Enter the . A Review of the Encoding Practices of Stage Directions within the TEI

Abstract Stage directions and other non-dialogical aspects of the dramatic texts have been overlooked historically and have received only minor scholarly attention. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the TEI's treatment of them is equally superficial. This is the source of diverse problems. On the one hand, this leads to certain not uncommon structures of the drama to be impossible to encode within the TEI. For example, the blend of speech prefix and genuine stage direction in "Pendant ce temps, ADRIEN." has no obvious nor trivial markup within the TEI. On the other hand, the current guidelines tend to mislead practitioners, resulting in poor markup choices. Maybe the most aggravating example occurs whenever a dialog is introduced not with a speech prefix but with a stage direction. In these cases, the dialog is habitually ignored as a speech or the stage direction is changed to conform to our idea of a classic speech prefix. These problems are augmented by the fact that the term “stage direction” lacks a stable equivalent in many languages. The poster explores "impossible" and unconventional stage directions from French, Spanish, and German plays as well as their encoding within the TEI(-adjacent) projects Théâtre Classique, ArteLope, Deutsches Textarchive, and TextGrid Repository. It aims at a productive criticism of the current TEI schemata and guidelines and suggests ways to overcome existing shortcomings.