Douai Manuscript: Annotations on Julius Caesar

assemble … sort;
MS annotation in left-hand margin by a later hand: x (cross).
Enter … Flavius
MS annotation in left-hand margin by a later hand: x (cross).
Scene 2a
Scene numbers not in F2. The scribe adds scene numbers throughout the play.
lett … you
MS annotation in left-hand margin by a later hand: x (cross).
Manent
The Douai scribe shows a scrupulousness about entries and exits which (here and elsewhere in this act) makes him specify that Brutus and Cassius need to remain on stage during the next scene.
councell
Erroneous repetition of the word councell (the scribe’s eye was obviously drawn to the previous line) – not in F2.
Scen: 5a
Numbering error for Scene 4. Number 4 is simply skipped.
Caesar … contrive
Speech attribute missing, as in F2 where the letter is presented in italics after the stage directions. Letter and speech spoken by Artemidorus.
Alecto
This original emendation substitutes Alecto, one of the Erinyes of Greek mythology, the goddesses responsible for punishing wrongdoing, for Ate, the goddess of mischief, ruin, and rash action.
know
Closing parenthesis missing.
not meet: you know
No colon in F2. By punctuating this line differently, the Douai editor introduces a different nuance.
stand
Speech attribute 1 Soldier missing, as in F2.
stand
Speech attribute 2 Soldier missing, as in F2.
stand
Speech attribute 3 Soldier missing, as in F2.
They come forward.
They in the stage directions must refer to Titinus and Lucilius whose entries are are otherwise not indicated. The comic scene of the visit of the Cynick poet is entirely excised here, perhaps because it is a distraction from the main action. It is the most significant cut in this play which otherwise follows the text very closely.
force
This word at the end of the page was accidentally omitted by the Douai scribe and added by a later hand, different from the one that adds several stage directions in the margins.
upon my pay
pay is a transcription error for Boy; this intriguing slip could indicate that the Douai manuscript might have been copied, at least in part, from an intermediary manuscript source (as suggested by G. Blakemore Evans in 1962), and perhaps not from F2 directly throughout, although there are no other instances of this.
I know not sir.
Lucius’s cue, which must have been accidentally left out by the scribe, was added on a second reading on the same line as Brutus’s cue; the scribe also corrected the speech attribution of the following line, which he had first attributed to Lucius.
And look where Publius is come to fetch me
This line is a continuation of Caesar’s speech. The scribe adds a scene break in the middle of a speech without indicating that Caesar remains on stage and continues to speak.
[Ghost descends
This stage direction is one of several that were added by a later second hand, usually in the right margin. It points to an interesting stage business which makes Caesar’s ghost descends from where it had first appeared, i.e. above, perhaps on a gallery or on a balcony.
Murellus
This word, written in the bottom margin, was half cut at the binding stage.
from the from the
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

Evans, G. Blakemore The Douai Manuscript—Six Shakespearean Transcripts (1694–1695). Philological Quarterly, 41 (1962), 158–172.

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.

Metadata

Authority title Douai Manuscript: Annotations on Julius Caesar
Type of text Annotation
Short title Douai JC: Annotations
Publisher Sorbonne Université and University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project
Source
Annotations written by Line Cottegnies
Editorial declaration Edited according to the Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project Editorial Procedures
Edition Released with The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project 1.0
Sponsor(s)

The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project

Anthology 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
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, 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. 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 787 and 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.