Shakespeare anthologized: Taking a fresh look at Douai Manuscript MS787

Abstract

This essay looks at an exceptional manuscript collection of plays, dated 1694-1695 and held at the Bibliothèque municipale of Douai, which I am currently editing for The Internet Shakespeare Editions (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/). It consists in a transcript of six plays by Shakespeare, bound together with three Restoration plays by Nathaniel Lee, John Dryden and William Davenant. The manuscript once belonged to one of the (Catholic) English colleges in Douai. As confirmed by the recently-discovered First Folio in Saint-Omer, English colleges abroad, including Jesuit colleges, had a rich theatrical culture, in which Shakespeare features in a prominent place. G. Blakemore Evans was the first scholar to highlight the importance of the Douai manuscript in 1962. He established that the scribe used the second Folio as copy-text for the Shakespeare plays and pointed out that the transcript contained multiple hitherto-unrecorded readings, which in some instances predate several of the best-known emendations by eighteenth-century scholars like Rowe, or Malone. This paper aims at reconsidering this collection as an anthology, in order to question the uses of the text and the reception of Shakespeare in a Catholic context. This necessarily means thinking about the status of this transcript by looking at the internal as well as external evidence: this essay argues that this collection, which has been interpreted as a promptbook by the critical tradition, i.e. a dramatic manuscript with a view to performance, should also be seen as an edition obeying Restoration editorial standards.