Para1The Douai MS is a small folio measuring 22.2 cm x 17 cm, which is approximately the size of a seventeenth-century printed quarto play. It contains 317 leaves. It is bound in vellum, with a manuscript title in ink on the spine reading English Comedys and tragedys, with Shakespear Lee Dryden Davenant in a different handwriting underneath. There are no preliminaries or a general title-page. The first page, which is covered with a number of pen trials and doodles, is missing its top. The binding has been dated in or around 1697, during a restoration undertaken at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in the late 1970s when it was revealed that a fragment of a printed title-page from a 1697 French prayer book printed in Béthune (a city about 50 km away from Douai) had been used for reinforcement.

Para2The manuscript is made up of sheets of paper folded once and generally gathered into groups of four half sheets or quires. Twelfth Night covers four full quires; As You Like It four full quires and one gathering of two half sheets; The Comedy of Errors three full quires and one gathering of three half sheets; Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth five full quires each; Mithridates and The Indian Emperor five full quires and one gathering of three half sheets each; and The Siege of Rhodes, Part 2 four full quires. Each play starts on a new quire, except the last play, The Siege of Rhodes: the scribe started copying Davenant’s play on the verso of the fifth leaf of the previous gathering. The recto of the sixth leaf is left blank and the scribe copied the Dramatis Personæ of Davenant’s play on the verso. The first leaf of the first gathering of Twelfth Night has been glued to the inside of the front. The first leaf of the first quire of Macbeth is missing. The folios are not numbered by the scribe, but folio numbers were later stamped, probably in the nineteenth century, in the right-hand corner of each recto page. The scribe uses catchwords only in Julius Caesar to mark the end of its four quires.

Para3Seven of the nine plays end with a date which is either 1694 or 1695; the plays were not bound in the order of composition. Twelfth Night, the first play in the volume, is dated 13 June 1694; the second play, As You Like It 9 March 1694/5; Comedy of Errors, 1694, like Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. The following play, Mithridates, is dated 1695; the scribe has also copied its imprimatur, on the verso of f. 210: Licensed March 28 1678. The last two plays are not dated.

Para4The manuscript is a fair copy written in the same hand, with very occasional additions by a later hand, writing in a handwriting that is thinner and more slanted and in ink that is slightly darker. The additions of this later hand consist in a few additional stage directions (in English). These are present in four Shakespeare plays (all except As you Like It and Macbeth), and this annotator has also added one stage direction on f. 280 (in The Indian Emperor).

Para5Each play is preceded with a descriptive list of characters. There were no lists of characters in any of the Folios of Shakespeare’s works for the six Shakespeare plays included here. The Douai Manuscript includes the very first known dramatis personae for four of these plays, i.e. the three comedies and Romeo and Juliet. A list of characters had already been published in the 1673 Quarto of Macbeth and in the 1684 Quarto of Julius Caesar.

Para6Four of these plays are divided into acts and scenes, and one, Comedy of Errors, only into acts (with only the first scene of the first act indicated). Romeo and Juliet includes an indication for the first act and the first scene only. In all plays, the layout is regularized with entrances usually centered and final exits aligned to the right.

Para7All plays are transcribed from a printed source. The Shakespeare plays are copied from the 1632 Folio. For the Restoration plays, the scribe used the 1681 Quarto of Dryden’s The Indian Emperor, the 1685 Quarto of Lee’s Mithridates, and probably the 1663 Quarto of Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes (see Evans and Hedbäck).

Para8Spelling and syntax are consistently modernized, according to Restoration standards, but punctuation is generally light, markedly lighter in the three comedies than in the last three plays of the volume. It is worth pointing out that, even though the manuscript was copied by the hand over a relatively short period, neither the punctuation nor the spelling are consistent from one play to the other, and sometimes not even within the same play. The scribe frequently provides reformulations of the F2 texts, changing the word order, or providing alternative versions of the dialogue. They occasionally edit the F2 text when erroneous, and provide a few original emendations, which show the work of a careful editor—whether the latter is the same person as the scribe is a moot point. The text of F2 is occasionally abridged with a view to dramatic efficiency. Some emendations and corrections concerning religious allusions and bawdy jokes point to light expurgation. Each of these potentially meaningful interventions are flagged in the annotations and lists of collations for each play.

Para9The scribe uses common scribal abbreviations. It must be noted that Julius Caesar contains many more abbreviations than the other plays, in particular Latin abbreviations and glyphs like ꝯ (con), ꝑ (minuscule cut p for per, pre, or par) and the glyph ꝰ (for -us), which seem to reflect semi-professional or professional scribal habits.