Award:
Barbara Palmer Award
Award Year:
2024
Winner: McInnis, David, Matthew Steggle, and Misha Teramura. "Alice Mustian, Playwright." The Review of English Studies (2023): 1-13. DOI: 10.1093/res/hgad104.
McInnis, Steggle, and Teramura introduce readers to the fascinating figure of Alice Mustian, an early seventeenth-century Salisbury woman who wrote plays and put them on in a playhouse she built in her own backyard. This essay presents excellent archival work, recovering Mustian’s identity and contributions as a playwright as well as remedying the relative lack of women’s plays and performance records we have from this period. Furthermore, it demonstrates how such amateur plays, imitating professional theater, point to women as both consumers and creators of theater.
Committee: Tina Fitzgerald, Kirsten Mendoza, and Jeff Stoyanoff (chair). Awards announcement and presentation took place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2024, at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.