Para1The Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, the public library in Douai, a city now in the North of France, holds a manuscript that contains nine plays in English, dated 1694–1695, six by Shakespeare and three by Restoration playwrights. It constitutes a rare early instance of a dramatic manuscript miscellany. According to Laura Estill and Arthur Marotti, this miscellany contains six out of the nine manuscript transcripts of complete plays by Shakespeare that were compiled in the seventeenth century, which is an indication of its importance (Marotti and Estill 51).

Para2The manuscript is in a neat, single hand, with a few (probably eighteenth-century) annotations. It contains three comedies (Twelfth Night, As You Like It and The Comedy of Errors) and three tragedies (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth) by Shakespeare, bound together with three Restoration plays—Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates (1678), Dryden’s The Indian Emperor (1670), and Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, Part II (1663). The miscellany gives the impression of having been carefully put together; although the plays were written on separate booklets before being gathered here, the principle of selection seems to have been representativity and variety. It is also very much of its time: the chosen tragedies for instance were particularly fashionable on the Restoration stage. Dated 1694–1695, it was presumably produced within one of the Catholic English colleges or monasteries in Douai.

Para3Although a francophone city, Douai, which belonged to Spanish Flanders until 1667, became in the course of the seventeenth century one of the most important educational centres for English Catholics abroad. The Low Countries had been the destination of many religious exiles from England during the period of the Reformation, Protestants as well as Catholics, and the earliest of the foundations made by the English Catholics were in the area. When he was forced to leave Oxford, Cardinal William Allen founded the English College at Douai in 1568, where a new university had been erected under the patronage of Philip II of Spain. Allen would later be the prime mover behind the Douay Rheims Bible, and the New Testament was published in Rheims in 1582, and the Old Testament in Douai in 1609. What was initially conceived as a provisional settlement until England returned to Catholicism evolved into a parallel community, a seminary for the training of clergy and also, by the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century, a school for boys. Douai thus became one of the main centres for English Catholic exiles. Although the English College was the largest, it was by no means the only English institution of this kind in Douai: the English Benedictines opened a priory dedicated to St. Gregory the Great in 1607, and the English Franciscans opened a friary and a college dedicated to St. Bonaventure (they were known as the English Recollets) in 1617. There were also a Scottish Jesuit College (founded in 1604) and an Irish college (founded in 1603) in Douai.

Para4The English presence endured in Douai until the nineteenth century. For much of the period the buildings of St. Gregory’s were used by the English monks of St. Edmund’s (formerly at Paris) as their monastery and school. The building stayed in their hands until the beginning of the twentieth century, when they left. St. Gregory’s old church was demolished after the French Revolution and a new monastic church designed by Augustus Pugin was erected. The old refectory and Pugin’s Chapel are now part of Lycée Jean-Baptiste Corot—one of the few architectural witnesses of the English presence in Douai after the heavy destructions of the two World Wars.

Para5The Douai public library was created in 1767, but it seems likely that the manuscript (along with the other English printed books and manuscripts that it still holds) entered the collections some time after 1794, which is when the religious institutions were seized as part of the revolutionary settlements. MS 787 bears the stamp of the Bibliothèque publique Douai, a name that was used only until the end of the nineteenth century, when it became the Bibliothèque municipale.

Para6Although it bears no mark of provenance, MS 787 must have belonged to one of the English colleges, seminaries, or monasteries, possibly the Benedictines of St. Gregory’s. Another manuscript of the Douai library (shelfmark MS 788), which appears to have been catalogued at the same time as MS 787, is a poetry miscellany including Restoration poems and satires, but no drama. According to the old library catalogue, it once belonged to the English Benedictines. About MS 787, the catalogue mentions only that it probably comes from one of the English convents (not to be understood in its meaning of nunneries, since there were no English Catholic convents for nuns in Douai).

Para7MS 787 has been linked by G. Blakemore Evans to a manuscript of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar held in the Folger library; Evans thought that both manuscripts were derived from a common manuscript source (MS va85), while most of the other Shakespeare transcripts in MS 787 were derived from F2 (Evans). However, as Ann Mari Hedbäck has convincingly shown in a 1979 article, Folger MS va85 is in fact derived from Douai MS 787 (Hedbäck). Apart from an incomplete version of Julius Caesar, missing most of the last scene, Folger library MS Va85 also includes a selection of poetry from the Restoration, and in particular four of the poems which, intriguingly, also feature in Douai MS 788. This possible triangulation suggests that whoever copied Julius Caesar from Douai MS 787 might also have had access to Douai MS 788 at the same time, which points to a common provenance—possibly the English Benedictines, although this suggestion cannot be proven with absolute certainty.

Para8As we now know from the work of Suzanne Gossett, Alison Shell and Martin Wiggins (among others), English colleges and seminaries abroad, most particularly Jesuit colleges, had a rich theatrical culture. Recent research around the Shakespeare First Folio discovered in 2014 in the neighbouring city library of Saint-Omer has shown that Shakespeare was certainly read and perhaps even performed there in the English Jesuit College (Cottegnies, Saint-Omer Folio). Saint-Omer, also Spanish-held until 1678, is about 100 km from Douai. It was also an English educational centre in the heart of the Flanders, but dominated by the Jesuits until 1762, when they were ousted from France. Douai MS 787 also suggests an early Catholic interest in Shakespeare in college, seminary, or monastery. The Douay College Diaries, chronicles that cover 150 years of life at the English College, reveal that public performances, sometimes open to the city, as well as private ones, were held there, in the refectory or in one of the halls—sometimes in the neighbouring Jesuit Collège d’Anchin, which had a purpose-built hall for these kinds of events (Burton and Williams, I: 238, 270). However, almost all of the recorded school performances are of Latin hagiographic plays (see Cottegnies, Saint-Omer Folio). The performances were sometimes followed by an unspecified comedy (which served as an interlude), most generally a farcical entertainment that could be in English, or include some English, but the title is rarely recorded. This is consistent with two manuscript plays held at the Douai library: one is a Biblical tragedy in Latin performed around 1639 in one of the English Jesuit Colleges, entitled Crispu, a hagiographic play, the other a multilingual farce, Oswinus, that was performed by boys at the Scots Jesuit College of Douai in June 1697, mostly in Latin but interspersed with cues in English and French.

Para9There is evidence that points to the fact that fully-fledged plays in English could also have been performed or used in excerpts in English Colleges in the seventeenth century and increasingly so in the eighteenth century, in spite of official regulations like the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum that forbade them. Although there are no official records of English plays performed in public (or private) in English either at Douai or Saint-Omer in the seventeenth century, the English College in Rome still holds several manuscript plays in English. It is likely therefore that English plays were also occasionally performed in Douai, in private or on semi-public occasions. The provenance and associations of MS 787 once more draw attention to a milieu of Catholic readers of Shakespeare and suggest possible performances or readings of his plays in the context of a college or a religious institution (see Cottegnies, Shakespeare Anthologized).

Para10In light of his previous work on printed promptbooks, G. Blakemore Evans suggested that the manuscript should also be seen as a promptbook with a private performance (or reading) in mind (Evans). Promptbooks, understood in the sense that Shattuck has given the term as dramatic texts that can reflect various stages of preparation of the text, are usually annotated printed texts—perhaps because manuscript promptbooks often did not survive. If read as a promptbook, Douai MS 787 is unique then, because it is a seemingly organized collection (Marotti and Estill 64). It also reveals a local, manuscript appropriation of printed texts, tailored to the needs, and tastes, of an editor-reviser whose milieu can be identified as a Catholic community of exiles.