For those of you who aren't familiar with Shakespearean stage-craft, one of the particularly interesting staging conditions of Elizabethan London is that individual actors didn't have copies of the whole play: they had only their own parts, with a few cue words written out for them. As more theatre companies are experimenting with re-creating Shakespeare's staging conditions, more are turning to this form of script distribution under the premise that it forces actors to listen to each other, and allows for some interesting discoveries in rehearsal.
While creating cue scripts is a lot easier with a word processor than it was writing it out by hand 400 years ago, I wrote this script to make generating cue scripts even easier. It's functionality is currently limited to processing files from the MIT Shakespeare, but it supports creating a cue script that includes multiple parts (as many as the end user specifies) because doubling is one of Shakespeare's original staging conditions, too:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# cueScriptGen
#
# Generate a cue script from an MIT Shakespeare File
#
#
# Released under the GPL 2.0 and all that jazz.
#
# This is just a prototype. A more polished version will need further
# testing and development.
#
# Last Revised 12 Dec. 2012 8 PM
use strict;
use warnings;
# The user must give us at least one character name (but may give us
# any number of them), followed by a script file. If they don't,
# print a simple error and exit.
if (@ARGV < 2) {
die "usage is \"cueScriptGen character_1 [character_2 &c] file_name\
+"\n";
}
# We should edit this to either accept a file name or a URL.
# If we force a URL, we can explore transformations based on
# alternative methods of formatting.
# Whatever the file is, it will be the LAST thing in our
# argument list, so pop it off so we have a list of nothing
# but characters.
my $mit_shakes = pop @ARGV;
# Initialize variables.
my $cue_line = "";
my $prev_cue_line = "";
my $act = "";
my $scene = "";
my $new_act = "false";
my $new_scene = "false";
my $line = "";
my $title_of_play = "";
# Open a file or quit with a basic warning if you can't.
open PLAY, $mit_shakes || die "Could not open file: $!\n";
# Step 0.5: Print basic html header info from the file, and
# them some heading info so the reader knows what they're
# looking at.
until ($line =~ m/<\/head>/) {
if ($line =~ m/<title>(.*)<\/title>/) {
$title_of_play = $1;
}
print "$line\n";
$line = <PLAY>;
}
print "</head>\n<body>\n";
print "<h1>$title_of_play</h1>\n";
print '<h2>Cue Script for ';
# This boolean will tell us if we're on the
# first item in the list, which should not
# be preceeded by a comma and a space when
# printing the list of characters.
my $i = 0;
foreach (@ARGV) {
if ($i == 0) {
print "$_";
$i = 1;
}
else {
print ", $_";
}
}
print ". </h2>\n";
# Traverse the file until EOF
while (<PLAY>) {
$line = $_;
# print "</head>\n";
# Step 1: Find a speech block that contains a character that we're l
+ooking for.
# We need to do this for every character left in our arguument list.
+
foreach (@ARGV) {
my $character = $_;
if ($line =~ m/^<a name="speech\d+"><b>$character<\/b>/i) {
# Print the act heading if we haven't yet.
if ($new_act eq "true") {
print "$act\n";
$new_act = "false";
}
# Print the scene headin if we haven't yet.
if ($new_scene eq "true") {
print "$scene\n";
$new_scene = "false";
}
# Step 2: We've found a line of text that matches a block of tex
+t for the
# character we're looking for, so first we need to print their c
+ue line.
# See step 1.5 (below) for details. If the cue line is less than
+ three
# words long, print the line that came before it, too.
$cue_line =~ m/^<a name="\d+\.\d+\.\d+">(.*)</;
my @cue_words = split /\s/, $1;
my $cue_words = @cue_words;
if ($cue_words < 2) {
print "<b>Cue:</b> $prev_cue_line\n$cue_line\n\n";
}
else {
#print "<b>Cue:</b> $cue_line\n\n";
}
# Step 3: Print the entire speech block for the character; you k
+now you're
# at the end of the block when you reach the closing blockquote
while ($line !~ m/<\/blockquote>/) {
print "$line\n";
# We still need to keep track of the cue line, just in case the cu
+e script
# is for an actor who plays two roles with back to back lines.
$prev_cue_line = $cue_line;
$cue_line = $line;
# Read the next line of the file.
$line = <PLAY>;
}
# Step 4: Print the closing blockquote.
print "</blockquote>\n";
}
# Step 1.5: We need to keep track of each line of text as we go, s
+o if the
# line was not a speech heading, see if it's a line of text. If it
+ is, keep it
elsif ($line =~ m/^<a name="\d\.\d+\.\d+"/) {
$prev_cue_line = $cue_line;
$cue_line = $line;
}
# Step 1.6: We should also print act headings.
elsif ($line =~ m/.*<h3>ACT \w+.*/) {
$act = $line;
$new_act = "true";
}
# Step 1.7: We should also print scene headings.
elsif ($line =~ m/.*<h3>SCENE \w+.*/) {
$scene = $line;
$new_scene = "true";
}
}
}
# Last piece of cleanup, close off our HTML elements
print "\n</body>\n</html>\n";
Please feel free to comment and make suggestions for improvements.
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