The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project
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The Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, formerly Bibliothèque municipale de Douai, in the northern city of Douai, France,
owns a transcript of nine plays, shelfmark MS 787, dated 1694–1695, six by William
Shakespeare (mostly transcribed from the 1632 Second Folio) and three by Restoration
playwrights. The Shakespeare plays consist of three comedies—Twelfth Night, As You Like It and The Comedy of Errors—and three tragedies—Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. They are bound with Nathaniel Lee’s Mithridates (1678), Dryden’s The Indian Emperor (1670) and Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes, Part II (1663).
The manuscript was previously owned by, and presumably produced within, one of the
Catholic English colleges or monasteries in Douai. Although a Francophone city, Douai,
which was part of the Spanish Low Countries until 1678, was one of the most important
educational centres for English Catholics abroad in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Reading and possibly performing Shakespeare’s plays were a part of their
formative process that we are just beginning to understand through documents like
this manuscript.
This website offers a semi-diplomatic edition of the six Shakespeare plays of MS 787,
with optional enriched reading modes.
The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project is a collaboration between Sorbonne Université and LEMDO at the University of Victoria.
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, 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
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.
Orgography
Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes Valmore (DOUA2)
Bibliothèque municipale de Douai (DOUA2)
https://www.bm-douai.fr/Formerly known as Bibliothèque municipale de Douai.
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/Metadata
Authority title | The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project |
Type of text | Anthology |
Publisher | Sorbonne Université and University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online platform |
Series | Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project |
Source |
Anthology led by Line Cottegnies. First published as Douai 1.0 on 2024-04-02. Republished with additional three plays
as Douai 1.1 on 2025-07-03.
|
Editorial declaration | n/a |
Edition | Released with The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project 1.1 |
Sponsor(s) |
The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript ProjectAnthology Lead: Line Cottegnies. The project is a scientific collaboration between Sorbonne Université and the University
of Victoria.
|
Encoding description | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines |
Document status | published, peer-reviewed |
Funder(s) |
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Fonds France Canada pour la Recherche / France-Canada Research Fund Sorbonne Université University of Victoria |
License/availability |
This project is licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that its files are freely downloadable without permission under the
following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the author, the Douai Shakespeare
Manuscript Project, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and/or data; (2)
the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes
of academic review and citation); and (3) commercial uses are not permitted without
the knowledge and consent of the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project, the editor,
and LEMDO. This license allows for pedagogical use of the critical paratexts in the
classroom. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training
large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial
intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are
strictly prohibited.
Images provided by the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore are licensed under
a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. They can be downloaded and reproduced in scholarly publications and presentations
provided that credit is included. Credit must include the phrase:
Used by kind permission of the Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Douai ,and must include the shelfmark MS 787and the folio numbers. We ask that a copy of any scholarly publication be sent to the Douai library via email attachment to the Curator, currently Jean Vilbas at jvilbas@ville-douai.fr, or via mail to the following address: Bibliothèque Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 61 Parvis Georges Prêtre, BP 20625, 59506 Douai cedex, France. |