The Douai Julius Caesar: Introduction

Para1The text of the Douai MS for this play is very clean, and follows the F2 text quite closely. It is not entirely impossible that an intermediary manuscript source was used in parts, as suggested by an odd transcription error in A4 Sc 4 (this edition), which has pay instead of Boy (see Sp632). As with the other plays, the lexis and syntax are modernized, and the punctuation is very light (and often erratic). Most of the changes made to the text of F2 concern word substitutions. Where faulty, the F2 text has been occasionally corrected by the Douai scribe-cum-editor. The editor’s major area of intervention concerns scene numbers, which are consistently added throughout the play (where there were none in F2), as well as the addition of a list of characters. It is different from the list of characters that was included in the 1684 Quarto of the play. There seem to be two layers of scene numbers, some added in the margins on a second reading. Another (later) hand has added several stage directions in the margins in a slanting handwriting.
Para2Only the major departures from F2 have been indicated in the collation, however, and the salient points of the transcription-cum-edition have been flagged in the annotations. Note that the Douai manuscript significantly substitutes yes for the archaic Ay or I, or my for mine, if for and, and of which for whereof. Some substitutions of a plural form for a singular, or vice versa, have not been marked either, unless they constitute significant emendations. These frequent substitutions are not indicated in the collation.
Para3The author of the Douai MS uses many abbreviations in this play, especially Latin ones like ꝯ (con), ꝑ (minuscule cut p for per, pre or par) and ꝰ for final -us, which seem to reflect semi-professional or professional scribal habits. These abbreviations are used much less freely in the other plays. Only in this play does the scribe use catchwords to mark the end of each quire.

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

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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