How it Works

In Shakespeare’s work, every line of text has meaning and communicates volumes beyond the individual words. As such, iambic‘s root object is the individual line, or node. Each node is assigned a specific type based upon simple syntactical rules. These rules can be broken out into the following logical groups:

1. Locales

A Locale will be denoted by header formatting (H1-5) and represents a logical break in the forward action of the play. These can be thought of as the entries that may show up in a Table of Contents, and can include: - Act - Scene - Prologue or Epilogue

An Act may have many nested Scene, Prologue, and Epilogue sections.

A Scene will be always be nested under an act Act. A Scene contains speeches, dialogue, and actions.

A Prologue or Epilogue may or may not be nested under an Act and may or may not have the structure of a Scene or an Act.

2. Actions and Directions

Actions and Directions will be denoted by an italicized paragraph of any length and represent a physical action that takes place on stage. These can include: - Character Action (Action) - Stage Direction (Direction) - Entrance/Exit (Entrance or Exit)

An Action object represents an action of a specific character and are usually found within or just after a speech. If these are more than one word (such as Aside), they will either reference the character by pronoun, or begin with To …. In order for iambic to understand that the given paragraph is an Action, the paragraph should be wrapped in brackets (\[]) in addition to italicized. ex: [He brandishes his sword], [To JULIET]).

A Direction is more straightforward - it is simply a stage direction, meaning a paragraph of text which illucidates some on-stage action between any number of characters. A Direction will always be written in third-person omniscient and reference characters by name and be denoted simply by italics. ex: Flourish, They fight, HAMLET stabs CLAUDIUS.

An Entrance or Exit will usually lead or finish with Enter, Exit, or Exeunt and be italicized.

3. Personae

The Persona object is in its own category and is initially denoted by a bolded line preceding a block of dialogue. ex:

 **HAMLET**  
 Not so, my lord, I am too much i'th'sun.

Once a persona is created, that object is tracked throughout the rest of the play.

4. Lines

Finally, the meat of the text. Having filtered out all other syntactical notations, whatever is remaining is considered a line of Dialogue. Dialogue objects represent a single line of spoken word and are grouped within larger Speech objects, which are associated to the character speaking and nested directly under the Scene, Prologue, or Epilogue object in which it occurs.

JSON Schema

The full JSON schema definition is hosted on GitHub. The definition is generated automatically by typical and is available as a constant within the library - from iambic import SCHEMA