Editorial Procedures

Rationale

Para1This website offers a semi-diplomatic edition of Douai Manuscript 787, which is here made available to the public for the first time, in collaboration with the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmo in Douai, France. The objective has been to provide a reliable lightly-edited transcription of the manuscript reflecting its accidentals and layout, which we believe are often significant. This transcription is wrapped into a critical apparatus that offers the possibility to view images next to the manuscript or separately, as well as various visualization tools, annotations, and collation.
Para2Because no reader will turn to the Douai Manuscript as a first-hand encounter with Shakespeare’s text, the interface has been adapted and customized to be useful to scholars desirous to read, study, or search the text as a source. We hope it will be of interest to Shakespeare scholars, textual scholars in general, historians of drama, and scholars working on Catholics in exile.
Para3For more on the interface and how to use it, see the User Guide.

Principles of this Edition

General

In accordance with LEMDO semi-diplomatic guidelines, we have not disambiguated i/j and u/v, but we have regularized long s.
The text has been rigorously transcribed and the layout of the manuscript respected, including where we believe the scribe’s inconsistencies might indicate revision gestures at successive times.
Abbreviations and symbols used for abbreviations (like cut p for per- or pre-) have not been expanded, although as an optional feature they can be expanded in the user-friendly reading mode.
Deletions in the text have been transcribed, and words or letters written-over provided whenever possible. Conjoined words have not been corrected in the default (original) mode.
Short lacunae (like tears in the paper) are rendered by an ellipsis in the text, with an annotation that describes the textual accidents. Long lacunae (for a part of the page torn-out, for instance) are indicated in the text by a grey box, with an annotation specifying the nature of the lacuna. The missing text is provided in the annotations and supplied from F2, the manuscript’s source.
Occasional reading marks, usually crosses in the margins, are flagged in the annotations.

Folio Numbering

In the edition, the text has two folio numbering sequences. The numbers present in the manuscript, most probably stamped in the nineteenth century at conservation stage, are in the top right. They are provided only on rectos. We have added editorial folio numbers which give each page a number, including versos, to make the process of quoting from the manuscript easier. These numbers, in small type, are placed on the top of each opening in grey. Speech headings are also numbered also for conveniency’s sake.

Stage Directions

In our edition, stage directions feature roughly where they are placed in the manuscript. The layering of stage directions is one of the main difficulties of the transcription-edition. Entrances are usually presented by the scribe as centered and exits either as flush to the right of the page block or directly next to the lines; but at a revision or, perhaps, performance stage, the scribe added new stage directions, often floating around the text or in the margins. These latter stage directions have been treated as additions, and have been tagged as such. They can be highlighted in the enhanced viewing mode and show in pink. When there was doubt about whether a particular stage direction was added as an afterthought or in the moment of the transcription itself, we have not treated it as an addition.
A few stage directions were also added by a later, second hand, more slanted and cramped: these stage directions have also been indicated as additions, and can be highlighted in the enhanced viewing mode, where they show in red.

Critical Apparatus

The text comes with a series of annotations. Textual annotations indicate hand attributions for the additions and offer comments on the most significant departures from the manuscript’s source text, and on the most significant emendations. Commentary annotations comment on salient aspects of the text’s appropriation of F2, especially when it suggests signs of having been prepared with a performance in mind.
The collation is purposefully limited to a comparison between the manuscript and its source, Shakespeare’s Second Folio. We have used the copy of second Folio held at the Legislative Library of British Columbia, digitized and made available by the University of Victoria, as our source-text.
Important: The collation does not record all spelling variants, due to the heavy modernizing of the text by the scribe; neither does it record systematically differences in lineation or punctuation.

The Reading Modes

Para4Our anthology interface provides three main reading modes of the texts, with options that can be activated via the Tools menu (see User Guide). Once on the landing page of each play, click on the Tools menu and click on a radio button to select or change the reading mode:
The Original reading mode (which is the default mode) offers a transcription of the manuscript without any enrichments. The text’s layout has been preserved and all its accidentals reproduced. By clicking the checkbox opening the menu at the top-left of the page, the reader can select Tools to access other reading modes. In the default mode, readers can choose to display the facsimile images by clicking the relevant checkbox.
The Enhanced reading mode allows readers to display the critical apparatus, i.e. the layer of annotations and collation, scribal corrections and additions. They can deselect the box (Display Annotations and Collation, still in the Tools menu) to hide them. In this mode, another option comes clicked by default: it offers readers the possibility of visualizing the corrections and additions. This function allows for a better apprehension of the corrections made by the scribe while writing (hesitations, deletions, overwritten letters, for instance), as well as his corrections and additions of stage directions at an obviously later stage of revision (in pink). The additions include textual additions and extra stage directions. This option also highlights the occasional additions by other hands in bright red. This highlighting is optional and can be unclicked. In this mode, it is still possible to display the images or not.
The Reader-friendly mode of reading offers a cleaned-up display. This is a regularized viewing mode in which all the abbreviations and symbols used for abbreviations are expanded, conjoined words are separated, and deletions in the text are hidden. This version is particularly useful for word searches. In this mode, facsimile images can be displayed by clicking the appropriate box, or not.

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.

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

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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