Textual Essay
Material Description
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 Davenantin 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 Personæof 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).
Textual Characteristics
Para5The scribe or editor has not been consistent in his transcription strategies, although
there is an effort at regularization. Each 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 appeared 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 only. In all plays, the manuscript layout
is more or less regularized: entrances are 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 three tragedies of the volume. It is worth pointing out that, even though the
manuscript was copied by the same 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 modernizing the text, 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, oaths and bawdy jokes point toa form of 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.
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.
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
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.
Bibliography
Evans, G. Blakemore.
The Douai Manuscript—Six Shakespearean Transcripts (1694–1695).Philological Quarterly 41 (1962): 158–172.
Hedbäck, Ann-Mari.
The Douai Manuscript Reexamined.Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 73.1 (1979): 1–18.
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/Metadata
Authority title | Textual Essay |
Type of text | Paratext |
Publisher | Sorbonne Université and University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform |
Series | Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project |
Source |
Born-digital anthology page written by Line Cottegnies for publication in the Douai 1.0 anthology on the LEMDO platform
|
Editorial declaration | n/a |
Edition | Released with The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project 1.0 |
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 |
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 file is licensed under a CC BY-NC_ND 4.0 license, which means that it is freely downloadable without permission under the following
conditions: (1) credit must be given to the author, Douai 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 Douai
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 codex, France. |