sydb
commented
2 years ago I find the “stage operates in a stand-offish way” argument all but completely compelling. This argument suggests that in some cases use of the current <handShift> method can be confusing, at least if used without extreme care.
But even without that argument, the convenience argument (that stage directions are obvious logical structures that are often in a different hand — This argument says essentially that yes, these can be encoded with the current <handShift> method, but use of @hand is a lot easier on encoders) is enough to make me agree that this is a good idea.
So barring a good argument against, I am solidly in favor.
lb42
ebeshero
martindholmes
JanelleJenstad
The @hand attribute (att.written) is intended to "indicate the hand in which the content of an element was written in the source being transcribed." For transcriptions [originally, I wrote "sourceDoc-like transcriptions," which was misleading] members of att.written include att.transcriptional elements such as
add,del,substand so on; for correspondence, structural elements such aspostscript,salute, andsignedare members. But although manuscripts of dramatic texts are often the work of multiple scribes, none of the elements commonly used in drama encoding are members of att.written. We would like to see at leaststageadded to att.written to handle the most straightforward cases of MS dramas written in multiple hands. (We would welcome use cases ofsp,speaker,head,lgandlbeing written in a second hand but haven't stumbled across any examples in the corpus yet.)It would be useful generally (not just to us) to have the hand attribute on
stagein particular because stage directions are frequently added in another hand: by the bookkeeper using an authorial ms as a prompt copy, by a copyist after seeing a play in performance, by a director making notes, and by stage managers who record actual performance actions. In other words,stageis a structural element that often functions in a stand-off sort of way.USE CASE 1: The Douai Manuscript MS787 is described by Line Cottegnies, the lead of the Douai Shakespeare project, in the journal of la Société Française Shakespeare (SFS): https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/4289.
See especially the image at https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/docannexe/image/4289/img-2.jpg, where one can see the stage direction [Enter Romeo written in the right margin in a different hand.
USE CASE 2: In this leaf from the ms of Sir Thomas More, a play written in at least four different hands by different authors (including Shakespeare), the stage direction "Enter Fishmonger" is written in a different hand and enclosed in a rhomboid.
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