[lxml] suppress namespace prefix in printouts

If you use lxml to extract elements from an XML text associated with a schema, you must give the program the element name with its namespace, and it will print out the element with its name space. Thus a TEI element <w xml:id="someID">Mary</w> will be written out to the outputfile as <w xmlns="http://www.tei-c.org/ns/1.0" xml:id="someID">Mary</w> Is there a way of suppressing the name space so that the output looks like the input, i.e. <w xml:id="someID">Mary</w> Martin Mueller Professor emeritus of English and Classics Northwestern University