Dramatis personae: <castList>

At the beginning of dramatic texts it is customary to provide a list of the characters in the drama, dramatis personae. The TEI has a set of tags that serve to identify this list accurately, and we will use some of these.

The main tag is <castList> (casting list), which, as its name indicates, contains the list of characters or <castItem>, with the following structure:

<div type="personae" xml:id="grc.personae">
	<head>Τὰ τοῦ δράματος πρόσωπα</head>
	<castlist>
		<castitem>
			<role xml:id="grc.Eteocles">Ἐτεοκλής</role>
		</castitem>
		<castitem>
			<role xml:id="grc.Mensajero">Ἄγγελος</role>
		</castitem>
		… etc …
	</castlist>
</div>

To be visible in the table of contents of the work, the list of characters must be included in a <div> of @type="personae", with a corresponding <head> describing its content. In the example, the header that appears in our reference edition for this dramatis personae of a play in Greek is shown, but each work or each translation will have its own header.

This <div> will also have its corresponding @xml:id so that this list can be aligned with the list that will appear in the translations.

The <castList> itself will contain all the <castItem> needed, composed only of the <role> of each one. We need to assign a language-prefixed @xml:id to each <role> because we will refer to it every time the character has an intervention throughout the work. For each translation of the work, the @xml:id id of the characters will be the same, simply changing the language prefix. The node of each <role> will be the name of the character in the original language and in the translations.

In case you need to group some of the characters within the general list, you can use the <castGroup>, tag, adding an internal <head> that identifies each group:

<div type="personae" xml:id="grc.personae">
	<head>Τὰ τοῦ δράματος πρόσωπα</head>
	<castlist>
		<castitem>
			<role xml:id="grc.Eteocles">Ἐτεοκλής</role>
		</castitem>
		<castitem>
			<role xml:id="grc.Mensajero">Ἄγγελος</role>
		</castitem>
		<castgroup>
			<head>Κωφὰ πρόσωπα</head>
			<castitem>
				<role xml:id="grc.Eurisakes">Εὐρισάκης</role>
			</castitem>
			<castitem>
				<role xml:id="grc.Pedagogo">Παιδαγωγός</role>
			</castitem>
		</castgroup>
		… etc …
	</castlist>
</div>

It is advisable always to use @xml:id that are short and easily identifiable for each character, to facilitate their later inclusion in the body of the work.

Important Tags

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