Douai Manuscript: Annotations on Twelfth Night

Orsino Duke of
This is the first list of characters for this play (the first printed one is in Rowe’s edition). The first page of the play starts on the verso of the first page in the bound manuscript. The recto of that page carries several pen trials; there is no title. The top of the page is damaged, missing a whole strip of paper. The missing information must have included something like The Names of the Actors, and perhaps the first category, Men, since this particular list keeps men and women separate (which is not always the case with the Dramatis Personae in this manuscript. The missing word is Illyria. Note that Valentine does not feature in this list, but it is probably an oversight, as he is unlikely to have been mentioned before the character with the highest rank.
Capers awkward=ly
The stage direction Exeunt (F2) is missing in Douai, but this stage direction, indicative of a stage business, was added by a later second hand. This is one of several additional stage directions added in the right margin probably later in the eighteenth century in a slanted, thin handwriting.
C:
This speech-heading was added on a second reading by the scribe-editor.
seed
Misreading for feed (F2).
thou
Used for though (F2) here and in other instances in the play.
Song
The Douai MS excises the Fool’s songs from the play, here and in the denouement.
Stage direction and final song omitted
The Douai MS excises two of the songs of the play. The final song is also the epilogue of the play, promising another performance. Perhaps it was thought unnecessary given that this manuscript was not meant for a public performance.
I Seb:
The scribe erroneously started a line beginning with the letter I, which he then half rubbed, and added a speech heading on the same line.
not / Not
Accidental repetition.
fa
The scribe obviously started the first word of the following line and changed his mind, but the two letters are not crossed out.
of / of
Accidental repetition.

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.

William Shakespeare

Bibliography

Rowe, Nicholas, ed. The Works of Mr William Shakespear. 6 vols. London, 1709; rpt. 8 vols. 1714. ESTC T138296.
Shakespeare, William. Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. London: Robert Allot, 1632. STC 22274. ESTC S111233.

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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