The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project

Para1The aim of the project is to offer enriched semi-diplomatic editions of the Shakespeare plays included in Douai MS 787, a manuscript that is often mentioned in Shakespeare scholarship and textual studies, but has not been widely available to scholars. The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project offers editions of the six Shakespeare plays, with a first instalment of three plays in early 2024 and a second instalment of the last three plays by the end of 2024.
Para2When G. Blakemore Evans wrote his seminal article on the Douai manuscript in 1962, which was originally part of a festschrift—Studies in English Drama Presented to Baldwin Maxwell, edited by Charles B. Woods and Curt A. Zimansky (Iowa City, State University of Iowa Press, 1962, 158–172, technically Philological Quarterly, number 41)—he was not able to see the manuscript himself, and relied on a microfilm and on second-hand evidence that he acquired through exchanges with the librarian in Douai (ibid. 8). In a 1979 article, Ann-Mari Hedbäck was able to offer a complete material analysis of the manuscript, which she saw just as it was being rebound at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Hedbäck). Since then, there has been only one article on the manuscript, published in 2019 by the Lead Editor of this project (Cottegnies, Shakespeare Anthologized). In light of the current interest in the circulation of Shakespeare texts on the continent and in Recusant culture, and also simply because of the unique editorial interest of the manuscript, it is high time this manuscript was made available to a larger audience of scholars.
Para3Douai MS 787 is important for three reasons. Firstly, it bears witness to the cultural and recreational, or perhaps educational, activities among the English Catholic community in exile in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Secondly, it is a rare example of a manuscript dramatic miscellany, and shows a sophisticated scribal awareness of dramatic form and conventions. This awareness strongly suggests that the manuscript might have been used as a promptbook for a private or semi-public performance or reading. Finally, it contains editorial interventions that predate the so-called birth of Shakespearean editing, showing how readers were engaged in judicious, critical emendations well before Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 London edition. As such, this edition should be a major addition to Shakespeare scholarship by making a unique source finally available to the community.
Para4The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project started as a graduate seminar project at Sorbonne Université in 2021. Thanks to the expertise of the LEMDO team, the support of LEMDO director Janelle Jenstad, and the dedication of developer Côme Saignol, it has developed into an ambitious interface offering three different reading modes for the semi-diplomatic edition of the manuscript.

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.

Bibliography

Cottegnies, Line. Shakespeare Anthologized: Taking a Fresh Look at Douai Manuscript MS787. Actes des congrès de la Société française Shakespeare, 37(2019). DOI 10.4000/shakespeare.4289. http://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/4289.
Evans, G. Blakemore The Douai Manuscript—Six Shakespearean Transcripts (1694–1695). Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 158–172.
Hedbäck, Ann-Mari. The Douai Manuscript Reexamined. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 73.1 (1979), 1–18.

Orgography

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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