Possibly prose in PlayShakespeare editions

Thanks, Michael! We'll take a look and respond here with any questions/comments. Some lines are definitely open to interpretation so you may have hit on some of those.

Unfortunately, you changed the encoding on the XML files and all the punctuation changes show up (and some of your formatting changes) when trying to diff-compare the files. That means hundreds of changes per file. Is there another way you can summarize/show the differences in what you did?

I'll see what I can figure out. All I did was run it through Ruby's XML parser and add some attributes, so I don't know what there were so many changes.

I've attached a zip file of the plays that have what appear to be prose lines that are tagged as verses. Just search for the possibly-prose attribute.

There are also a few files in which a <speaker> element had a short name that wasn't listed in any <persname> elements. For example, for this tag from Richard III:

<speaker long="All Ghosts">ALL GHOSTS.</speaker>

There is no <persname> element for "ALL GHOSTS.", but there is for "ALL GHOSTS" (no period). Those changes are marked with a comment that starts with "CHANGE:", like this:

<!-- CHANGE: Changing "ALL GHOSTS." (which isn't defined in any persname element) to "ALL GHOSTS" -->

Thanks, Michael! We'll take a look.

As far as the names are concerned, we did a pretty big review/cleanup on names in the last revision. It looks like you found the one line we missed.Thanks!

OK, we've reviewed these edits and here are the conclusions:

1. Your prose/verse changes for the following plays were incorporated:

• All's Well That Ends Well


• Cymbeline


• Double Falsehood


• Hamlet


• Henry 4.2


• Henry 5


• Henry 6.1


• Henry 6.3


• Henry 8


• King Lear


• Love's Labour's Lost


• Macbeth


• Merry Wives


• Midsummer Night's Dream


• Pericles


• Richard 3


• Taming of the Shrew


• Timon of Athens


• Troilus & Cressida


• Twelfth Night

2. The change for Comedy of Errors was not made. One of the lines identified was already tagged as prose and the other two are rhyming verse lines (though not iambic pentameter).

3. Two of the changes for Othello were made, but the third identified a verse line that was missing a break. So this line was corrected to be two verse lines instead of one.

4. The change for Sir Thomas More was not made because the line was missing a break (like in Othello). So this line was corrected to be two verse lines instead of one.

All in all these are great improvements and will be incorporated into the next release of the XML files. Thank you, Michael!