LEMDO: Encode Stage Directions in Modern Texts

Encode Stage Directions in Modern Texts

¶ Step-by-Step

To encode a stage direction, you need to:

Identify the text node of the stage direction.

Wrap the text node in a


                                                <stage>

element.

Add a


                                             @type

attribute to the


                                                <stage>

element.

Add the correct value(s) to the type attribute ("entrance", "exit", "setting", "business", "sound", "delivery", "location"). See Table Summary.

¶ Punctuation in Stage Directions

In accordance with the DRE style guidelines, we recommend that you use terminal punctuation in all stage directions except for those that are in-dialogue.

For example:

<sp>
 <speaker>Labesha</speaker>
 In a blanket?
</sp> <stage type="exit">Exit.</stage> <sp who="#emdAHDM_M_Moren" xml:id="emdAHDM_M_s5_sp7">
 <speaker>Moren</speaker>
 Nay, but Besha—
</sp>

<sp>
<speaker>Lemot</speaker>
He is marvellous welcome. <stage type="delivery">To Blanvel</stage> I shall be exceeding proud of your acquaintance.
</sp>

¶ Supplied Stage Directions

It is conventional for editors to add stage directions to specify which characters enter and exit and when, if the early stage directions are not entirely clear. The print convention has been to mark such supplied stage directions with square brackets. In LEMDOʼs digital environment, we never use square brackets in the modern text. For supplied stage directions, anthologies have two options:

Wrap the supplied stage direction in the


                                                <supplied>

element. Add a collation note as well if you wish.

Use the collation file (1) to capture differences between the modern text and the earliest editions, and (2) to give your editorial predecessors credit where credit is due.

At least one LEMDO anthology (DRE) has taken the textual critical position that because the entire modern text is supplied (especially in the Anglo-American eclectic editing tradition and in recent efforts to try to reproduce a text or performance at a particular moment in its history even if one has to reconstruct it from witnesses that represent other points in its history). On the other hand, QME has chosen to wrap editorial stage directions that do not appear in the early modern printed texts.

LEMDO is agnostic on the questions of (1) what types of interpolations and clarifications an editor may add, (2) whether the editor needs to use markup to indicate supplied material, and (3) whether and how much the editor should collate. These decisions will be made at the anthology level. You will want to consult with your anthology lead.

¶ Encoded Supplied Material

If your anthologyʼs practice is to use markup to indicate supplied material in stage directions (as QME has chosen to do), hereʼs what you need to know:

Wrap the supplied part of the stage direction in the


                                                <supplied>

element.

You may use the


                                                <supplied>

element in the modern text only inside the


                                                <stage>

element.

You will want to collate your supplied material if the source is a prior editor (to give credit where credit is due).

If you collate the stage direction, you will need to include the


                                                <supplied>

element in the lemma (the text node of the


                                                <lem>

element). See Practice: Encode Collated Stage Directions.

At rendering time, the supplied material will be wrapped in square brackets on the screen and in the print output.

<stage type="entrance">Enter <supplied>Prince Edward</supplied>.</stage>

¶ Collated Editorial Stage Directions

If your anthologyʼs practice is not to mark up supplied material, you will need to consult with your anthology lead about what to collate. In this case, do not add


                                             <supplied>

elements to your stage direction. Instead, use LEMDOʼs collation protocols to indicate what the stage directions have been in earlier editions. It will be clear to the reader who looks at the collations what you have added.

¶ Table Summary

The following table summarizes which value you should use for different types of stage directions.

Value	Description	Example(s)
`"entrance"`	marks the entrance of one or more characters
`"exit"`	marks the exit of one or more characters
`"remain"`	indicates that one or more characters remains on stage when others exit¹
`"business"`	describes stage business and character actions like kneeling. Use for stage directions marked in the playbook as dumbshows.	Kneels.
`"sound"`	describes a sound such as flourish, music, thunder, a shot, drums, whether the sound is made offstage or onstage
`"delivery"`	describes how or to whom a character speaks.	Addressee clarification, addressee change, aside, or specialized dialogue (“sings”, “reading”, etc.)
`"setting"`	describes a setting (e.g., in her bed, a council chamber). Do not use this value to describe a stage location.	Any direction that gives a description of temporal or spatial setting (“Enter as from riding”, “Servants with torches”, “Enter Barabas to his counting house”, etc.)
`"location"`	describes a location on stage, such as above or at one door. Do not use this value to describe a setting. Do not assign a location that is not required by an early modern stage direction or implied by a dialogic stage direction.	Within, Above

¶ Examples

Below are examples of the different types of stage directions.

¶ Entrance

Use the value "entrance" for entrances of a character or characters:

<stage type="entrance">Enter the king, Northumberland, Worcester, Hotspur, Sir Walter Blunt, with others.</stage>

¶ Exit

Use the value "exit"for the exit of a single character or multiple characters:

<stage type="exit">Exit Iago.</stage>

¶ Setting

Use the value "setting" for descriptions of temporal or spatial settings. This type of stage direction is almost always combined with another type. Setting in the early playhouse is usually established by costume and stage properties, which are often noted upon a characterʼs entrance:

<stage type="entrance setting">Enter a Carrier with a lantern in his hand.</stage>

<stage type="entrance setting">Enter Barabas in his counting house, with heaps of gold before him.</stage>

In the first example, the use of a lantern implies darkness. Darkness indicates temporal aspects like time of day and falls into the category of setting.

See Multitype Stage Directions below.

¶ Business

Use the value "business" for specified actions:

<stage type="business">They kiss.</stage>

¶ Sound

Use the value "sound" for non-dialogic sounds:

<stage type="sound">Trumpet within.</stage>

¶ Delivery

Use the delivery value for addressee clarification, addressee change, aside, or specialized dialogue . When the addressee of a speech is not obvious, or you think the reader might be confused, you may use a stage direction within the speech element to clarify the character(s) being addressed. This clarification is particularly important when a speaker changes interlocutors within a speech, or in the case of asides. As with all added stage directions, collate fully:

Thatʼs a lie in thy throat.—<stage type="delivery">To Gower</stage> I charge you in his majestyʼs name, apprehend him. Heʼs a friend of the Duke Alenconʼs.

<l>
<stage type="delivery">Aside</stage> How like a fawning publican he looks!</l>

¶ Location

Use the value "location" for locations within the playhouse:

<l>
<stage type="location">Within</stage> My lord, my lord? What ho? My lord, my lord!</l>

¶ Multitype Stage Directions

Many stage directions will contain more than one of these types. You may tag their types with multiple values, separated by white space:

<stage type="entrance exit">They pass over the stage.</stage>

<stage type="entrance sound">Flourish. Enter King Richard and attendants.</stage>

<stage type="sound setting">Storm still.</stage>

<stage type="entrance setting business sound">Enter Caliban with a burden of wood. A noise of thunder heard.</stage>

<stage type="entrance exit sound">Alarums and excursions.</stage>

<stage type="entrance setting">Enter Titus like a cook.</stage>

<stage type="entrance setting location">Enter Aaron, Chiron, and Demetrius at one door, and at the other door young Lucius, and another with a bundle of weapons and verses writ upon them.</stage>

Notes

1.Old IML value was usually “other”.↑

Prosopography

Isabella Seales

Isabella Seales is a fourth year undergraduate completing her Bachelor of Arts in English at the University of Victoria. She has a special interest in Renaissance and Metaphysical Literature. She is assisting Dr. Jenstad with the MoEML Mayoral Shows anthology as part of the Undergraduate Student Research Award program.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Joey Takeda

Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020 after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.

Kate LeBere

Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.

Mahayla Galliford

Research assistant, remediator, encoder, 2021–present. Mahayla Galliford is a fourth-year student in the English Honours and Humanities Scholars programs at the University of Victoria. She researches early modern drama and her Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award project focused on approaches to encoding early modern stage directions.

Martin Holmes

Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVicʼs Humanities Computing and Media Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020. He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Nicole Vatcher

Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.) in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was womenʼs writing in the modernist period.

Tracey El Hajj

Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life. Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

Metadata

Authority title	Encode Stage Directions in Modern Texts
Type of text	Documentation
Short title
Publisher	University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series	Linked Early Modern Drama Online
Source	TEI Customization created by Martin Holmes, Joey Takeda, and Janelle Jenstad; documentation written by members of the LEMDO Team
Editorial declaration	n/a
Edition	Released with Linked Early Modern Drama Online 1.0
Encoding description	Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status	prgGenerated
Funder(s)	Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
License/availability	This file is licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that it is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the author and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except in quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the editor and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the documentation in the classroom.