Module 5: Drama
2. Christopher Marlowe: The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (B text) #
The following example is a fragment (the front matter, scene 2 of the first act, and back matter) of Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus (B text), encoded and made available by the Perseus Digital Library.
The text of the play is preceded by front matter, consisting of a character list, and a prologue. The character list is encoded as a <castList> structure within a <div> container in the <front> part. The cast list mainly consists of loose descriptions of the roles’ names (<role>) per character (<castItem>); some have a role description in <roleDesc>. The “Sins” are grouped in a labeled <castGroup> element; another <castGroup> groups Charles, Darius, and Alexander without explicit label. The cast list is concluded by a list of minor characters, grouped in a <castItem type="list"> element, which overrides the default value of "role" for the @type attribute on <castList>. The front matter is concluded with a prologue (<prologue>) consisting of a speech (<sp>) of 28 lines (<l>) spoken by the Chorus, as indicated by the @who attribute on <sp>, which refers to the ID code of the Chorus <role> in the cast list.
The play is concluded by an 8 line <epilogue> (spoken by the Chorus), an <epigraph>, and trailing material in <trailer>. These are grouped in the <back> section.
The body of the play (<body>) consists of 20 scenes, grouped into 6 acts. Acts are encoded in <div1> elements, in which the scenes occur as <div2> elements. Each speech is marked with <sp>, containing the indication of the speaker as it occurs in the source text (<speaker>), as well as a formal indication (using the @who attribute). Stage instructions are encoded inside <stage>. Notice how the first 10 speeches contain paragraphs (<p>), while the last 4 are made up of verse lines (<l>).
Finally, notice how this text is encoded as any other text, resulting in the use of many common TEI elements (<name>, <foreign>, <orig> / <reg>, <add>, ...). A system of <milestone unit="page"/> elements is used to mark the page boundaries (as an equivalent to the shorter <pb> element), while each visual line break is explicitly marked with a <lb> element, if it does not coincide with a verse line.
Note
In this transcription, the <join> element is used to group the lines of the play in alternative groups, thus overriding the structural organisation in speeches. Although the purpose of this alternative grouping is unknown to us, it could well be for analytical reasons. The <join> element lists pointers to the identification codes of the elements to be grouped as a space-separated list in the @target attribute. The purpose of this element is to formally indicate elements that should be joined. The actual join is supposed to be performed in further processing (e.g., by means of XSLT transformations). For a detailed account of the use of <join>, see section 16.7 Aggregation of the TEI Guidelines.Bibliography
- Ibsen, Henrik. 1918. The Wild Duck. New York: Boni and Liveright, Inc.. Encoded and made available by the University of Virginia Library, Text Collection at https://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/IbsWild.html.
- Marlowe, Christopher. 1616. The Tragedie of Doctor Faustus. Encoded and made available by the Perseus Digital Library. Available online at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0011.
- Melville, Herman. 1922. Moby-Dick or, The Whale. London, Bombay, Sidney: Constable and Company LTD. p. 214–215.. Facsimile available from Internet Archive at https://www.archive.org/details/mobydickorwhale01melvuoft.
- Shakespeare, William. 1594. Titus Andronicus. Encoded and made available by the Perseus Digital Library. Available online at https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.03.0037.
- Wilde, Oscar. 1930. “The Importance of Being Earnest.” In: Plays, Prose Writings and Poems. London: Everyman. Encoded and made available by CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College, Cork. Available online at https://www.ucc.ie/celt/published/E850003-002/.