Para1There is no title-page and the title of the play is not given. The play covers five full quires. The scribe or the editor adds a list of characters; there was none in F2, the source text. There is no division of acts in this play (as in F2), contrary to what is the case with all the other plays of the Douai collection; it has no scene numbers either. The F2 text only includes an indication for the first act and the first scene; the scribe or editor only retains the mention of Act I. There is no prologue (but this was also the case in F2), but the Douai MS also excludes the Chorus which opens Act 2. In this edition, act numbers have been provided between brackets for the reader’s comfort.

Para2The text of the Douai MS for Romeo and Juliet is relatively clean. It follows F2 consistently, although there are a great number of cuts throughout the play, ranging from a couple of words to passages of a few hundred words. The Douai Romeo and Juliet is the play that is the most heavily abridged of the volume, with cuts amounting to almost a third of the play (almost 1,000 lines), which brings the playtext down to about 2,000 words. The roles of the Nurse and Friar are considerably abridged, as well as generally the comic passages that include bawdy jokes. Romeo’s ramblings about the definition of love at the beginning of Act I (the scene is not numbered), have been cut, like the scene in which Mercutio extemporizes about Queen Mab (usually Act I, Scene 4). The long digressions, like the dialogues between Romeo and Mercutio, Benvolio and Mercutio, and between Romeo and the Nurse or the Friar, are consistently abridged; the scene between Peter and the musicians is left out. As a result the action is deliberately focused on the tragic fate of Romeo and Juliet, but the long soliloquies are often abridged. The cuts serve a higher dramatic efficacy, but some might be explained by moral reasons, for instance when they include bawdy allusions, or Juliet’s threat to kill herself.

Para3 As in the other plays of the MS, the lexis and syntax are often modernized. Archaic spellings and verbal suffixes in -th or -st are often edited by the scribe or editor and they have not been flagged in the collation; neither have lineation changes. The punctuation is fairly light. The F2 text has been edited by the Douai scribe where it is faulty or obscure, and the most significant textual emendations, some of which predate later ones by Rowe or Pope, have been highlighted in the annotations and collations. Only the major departures from F2 have been indicated in the collation, however, and the salient points of the transcription-cum-edition have been flagged in the annotations. Note that the Douai manuscript often substitutes yes for the archaic Ay or I; and my for mine; whereon is frequently replaced by on which. The scribe also uses whe for when. Some substitutions of a plural form for a singular, or vice versa, have not been marked either, unless they were considered to be significant emendations.