Brown University Women Writers Project Research and Encoding Training Materials LG Encoding Guide Poem or play?

This document last updated Tuesday, 09-Jan-2007 10:55:02 EST

Poem or play?

The textbase contains many poems that are "dramatic" in the sense that they represent characters speaking. Quite often the characters' names are printed before they speak, just like in a play, and there may even be things that look like stage directions, eg. (She wails this lament.) Because they look like little plays, do these poems need <SP> and <SPEAKER> tags, and a <CASTLIST>, just like regular plays?

In essence, drama is the real-time portrayal of situated action. It always involves characters doing things (even if just standing still) and usually speaking while they do them; and drama always makes some sort of gestures towards describing that action, by locating it in space or by whatever method. Whether that action is performable or not ("flies up to the Moon", "puts his tongue in his ear") makes less difference than whether we are supposed to understand its taking place as part of our experience of the text. So in deciding whether something is a play, the criterion is whether the "speeches" or the "spokenness" of the piece (which first puts it in the broadly dramatic sphere) are backed up with any kind of substantiating apparatus (acts or behavior attributed to the speakers, locations given or described, a list of names to give you the impression that they are all somehow present, on or off stage, even when not speaking)--or whether, on the contrary, these utterances are just given the kind of assumed speaker that any poem is given, just a little more explicitly named.

When you apply this criterion in practice, it should be easy to tell whether what you are encoding is a play or a poem that has some drama-like features. If you still can't decide, and the context doesn't help (ie. is it in a collection of poems? is the word "play" or "drama" or "poem" in the title? does the author refer to it in a particular way in a preface, perhaps?), get a second opinion.

Now,

• If you're sure you're encoding a play and the play has speeches written in verse, go here
• If you're sure you're encoding a play and the play is in prose but also contains some poems or songs, go here
• If you're sure you are encoding just a poem or song, go here