Chapel of the former English Benedictines in Douai (now part of Lycée Jean-Baptiste Corot). Picture by Peter Potrowl (https://sitemai.eu). CC BY 3.0 license.

The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project

A Digital Edition


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The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project

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The Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, formerly Bibliothèque municipale de Douai, in the northern city of Douai, France, owns a transcript of nine plays, shelfmark MS 787, dated 1694–1695, six by William Shakespeare (mostly transcribed from the 1632 Second Folio) and three by Restoration playwrights. The Shakespeare plays consist of three comedies—Twelfth Night, As You Like It and The Comedy of Errors—and three tragedies—Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. They are bound with Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates (1678), Dryden’s The Indian Emperor (1670) and Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, Part II (1663).
The manuscript was previously owned by, and presumably produced within, one of the Catholic English colleges or monasteries in Douai. Although a Francophone city, Douai, which was part of the Spanish Low Countries until 1678, was one of the most important educational centres for English Catholics abroad in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading and possibly performing Shakespeare’s plays was a part of their formative process that we are just beginning to understand through documents like this manuscript.
This website offers a semi-diplomatic edition of the six Shakespeare plays of MS 787, with optional enriched reading modes.
The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project is a collaboration between Sorbonne Université and LEMDO at the University of Victoria.

Prosopography

Côme Saignol

Côme Saignol is a PhD candidate at Sorbonne University where he is preparing a thesis about the reception of Cyrano de Bergerac. After working several years on Digital Humanities, he created a company named CS Edition & Corpus to assist researchers in classical humanities. His interests include: eighteenth-century theatre, philology, textual alignment, and XML databases.

Eric Rasmussen

Eric Rasmussen is Regents Teaching Professor and Foundation Professor of English at the University of Nevada. He is co-editor with Sir Jonathan Bate of the RSC William Shakespeare Complete Works and general editor, with Paul Werstine, of the New Variorum Shakespeare. He has received the Falstaff Award from PlayShakespeare.com for Best Shakespearean Book of the Year in 2007, 2012, and 2013.

Janelle Jenstad

Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.

Line Cottegnies

Line Cottegnies teaches early-modern literature at Sorbonne Université. She is the author of a monograph on the politics of wonder in Caroline poetry, LʼÉclipse du regard: la poésie anglais du baroque au classicisme (Droz, 1997), and has co-edited several collections of essays, including Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (AUP, 2003, with Nancy Weitz), Women and Curiosity in the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2016), with Sandring Parageau, or Henry V: A Critical Guide (Bloomsbury, 2018), with Karen Britland. She has published on seventeenth-century literature, from Shakespeare and Raleigh to Ahpra Behn and Mary Astell. Her research interests are: early-modern drama and poetry, the politics of translation (between France and England), and women authors of the period. She has also developed a particular interest in editing: she had edited half of Shakespeareʼs plays for the Gallimard bilingual complete works (alone and in collaboration), and, also, Henry IV, Part 2, for The Norton Shakespeare 3 (2016). With Marie-Alice Belle, she has co-edited two Elizabethan translations of Robert Garnier (by Mary Sidney Herbert and Thomas Kyd), published in 2017 in the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translation Series as Robert Garnier in Elizabethan England. She is currently working on an edition of three Behnʼs translations from the French for the Cambridge edition of Behn’s Complete Works

Navarra Houldin

Project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA in History and Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. During their degree, they worked as a teaching assistant with the University of Victoriaʼs Department of Hispanic and Italian Studies. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America.

Orgography

Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes Valmore (DOUA2)

Bibliothèque municipale de Douai (DOUA2)

https://www.bm-douai.fr/
Formerly known as Bibliothèque municipale de Douai.

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

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