chapkachapka / george-bernard-shaw_short-plays

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Review #1

Open vr8hub opened 9 months ago

vr8hub commented 9 months ago

(I just happened to run across these while I was looking at/for other things.)

We're now veering off into play structure, which is not my forte. However, in most of the cases below I've looked through several other of our plays to see how things are done. (Some of it's also logical to me.) So, it might be ignorance, but it's at least informed ignorance. :)

chapkachapka commented 9 months ago

Working through these, but a few preliminary issues:

1) I added the language tag to "Patiomkin" based on advice from Emma on the project thread. I don't feel strongly either way but she recommended it based on issues with Slavic names generally.

2) The "shall" you specify isn't italicised in the source images because Shaw didn't use italics for emphasis, he used gesperrt (spaced-out letters) emphasis instead. This is easy to miss if you're not looking for it, especially in justified text where the word spacing is small. That specific one is definitely gesperrt in the original.

3) For the punctuation in Great Catherine: I've added that missing source link, and they are definitely colons. Shaw was...idiosyncratic about things like spelling and punctuation, and they were often "normalised" by other publishers. In this case Shaw's original standalone publication and the original UK volume publication by Constable & Co. (which I follow here) both use the colons; you were likely looking at the American reprint from Brentanto's, which has some changes that I'm confident were made by the American editor and not Shaw. I definitely reviewed every colon at least once at the proofing stage because of this.

chapkachapka commented 9 months ago
  1. For the "together" issue: I set them up that way for situations like this, where the bracket is covering several speakers and lines:

https://archive.org/details/androcleslionove00shawuoft/page/88/mode/2up?q=exclaiming

In those cases, you can tell which lines are "together" because the tag adds a line connecting them. I agree that in this case it doesn't make sense to do it that way, so I've fixed it, but I wanted to clarify since I'm leaving the others as is.

  1. As for the personas, standard practice both here and generally is not to apply formatting to the articles--here's an example from one of our Shakespeare editions, "enter the SOOTHSAYER."

https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/julius-caesar/text/act-2#scene-2-4

vr8hub commented 9 months ago

Yep, no problem on all that. (As an aside, we won't argue about the punctuation since you have a scan that includes it, but as Alex has mentioned on-list a couple of times, you're still assigning way too much value to the author. :) The printing decisions were made by an editor and a publisher. The British ones of a particular edition used colons (which, IMO, is odd) and the American ones of a particular edition used commas (which, IMO, is less odd :)). We look for the latest edition possible when we look for scans for the precise reason of getting the most corrections, and the most "modern" spelling and punctuation practices, etc. What Mr. Fielding thought of commas in the 1700's is irrelevant to us today. But, again, no problem because the scans you're using have the colons.)

For the "together" I see what you're talking about, but note there are other instances exactly like the example I gave you.

chapkachapka commented 9 months ago
  1. Fixed the italics, but left "in camera" because lint considers it confusible.

  2. For the Cashel Byron issue--I agree it's strange-looking; this has to do with SE standards for verse drama, which make a distinction between a stage direction in the middle of a line and one "attached to a persona." Search for "attached" in the play formatting document and you'll find the rule: https://standardebooks.org/contribute/how-tos/how-to-conquer-complex-drama-formatting

In this case you can tell the original typesetter considered the direction "attached to the persona" because there's no period between them. I do 100% agree it looks odd in this line, but I'm not sure of the best way of fixing it that doesn't also look inconsistent with other stage directions.

vr8hub commented 9 months ago

OK, no problem on either (I should have thought of the in camera issue; we do that for any non-English phrase that begins with an English word). The Aside/Aloud was more of a question than anything, it just looked odd to me, but, as mentioned many times, drama is not my thing. :)

chapkachapka commented 9 months ago

I think there are only two things left to address:

  1. I added back the missing poetry formatting, except for the p + p formatting--because there are no "stanzas" in this project, lint gave a warning when I tried to put that one in.

  2. I've moved the initial stage directions into the table in Bashville, and made a few edits in the other plays. However, in many of the plays that distinction isn't as clear; because there wasn't any distinction on the page, Shaw tended to write long descriptive paragraphs incorporating both. The first scene of Great Catherine is a good example, where the actual description ("there is a screen behind the ottoman") comes after what could otherwise be character business. Then there are plays like Augustus Does His Bit, where I could make it a separate stage direction but only by splitting the paragraph in the middle. For now I've moved the instances where there was a clear division and left the others--let me know if you want me to be more aggressive about it.

vr8hub commented 9 months ago

I don’t have access to GitHub at the moment, so hopefully their email access works. :) Yes, by “rest” I mean “rest applicable.” No problem, if you’ve taken care of the obvious ones the muddled ones will have to stay muddled. :)I’m AFK for a couple of days, I’ll review the updates when I get settled; probably Wednesday.

vr8hub commented 9 months ago

Just a few niggles left.

chapkachapka commented 9 months ago

All set. My comments:

  1. In the project thread, Alex first suggested doing the list styles in markup, and when you pointed out it could be done in CSS he agreed but said it couldn't hurt to leave it in the markup as well, so I did it in both. (The CSS is in local.css under the Blanco Posnet subhed).

  2. I used "subchapter" for this and my previous Shaw play because I looked at some other Shaw in the corpus and that's what was used for the chapter headings there. So it may not be perfect, but at least it's consistent. :)

  3. I changed the cuckoo clock direction as well as the second paragraph of the O'Flaherty scene description, "A loud yawn is heard..." from Great Catherine scene 2 and three short paragraphs at the beginning of The Interlude.... (I'd only done entrances in the first pass but these seemed as "stage directiony" as the cuckoo clock.)

  4. For "An elderly clerk," I left it because it was all part of one paragraph. I also left the entrances to Great Catherine scene 3 and to The Fascinating Foundling and The Glimpse of Reality as part of the paragraph by the same reasoning. I can split the end of these paragraphs out into stage directions if you think it's necessary; would that be an editorial change for adding in the paragraph break?

vr8hub commented 9 months ago

Hah! I didn't remember it was this that conversation was about. Well, it didn't make sense to me then to have both, and it doesn't make sense to me now. There is zero reason for markup if the CSS is handling it. Don't worry about it; I'll mention it to him when I give it to him. I really don't want an example in the corpus of belts and suspenders when we only need the latter, but he's the boss, so he gets to decide.

OK, to be clear I don't have strong feelings about any of this because I don't know enough to have strong feelings. :) With that, my logic would be: if the (what seem to be) stage directions are mixed in with scene description and can't be extricated, then they would stay. But, in these cases where they're at the end of everything but just not in their own paragraph, that doesn't seem to me to be a strong enough reason not to label them as what they are (if in fact you agree that's what they are).

Since it's just formatting, not changing the text, I wouldn't consider it as editorial, but they should be in their own commits, and if someone disagrees it's easy to change.

chapkachapka commented 9 months ago

All set then, let me know if you see anything else. Between this and the poetry I'm proofing now, I'm about ready for a nice simple novel!

vr8hub commented 9 months ago

No kidding! I do not have the fortitude for poetry/drama, I really do admire those of you who produce it.