Hi Samuel,
Great question.
Two points to note,
- Shakespeare is traditionally broken down into lines. The allows the reader to see rhyming couplets, get a sense of rhythm, etc. It's also useful for long soliloquies to be able to reference specific lines.
- The original DB used "[p]" to show new lines. I wasn't aware of any parsing tools which could easily strip that out and replace it with, e.g. >br/<>