Award:
David Bevington Award
Award Year:
2025
Winner: Payne, Deborah C. The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660–1700. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
The committee is delighted to award this year’s Bevington Prize to Deborah C. Payne for The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660–1700, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. This monograph offers a bold new synthesis of and compelling argument about the ambition and ultimate economic failure of the project of Restoration theater. The committee found that Payne’s innovative combination of literary theory with archival research and her elegant writing made this book not only informative and groundbreaking, but also enjoyable and exciting to read.
Honorable Mention: Publicover, Laurence. Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy: Horror, Mystery, and the Oceanic Sublime. Oxford University Press, 2025.
The honorable mention for this year’s Bevington award goes to Laurence Publicover for Fathoming the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy: Horror, Mystery, and the Oceanic Sublime, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. This insightful monograph provides a fresh look at English Renaissance tragedy by focusing on the recurrent imagery of depth and fathoming. This book situates its brilliant analysis of fathoming as a metaphor for knowledge-seeking within wider contexts, not only the theory of tragedy but also interdisciplinary oceanic studies. The committee found Publicover’s work eye-opening, memorable, and engagingly written.
Committee: Carla Della Gatta, Nicole Rice, and E. Maggie Solberg (chair). Awards announcement and presentation took place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2025, at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.