Bundled Plays

The Bundled Plays

Understudy ships with ten complete plays built in. Open the Script Browser in Author mode and any line is one tap away.

All ten are public-domain texts from Project Gutenberg, restructured as JSON for runtime use. You don't need to type a single line of dialogue to author a working blocking — pick a play, pick a scene, drop the whole thing.

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The library

Play	Author	Translation	Acts	Dialogue lines
Hamlet	William Shakespeare	(Folger / Project Gutenberg)	5	1,108
Macbeth	William Shakespeare	(Folger / PG)	5	647
A Midsummer Night's Dream	William Shakespeare	(Folger / PG)	5	484
The Seagull	Anton Chekhov	Constance Garnett	4	627
The Cherry Orchard	Anton Chekhov	Julius West	4	643
Three Sisters	Anton Chekhov	Julius West	4	754
Uncle Vanya	Anton Chekhov	Constance Garnett	4	525
The Importance of Being Earnest	Oscar Wilde	(PG)	3	873
Salomé	Oscar Wilde	Lord Alfred Douglas	1	362
Ghosts	Henrik Ibsen	William Archer	3	1,123

That's 7,146 lines of dialogue across three centuries of theatrical canon, ready to attach to your blockings.

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Why these ten

The selection isn't random. It's:

• Foundational — Shakespeare and Chekhov anchor most theatre training programs.
• Rangey — comedy (Wilde, Midsummer), tragedy (Macbeth, Ghosts), naturalism (Three Sisters), poetic-symbolic (Salomé). You can stress-test Understudy across very different rhythms.
• Public domain — all ten are out of copyright in every major jurisdiction. We can ship them with the app.
• Translated where needed — the Russian and Norwegian plays use translations that are themselves public domain (Garnett, West, Archer). We chose readable translations over scholarly ones.

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Picking lines

In Author mode, tap any mark → Pick from script… → the Script Browser opens.

Top of the dialog:

• Play picker — switch between all ten
• Scene filter — drill down to a specific Act / Scene
• Search — find any character's line by typing part of their name or a phrase

Already-attached lines get a green ✓ on the right. Tap any other line to attach it.

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Drop Whole Scene — the killer feature

Each scene header in the Script Browser has a Drop scene chip. Tap it, and Understudy:

1. Walks every dialogue line in the scene
2. Buckets lines by speaker (one mark per speaker turn, max 4 lines per beat)
3. Auto-lays out a zig-zag path: 1.2 m forward spacing, 0.8 m alternating lateral offsets
4. Yaws each mark towards the next beat
5. Drops them all into your blocking with lines pre-populated

A 20-beat scene becomes a walkable 20-mark blocking in under a second.

This is how you go from "I want to rehearse Act I Scene I of Hamlet" to "we're rehearsing Act I Scene I of Hamlet" with no typing. Drop the scene, hit Perform, walk the path.

You can edit, drag, delete after the fact. The auto-layout is a starting point, not a final blocking.

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How the scripts are parsed

If you're curious about the engineering layer:

• Shakespeare uses scripts/parse_hamlet.py — handles SCENE-numbered format with line numbers, identifies speakers as ALL-CAPS lines on their own.
• Wilde and Chekhov use scripts/parse_modern.py — flexible ACT/SCENE detection, handles two speaker shapes (CHARACTER.\n dialogue like Wilde and CHARACTER. dialogue inline like Chekhov).
• Salomé uses scripts/parse_salome_html.py — Wilde's HTML edition has a different structure (<p>CHARACTER</p><p>text</p>) and needs HTML parsing.
• Ghosts uses the same modern parser, with stage directions tagged separately so they import as .note cues instead of .line cues.

All parsed JSON files live in Understudy/Resources/ and ship as part of the app bundle. You can extend the library by:

1. Finding a public-domain text on Project Gutenberg
2. Running it through one of the parsers (or writing a new one)
3. Dropping the resulting JSON into Resources/ and adding it to Scripts.all in Script.swift

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Adding your own play

There's no in-app "import script" feature yet (planned for v0.31). For now:

1. Get the text in a clean format (.txt from PG works).
2. Use one of the parsers in scripts/ as a template.
3. Output to Resources/yourplay.json matching the existing JSON shape ({"title": "...", "acts": [{"sceneIndex": 1, "lines": [{"kind": "line", "character": "NAME", "text": "..."}]}]}).
4. Add Script.PlayRef(id: "yourplay", title: "Your Play", asset: "yourplay") to Scripts.all.
5. Rebuild — the new play appears in the picker.

We'd love to expand the library. If you parse something, send a PR.

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What's NOT bundled and why

• Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape) — still in copyright until 2059 in Europe.
• O'Neill (Long Day's Journey Into Night) — copyright is jurisdiction-specific; check before adding.
• Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Sarah Kane — all in copyright.
• Greek tragedy — Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus would be public-domain, but the translations are not always. Most modern translations are still copyrighted.
• Restoration / Restoration comedy — Wycherley, Sheridan, Behn would all work; we just haven't parsed them yet.

If you want a play that's not in the public domain, you'll need to type or import the lines manually for now.

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Where to next

• Author's Guide § Script Browser — using the bundled plays in the editor.
• Quick Start — the 90-second workflow, which uses Hamlet as the demo.