The Douai As You Like It: Introduction

Para1The text of the Douai MS for this play is very clean, and follows F2 quite closely. The play covers four full quires and one gathering of two half-sheets. As in other plays, the lexis and syntax are often modernized, and the punctuation is very light (and occasionally erratic). Most of the changes made to the text of F2 are word substitutions or changes to the word order, but there are many cuts, sometimes whole scenes, while comic scenes are abridged with a view to excising the bawdy jokes but also perhaps for dramatic efficiency. Most of the songs (except Hymen’s final one) are excised, and the scenes in which the Clown, Touchstone, wooes Audrey are cut. The Douai editor has also left out most of the fool’s bawdy jokes. They have also edited the F2 text in some places where it was faulty. The Douai text includes a list of characters for the first time; it follows F2 in including a complete act and scene division. There are also a series of substantial variants and emendations which often predate Rowe, Theobald, Pope, or Malone. They are recorded in the Collation and Annotation lists.
Para2Only the major departures from F2 have been indicated in the collation, however, and only the salient points of the transcription-cum-edition have been flagged in the annotations. Variants in punctuation or lineation are not recorded, for instance. Note that the Douai manuscript significantly substitutes yes for the archaic Ay or I, or my for mine, if for and, and of which for whereof. These frequent substitutions are not listed in the collation. Some substitutions of a plural form for a singular, or vice versa, have not been marked either, unless they were seen as significant emendations.
Para3Stage directions are fairly precise in the Douai manuscript of As You Like It, and contrary to what is the case with the other plays of the manuscript there are no interventions from the later eighteenth- or nineteeth-century hand in this play (marked as Hand 2 elsewhere). The folio numbers are stamped on the recto of each page, but the hand identified by former librarian Pierre-Jacques Lamblin as that of P.J. Guilmot (librarian of the Douai library from 1806 to 1834), who added the title of Twelfth Night in French on f. 1 (recto) has also supplemented a missing number as f. 37Bis in As You Like It (Hand 4).

Prosopography

Abby Flight

Remediator and encoder, 2024–present. Abby Flight completed her BA in English at the University of Victoria in 2024, and is now an MA student focusing on Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

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, L’Éclipse 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 Shakespeare’s 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 Behn’s translations from the French for the Cambridge edition of Behn’s Complete Works

Louise Fang

Louise Fang is a Lecturer in English Literature at the Université Sorbonne Paris Nord. She has published a monograph on Shakespeare and games (Shakespeare et les jeux, Classiques Garnier, 2021) and is working on early modern drama. She is a transcriber and an editor in the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project.

Mahayla Galliford

Assistant project manager, 2024-present; research assistant, encoder, and remediator, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated with a BA (Hons) English from the University of Victoria in 2024. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. She continues her studies through the UVic English master’s program and focuses on editing and encoding girls’ manuscript writing in collaboration with LEMDO.

Navarra Houldin

LEMDO project manager 2022–present. Textual remediator 2021–present. Navarra Houldin (they/them) completed their BA with a major in history and minor in Spanish at the University of Victoria in 2022. Their primary research was on gender and sexuality in early modern Europe and Latin America. They are continuing their education through an MA program in Gender and Social Justice Studies at the University of Alberta where they will specialize in Digital Humanities.

William Shakespeare

Bibliography

Malone, Edmond, ed. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare. 10 vols. London: J. Rivingston and Sons, 1790. ESTC T138858.
Pope, Alexander, ed. The works of Shakespear. 6 vols. London: Jacob Tonson, 1725. ESTC N26060.
Rowe, Nicholas, ed. The Works of Mr William Shakespear. 6 vols. London, 1709; rpt. 8 vols. 1714. ESTC T138296.
Theobald, Lewis, ed. The works of Shakespeare: in seven volumes. Collated with the oldest copies, and corrected; with notes, explanatory, and critical. 7 vols. London: A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch, J. Tonson, F. Clay, W. Feales, and R. Wellington, 1733. ESTC T138606.

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.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Notes on scribal hands

Douai MS Hand 2
A second, later hand is used in the Douai MS, which is MS 787 in the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore repository. It is responsible for the insertion of stage directions. This later hand is smaller, thinner, and more slanting than the main scribal hand. It does not appear in Macbeth.
Douai MS Hand 4
A fourth hand appears in the Douai MS, that of the Librarian, in Twelfth Night.

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