Michael Kallweitt wrote:
George J. Dance@news.novabbs.com (George J. Dance) <George> wrote:
I'm posting to this group for the first time because I've been looking
for a technical term, and haven't been able to find it on the web.
You're welcome! There's not much traffic in here as Usenet has been on a decline for years, and most of us artist ppl aren't into tech anyway.
I understand about the decline. I normally post on rec.arts.poems and alt.arts.poetry.comments, where the same thing has happened.
I'm looking for the term to call the names that appear ore the lines
in a play, indicating which character is speaking those lines.
AFAIK (English is not my mother language) there is no specific term for
this, apart from "character [name]".
I haven't even been able to find any mention of one, so I suspect you're right that there isn't one.
I've been privately thinking of them as "cues," but I'd like to know
the actual term in use so I can talk about them.
A cue is a trigger for some action or effect (light, sound) to happen at
a specific moment. The term is also used in contemporary dance.
Fair enough. The problem is that it's hard to talk about them without having a name for them. Here, let me tell you why I wanted the name; and, if you're interested, feel free to comment.
Some poets have written long poems in the style of plays; we're currently debating whether one 19th-century poem is a play or not. Some insist it does, because the poet's divided it into Acts. My rejoinder would be that it still isn't in the style of a
play, because it lacks those "character [name]" tags; the story isn't told by the characters in dialogue, but by an anonymous narrator. I'm just looking for the best way to state that point.
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