involved (where attribute). For stage-historical purposes, a perf attribute is also provided; this allows the recording of different move elements as taken in different performances of the same text.

The actual speeches of a dramatic text may be composed of running text, which must be formally organized into paragraphs, in the case of prose (see section 3.1 Paragraphs), verse lines or line groups in that of verse (see section 3.12 Passages of Verse or Drama), or seg elements, in case of doubt as to whether the material should be treated as verse or prose. The following elements, all of which are defined in the core, are particularly useful when marking units of prose or verse within speeches:

• p (paragraphe) marque les paragraphes dans un texte en prose.
• lb/ (saut de ligne) marque le début d'une nouvelle ligne (typographique) dans une édition ou dans une version d'un texte.
• l (vers) contient un seul vers, éventuellement incomplet.
• lg (groupe de vers) contient un groupe de vers fonctionnant comme une unité formelle, par exemple une strophe, un refrain, un paragraphe en vers, etc.

Like other milestone elements, the element lb additionally bears the attributes ed and edRef, from its membership in the class att.edition:

• att.edition fournit des attributs identifiant l'édition source dont provient une quelconque caractéristique encodée.

  ed	(édition) fournit un identifiant arbitraire pour l'édition source dans laquelle la caractéristique associée (par exemple, une page, une colonne ou un saut de ligne) apparaît à ce point du texte.
  edRef	(edition reference) provides a pointer to the source edition in which the associated feature (for example, a page, column, or line break) occurs at this point in the text.

As a member of the classes att.typed and att.divLike, the lg element also bears the following attributes:

• att.typed fournit des attributs qui peuvent être utilisés pour classer ou interclasser des éléments de n'importe quelle façon.

  type	caractérise l'élément en utilisant n'importe quel système ou typologie de classification approprié.
  subtype	(sous-type) donne une sous-catégorisation de l'élément, si c'est nécessaire.

• att.divLike fournit un jeu d'attributs communs à tous les éléments qui offrent les mêmes caractéristiques que des divisions

  org	(organisation) précise l'organisation du contenu de la division
  sample	indique si cette division est un échantillon de la source originale et dans cas, de quelle partie.

• att.fragmentable groups structural elements which may be fragmented, usually as a consequence of some overlapping hierarchy.

  part	specifies whether or not its parent element is fragmented in some way, typically by some other overlapping structure : for example a speech which is divided between two or more verse stanzas, a paragraph which is split across a page division, a verse line which is divided between two speakers.

When the verse module is included in a schema, the elements l and lg also gain additional attributes through their membership of the class att.metrical:

• att.metrical définit un ensemble d'attributs que certains éléments peuvent utiliser pour représenter de l'information métrique.

  met	(structure métrique, canonique) contient un encodage spécifié par l'utilisateur pour la structure métrique conventionnelle de l'élément.
  rhyme	(schéma rimique) spécifie quel schéma de rimes a été appliqué à un groupe de lignes versifiées.

In many texts, prose and verse may be inextricably mingled; particularly in earlier printed texts, prose may be printed as verse or verse as prose, or it may be impossible to distinguish the two. In cases of doubt, an encoder may prefer to tag the dubious material consistently as verse, to tag it all as prose, to follow the typography of the source text, or to use the neutral ab element to contain the speech itself. When this question arises, the tagUsage element in the encodingDesc element of the header may be used to record explicitly what policy has been adopted.

Even where they can reliably be distinguished, a single speech may frequently contain a mixture of prose (marked as p) and verse (marked as l or—if stanzaic—lg).

Although primarily composed of speeches, performance texts often contain other structural units such as songs or strophes which are shared among different speakers. More generally, complex nested structures of plays within plays, interpolated masques, or interludes are far from uncommon. In more modern material, comparably complex structural devices such as flashback or nested playback are equally frequent. In all kinds of performance material, it may be necessary to indicate several actions which are happening simultaneously.

A number of different devices are available within the TEI scheme to support these complexities in the general case. Texts may be composite or self-nesting (see section 4.3.1 Grouped Texts) and multiple hierarchies may be defined (see chapter 20 Non-hierarchical Structures). The TEI encoding scheme provides a variety of linking mechanisms, which may be used to indicate temporal alignment and aggregation of fragmented structures. In this section we provide a few specific examples of the application of these techniques to performance texts:

• the use of the floatingText element
• the use of the part attribute on fragmentary lg elements
• the use of the next and prev attributes on fragments of embedded structures to join them into a larger whole
• the use of the join element to define a ‘virtual element’ composed of the fragments indicated

When an embedded structure extends across more than one sp element, each of its constituent parts must be regarded as a distinct fragment; the problem then facing the encoder is to reconstitute the interrupted whole in some way.

The next and prev attributes are discussed in section 16.7 Aggregation: they form part of the module for alignment and linking; this module must therefore be included in a schema if they are to be used, as further discussed in section 1.2 Defining a TEI Schema.

Like the next and prev attributes, the join element requires the additional module for linking, which is selected as shown above.

In printed or written versions of performance texts, a variety of techniques may be used to indicate the temporal alignment of speeches or actions. Speeches may be printed vertically aligned on the page, or braced together; stage directions (e.g. ‘Speaking at the same time’) are also often used. In operatic or musical works in particular, the need to indicate timing and alignment of individual parts of a song may lead to very complex layout.

In the original, the stage direction ‘in consternation’ is printed opposite a brace grouping all four speeches, indicating that all four characters speak at once, and that the stage direction applies to all of them. Rather than attempting to represent the appearance of the source, this example encoding represents its presumed meaning: the stage element is placed arbitrarily after the last relevant speech, and the four speeches with which it is to be associated are pointed to by means of the corresp attribute. This attribute, which is enabled by the linking module, provides a simple way of indicating the temporal alignment of speeches or actions in a play. Producing a readable version of the text which simulates the original printed effect may however require more complex markup and processing.

More powerful and more precise mechanisms for temporal alignment are defined in chapter 8 Transcriptions of Speech. These would be appropriate for encodings the focus of which is on the actual performance of a text rather than its structure or formal properties. The module described in that chapter includes a large number of other detailed proposals for the encoding of such features as voice quality, prosody, etc., which might be relevant to such a treatment of performance texts.

Traditional stage scripts may contain additional technical information about such production-related factors as lighting, ‘blocking’ (that is, detailed notes on actors' movements), or props required at particular points. More technical information about intended production effects may also appear in published versions of screenplays or movie scripts. Where these are presented simply as marginal notes, they may be encoded using the general-purpose note element defined in section 3.8 Notes, Annotation, and Indexing. Alternatively, they may be formally distinguished from other stage directions by using the specialized tech element:

• tech (indication technique de mise en scène ) indication technique particulière de mise en scène qui n'est pas destinée aux acteurs.

  type	catégorise l'indication technique de mise en scène.
  perf	(jeu) identifie la ou les représentations auxquelles s'appliquent ces indications techniques.

Like stage directions, tech elements can appear anywhere within a speech or between speeches.