Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society: Fall 2005 Newsletter

2005 Fall Newsletter MLA Sessions Fall 2005

MLA 2005—Washington, D.C. • Session 507 (MRDS) Watching the Noonday Demon: Representing Depression and Despair on the Early Stage Thursday, 29 December 3:30-4:45 p.m.

Monroe East, Washington Hilton "Depression, Despair, and Victimization in Early English Drama," Victor Ivan Scherb, Univ. of Texas, Tyler " 'Dolefull News' or 'Joyfull News'? Staging Despair in the Two Endings of Nathaniell Woodes's Conflict of Conscience," Erin E. Kelly, Nazareth Coll.

"Staging Despair in Elizabethan Drama: Wapull, Marlowe, and Shakespeare," Alan Charles Dessen, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Other Sessions of Interest • Session 64 Shakespeare's Music Tuesday, 27 December 7:00-8:15 p.m.

Carolina, Marriott "The Tabor and the Church: Music, Festivity, and Religion in Twelfth Night," Phebe Clare Jensen, Utah State Univ.

"Scoring the Text: Stanley Cavell and Musical Aesthesis," Theodore Wesley Folkerth, McGill Univ.

• Session 121 Gender in Arab Shakespeare Appropriations Wednesday, 28 December 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Hamilton, Washington Hilton

"Glaring Stare: Ophelia on the Arabic Stage," Yvette Khoury, King's Coll. London "Ophelia Was Pushed: Arab Women on the Edge," Margaret Litvin, Univ. of Chicago "Shakespeare vs. Sheherazade: Arab Women Writers and Selective Literary Lineage," Zahr Said Stauffer, Columbia Law School Respondent: Ferial Ghazoul, American Univ. in Cairo • Session 346 Insult, Invective, and Satire Wednesday, 28 December 7:15-8:30 p.m Eisenhower, Marriott "Representing the 'Scottis Natioun' to London: Populism and Propaganda in Satirical Broadsides," Tricia A. McElroy, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor "The Marprelate Controversy and the Menippean Tradition," Joseph Navitsky, Boston Univ.

"The Plots of Late Elizabethan Satire," Matthew A. Greenfield, Coll. of Staten Island, City Univ. of New York • Session 353 Global Contexts for Teaching Othello Thursday, 29 December 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Embassy, Marriott "Othello and Race," Michael Neill, Univ. of Auckland "Othello as an Adventure Play," Jean Elizabeth Howard, Columbia Univ.

"Looking for Othello," Joyce Green MacDonald, Univ. of Kentucky • Session 481 Language and Shakespeare: Beyond Formalism Thursday, 29 December 1:45-3:00 p.m.

Delaware Suite B, Marriott "Shakespeare and the Linguistic Market," Douglas S. Bruster, Univ. of Texas, Austin " 'That Every Word Doth Almost Tel My Name': An Examination of Periphrastic Do in Shakespeare's Sonnets," Gregory Foran, Univ. of Texas, Austin "Haggard Desdemona: Metaphor and Marriage Discourse in Othello," Maria Fahey, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York

• Session 540 Marlowe's Literary and Biblical Influences Thursday, 29 December 3:30-4:45 p.m Roosevelt, Marriott "How Marlowe Read Spenser: Tamburlaine and The Faerie Queene," Steven William May, Georgetown Coll.

"Violence, Love, and Strife: Lucan's Cosmology and Marlowe's Hero and Leander," Pamela Royston Macfie, Univ. of the South "Apocalypse and Marlowe's Tragic Vision," Patrick Ryan, Texas A&M Univ., Texarkana • Session 546 3-D Shakespeare: An American Sign Language Multimedia Event Thursday, 29 December 5:15-6:30 p.m.

Maryland Suite B, Marriott Program sponsored by Gallaudet University. Presiding: Peter Novak, Univ. of San Francisco Speakers: Catherine Rush, Philadelphia, PA; Adrian Blue, Philadelphia, PA • Session 577 Shakespeare's Audience Now Thursday, 29 December 7:15-8:30 p.m.

Delaware Suite A, Marriott "What's the Matter with Shakespeare in Kansas? Regional Sainthood versus NEA Management," Donald K. Hedrick, Kansas State Univ.

"Holding the Mirror Up to Shakespeare: Bald Pate or Pierced Punk?"

Elizabeth A. Charlebois, Saint Mary's Coll. of Maryland "Film Reception and Its Discontents," Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.

Respondent: Barbara Hodgdon, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor • Session 628 Prison Shakespeare Thursday, 29 December 9:00-10:15 p.m Delaware Suite A, Marriott "Shakespeare Behind Bars," Curt L. Tofteland, Kentucky Shakespeare Festival "Adapting Shakespeare: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison," Jean Trounstine, Middlesex Community Coll., MA

"Performing 'To Be': The Hamlet Project of Prison Performing Arts," Margot Sempreora, Webster Univ. " 'Shakespeare Saved My Life': Voices from a Segregated Housing Unit," Laura Bates, Indiana State Univ.

• Session 660 Radical Theatricality and the Baroque Body Friday, 30 December 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Map, Washington Hilton "Theatricality, Legalism, and the King's Two Bodies: The Execution of Charles I," Julie Stone Peters, Columbia Univ.

"Shaking, Quaking, Ranting: Spectacular Dissent," Katherine M. Romack, Stanford Univ.

"Kicking Around the Sun King: Molière's Tartuffe and the Absolutist Body," Matthew Buckley, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick • Session 661 Shakespeare and the Reformation Friday, 30 December 8:30-9:45 a.m.

Virginia Suite C, Marriott A special session. Presiding: Douglas A. Brooks, Texas A&M Univ., College Station Speakers: Elizabeth A. Charlebois, Saint Mary's Coll. of Maryland; Brett Foster, Wheaton Coll., IL; Louise Geddes, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York; Elizabeth Williamson, Evergreen State Coll.; William Rogers, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison Respondent: Glyn Parry, Victoria Univ.

• Session 710 Constructing Marlowe Friday, 30 December 12:00 noon-1:15 p.m.

Wilson A, Marriott "Straightening Out Christopher Marlowe," Jeffrey A. Masten, Northwestern Univ.

"Marlowe and the World Picture," Douglas S. Bruster, Univ. of Texas, Austin "Barabas and Charles I," John L. Parker, Harvard Univ.

Recent Publications Fall 2005

Recent Publications Blayney, Peter W. M., "The Alleged Popularity of Playbooks." Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1 (2005): 33-50.

Brown, Pamela Allen and Peter Parolin, eds., Women Players in England, 1550-1660: Beyond the All-male Stage, Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama, Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2005.

JAMES STOKES "Women and Performance: Evidences of Universal Cultural Suffrage in Medieval and Early Modern Lincolnshire" GWENO WILLIAMS, ALISON FINDLAY AND STEPHANIE HODGSON-WRIGHT "Payments, Permits and Punishments: Women Performers and the Politics of Place" NATASHA KORDA "The Case of Moll Frith: Women's Work and the 'All-Male Stage' BELLA MIRABELLA "'Quacking Delilah's': Female Mountebanks in Early Modern England and Italy" M. A. KATRITZKY "Reading the Actress in Commedia Imagery" JULIE D. CAMPBELL "'Merry, nimble, stirring spirit[s]': Academic, Salon and Commedia dell'arte Influence on the Innamorate in Love's Labour's Lost" RACHEL POULSEN "Women Performing Homoerotic Desire in English and Italian Comedy: La Calandria, Gl'Ingannati and Twelfth Night" MELINDA J. GOUGH "Courtly Comédiantes: Henrietta Maria and Amateur Women's Stage Plays in France and England" PETER PAROLIN "The Venetian Theater of Aletheia Talbot, Countess of Arundel" JULIE CRAWFORD "'Pleaders, Atturneys, Petitioners and the like': Margaret Cavendish and the Dramatic Petition" JEAN E. HOWARD "Staging the Absent Woman: the Theatrical Evocation of Elizabeth Tudor in Heywood's If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part I" BRUCE R. SMITH "Female Impersonation in Early Modern Ballads" PAMELA ALLEN BROWN "Jesting Rights: Women Players in the Manuscript Jestbook of Sir Nicholas Le Strange" Cathcart, Charles, "Authorship, Indebtedness, and the Children of the King's Revels." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 45.2 (2005): 357-74.

Farmer, Alan B., and Zachary Lesser, "The Popularity of Playbooks Revisited." Shakespeare Quarterly 56.1 (2005): 1-32.

Janning, Volker, Der Chor Im Neulateinischen Drama : Formen Und Funktionen, 1. Aufl ed. Vol. Bd. 7. Münster: Rhema, 2005.

Kerwin, William, Beyond the Body : The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005.

Kinney, Arthur F., Renaissance Drama : An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005.

Klausner, David N., ed., Wales 2 vols. REED Collection. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Kroll, Norma, "Power and Conflict in Medieval Ritual and Plays: The Re-Invention of Drama." Studies in Philology 102.4 (2005): 452-83.

Kuné, Cobie, "'Berliner (Niederrheinisches) Passionsspiel-Fragment'." Zeitschrift für Deutsches Altertum und Deutsche Literatur 134.2 (2005): 205-10.

Nelson-Campbell, Deborah. "Grace Frank (1886-1978) and Medieval French Drama." Women Medievalists and the Academy, Ed. Jane Chance. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 2005. 273-283.

Nolan, Maura, John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture, Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2005.

Stampino, Maria Galli, Staging the Pastoral : Tasso's Aminta and the Emergence of Modern Western Theater, Tempe, Ariz: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005.

Winkelman, Michael A., Marriage Relationships in Tudor Political Drama, Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama, Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2005.

Comparative Drama www.wmich.edu/compdr Volume 38, No. 2, 3 (Summer/Fall 2004) ROBERT M. SCHULER "Magic Mirrors in Henry II" TANYA CALDWELL "Meanings of All for Love, 1677-1813" ADAM R. BEACH "Anti-Colonist Discourse, Tragicomedy, and the 'American' Behn" ADRIENNE SCULLION Politesse and the Woman at Risk: The Social Comedies of Marie-Thérèse De Camp MARIA GERMANOU "An American in Ireland: The Representation of America in Brian Friel's Plays" BEATRICE GROVES "'Let this be copied out/ And keep it safe for our remembrance': Memory, Composition and the Relationship of King John to The Troublesome Raigne of King John" DANIEL JERNIGAN "Serious Money Becomes 'Business by Other Means': Caryl Churchill's Unique Metatheatrical Subject" Volume 38, No. 4 (Winter 2004-05) JULIE STONE PETERS "Joan of Arc Internationale: Shaw, Brecht, and the Modern Law of Nations" MAURICE HUNT "'Forward Backward' Time and the Apocalypse in Hamlet" CHARLES CONAWAY "'To Please some Friends-and draw the Vulgar in': Shakespeare, Molly House Culture, and the Eighteenth Century Stage"

DAVID NICOL "Interrogating the Devil: Social and Demonic Pressure in The Witch of Edmonton" Early Modern Literary Studies (EMLS) Online publication available at: purl.org/emls EMLS 11.1 (May, 2005) STEPHEN HAMRICK "'Set in portraiture': George Gascoigne, Queen Elizabeth, and Adapting the Royal Image" TRACEY HILL "'The Cittie is in an uproare': Staging London in The Booke of Sir Thomas More" AARON LANDAU "'I Live With Bread Like You': Forms of Inclusion in Richard II" M. G. AUNE "Elephants, Englishmen and India: Early Modern Travel Writing and the Pre-Colonial Moment" JAMES M. BROMLEY "Intimacy and the Body in Seventeenth-Century Religious Devotion" ELIZABETH M. A. HODGSON "Mourning Eve, Mourning Milton in Paradise Lost" JOYCE DEVLIN MOSHER "Female Spectacle as Liberation in Margaret Cavendish's Plays" EMLS 11.2 (September, 2005) CHRIS FITTER "Historicising Shakespeare's Richard II: Current Events, Dating, and the Sabotage of Essex" BRETT D. HIRSCH "An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of MalďŹ " ALEXANDRA G. BENNETT "'Now let my language speake': The Authorship, Rewriting, and Audience(s) of Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley" A. D. COUSINS AND R. J. WEBB "Appropriating and Attributing the Supernatural in the Early Modern Country House Poem" SANFORD BUDICK "Milton's Joban Phoenix in Samson Agonistes Early Theatre Vol. 8.2 (2005) REGINA BUCCOLA "'The top of woman! All her sex in abstract!': Ben Jonson Directs the Boy Actor in The Devil Is an Ass" ROBERTA BARKER "'Another Voyage': Death as Social Performance in the Major Tragedies of John Webster"

KAREN BAMFORD "Foreign Affairs: The Search for the Lost Husband in Shakespeare's All's Well that Ends Well" PHILIP D. COLLINGTON "Othello the Traveller" European Medieval Drama (EMD) Vol. 9 ECKEHARD SIMON "The First German Mary Assumption Play (c. 1300) and the Mary Portal of Strasbourg Cathedral."

LENKE KOVÁKS "The Staging of the Ludus de assumptione beatae Mariae virginis (Cod. 960, University Library, Innsbruck)."

MARGARET MARY RAFTERY "(Type)Casting the Other; the Representation of Jews and Devils in Two Plays of the Assumption."

ESTELLE DOUDET "Un dramaturge et son public au XVe siècle : George Chastelain."

KATELL LAVÉANT "Public et représentations dramatiques dans le nord de la France à la fin du moyen âge."

ROBERT POTTER "La Sebila Casandra: Gil Vicente's Postmodern Feminist Christmas Play."

GORDON KIPLING "The Deconstruction of the Virgin in the Sixteenth-Century Royal Entry in Scotland."

KATHLEEN ASHLEY "The Politics of Playing Herod in Beaune."

KONRAD SCHOELL "Maître Pathelin et les Pathelinades: plaidoyer pour Henno."

JOLANTE RZEGOCKA "Performance and Sculpture: Forms of Religious Display in Early Modern Krakow."

GERMÁN BERNARDO "La Muerteada: ¿una Danza de la Muerte en América? / The Muerteada: a Dance of Death in America?"

PHILIP BUTTERWORTH "Substitution: Theatrical Sleight of Hand in Medieval Plays."

Renaissance Drama Vol. 33 (2004) HARRY BERGER, JR "Acts of Silence, Acts of Speech: How to do Things with Othello and Desdemona" Adam Zucker "The Social Logic of Ben Jonson's Epicoene" JAMES LOXLEY "Performatives and Performativity: Ben Jonson Makes His Excuses"

AMANDA BAILEY "Livery and its Discontents: 'Braving it' in the Taming of the Shrew" PHILIPPA KELLY "See what Breeds about Her Heart: King Lear, Feminism, and Performance" ROBERT DARCY "Shakespeare's Empty Plot: The Epicenotaph in Timon of Athens" SUZANNE GOSSETT "Marston, Collaboration, and Eastward Ho!" PATRICIA PARKER "Barbers and Barbary: Early Modern Cultural Semantics" Dissertations Fall 2005

Dissertations Bazzoni, Claudio "A teatralização retórica dos autos sacramentais mitológicos de Calderón El Divino Orfeo, Andrómeda y Perseo."

University of São Paulo, 2005 Director: Maria Augusta da Costa Vieira Scammell, Jennifer F., "The Bible on the Stage : The Cultural Foundations of the Mystery Plays and the 'Popular Medieval Bible'."

University of Glasgow, 2005 Waldron, Jennifer Elizabeth, "Eloquence of the Body: Aesthetics, Theology, and English Renaissance Theater."

Princeton University, 2004.

Poculi Ludique Societas: Shakespeare and the Queen's Men

Poculi Ludique Societas: Shakespeare and the Queen's Men Shakespeare and the Queen's Men is an experimental reconstruction of the staging techniques of the Queen's Men, the most influential acting company of the early Elizabethan era. Their plays inspired Shakespeare.

The centrepiece of the project is a re-enactment of a Queen's Men tour. For the first time in 400 years - indeed, since the troupe disbanded in 1603 - their plays will be staged in their original repertory format, in locations that allow us to re-experience the performance conditions on the company's touring routes in England in the 1580s.

Our three plays are those Shakespeare borrowed and adapted for his own masterpieces: King Leir became King Lear; The Famous Victories of Henry V became Shakespeare's three plays about Henry V; and a comedy likely in their repertoire, Three Ladies of London, contained the foundation for The Merchant of Venice.

Shakespeare and the Queen's Men will offer an unprecedented opportunity for scholars, theatre artists and theatre lovers to experience theatre history in action. It will provide new insight into the theatrical conventions Shakespeare adopted and rejected as he modified the plays and techniques used by this company in his early career.

Performances will take place in Toronto and Hamilton, Canada, during the week of October 24 to 29, 2006. During the same week, an international conference of scholars, theatre artists, and students will meet in Toronto to contribute their own research, see the plays, and participate in a cross-disciplinary round-table discussion evaluating the project's findings.

For more information about this unique and important event, please visit the Shakespeare and the Queen's Men website at:

www.chass.utoronto.ca/~reed/QueensMen/ The site will expand and change as research and production plans develop, so please bookmark it and visit regularly.

Donations to Shakespeare and the Queen's Men can be made online at: www.canadahelps.org Search for our partner Poculi Ludique Societas And enter "Shakespeare and the Queen's Men" in the message window when you donate.

If you have a question or a comment about Shakespeare and the Queen's Men, or if you wish to make a donation in US dollars, please contact us at: reed@chass.utoronto.ca Tel: 416-978-5096.

MRDS Annual Awards Fall 2005

MRDS Annual Awards The 2005 David Bevington Award for the Best New Book in Early Drama Studies • Andrew Gurr. The Shakespeare Company, 1594-1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 • Eckehard Simon. Die Anfänge des Weltlichen Deutschen Schauspiels, 1370-1530: Untersuchung und Dokumentation. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 2003.

This year's Bevington Award is presented to two outstanding contributions by two influential scholars of early drama. Both books represent the fruits of a lifetime's research, both are extraordinary repositories of information and analysis, and each will stimulate further investigations into the study of theatre, at both reaches of our increasingly well-cultivated field.

In The Shakespeare Company, Andrew Gurr provides a masterful overview of the day-to-day workings, accommodations, negotiations, and strategies that made the acting company responsible for the commissioning, staging, and eventual publication of Shakespeare's plays "the only effective democracy of its time in totalitarian England." His account spans one of the richest theatrical half-centuries in history, beginning in the year 1594, when an up-and coming provincial playwright and bit-player named Will Shakespeare joined the company led by the bravura actor and entrepreneur Richard Burbage, to 1642, when the English theatres were closed and "the Shakespeare Company" (known, at various times, as the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the second Lord Hundsdon's Men, and the King's Men) was dissolved. It is an exciting and intensely practical book, explaining in clear and exquisite detail how Shakespeare collaborated with his colleagues, how they managed their finances, what their relations were to their patrons, how conditions of performance and other considerations shaped their repertory, and how they adapted and marketed the plays that have come down to us - and those that have not. By de-mystifying the quotidian aspects of Shakespeare's artistry, and that of his collaborators, it will encourage everyone to think freshly about these plays, and about the livelihood and legacy of their players, for a long time to come.

In Die Anfänge des weltlichen deutschen Schauspiels, Eckehard Simon combines the results of many years' patient labor in local archives with an intense appreciation of the larger contexts in which the records of medieval drama must be situated and understood: with respect to the critical controversies that have shaped and divided scholarship undertaken on the Continent, in England, and North America; in relation to the rich but fragmented evidence for the Latin and vernacular performance traditions of medieval Europe; and with careful attention to the specific cultural, social, political, economic, and religious conditions that gave rise, in the fourteenth century, to a new type of indigenous, world-embracing drama in many German towns. In so doing, he not only provides a compelling introduction to this phenomenon and its several manifestations, but he generously guides and encourages the work of future generations by surveying a vast amount of territory in a highly systematic manner, providing the reader with a catalogue and compendium of available sources, offering invaluable insights on the way that plays were

conceived, performed, and received; and documenting the different occasions, circumstances, and problems to which Carnival plays, topical sketches, and large-scale theatricals offered various responses. This book commands the attention of all those engaged in the study of drama in the later Middle Ages, as well as those interested in the relationship between medieval communities and their dramatic means of expression.

The 2005 Martin Stevens Award for the Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies • Max Harris and Lada Čale Feldman, "Blackened Faces and a Veiled Woman: The Early Korčula Moreška," Comparative Drama 37 (2004): 297-320.

This article examines the highly individual form and history of the moresca - mock battles between Moors and Christians - practiced on the Adriatic island of Korčula. Feldman and Harris bring together knowledge of the local context and knowledge of similar forms of ceremonial across the globe to make sense of the limited evidence. The article is a model of international collaboration between a young scholar and an established one to explore the development and political resonances of this particular ceremony.

The 2005 Alexandra Johnston Award for Best New Conference Paper in Early Drama Studies by a Graduate Student • Jenna Soleo, "'Teatro' in Piazza: Siena's Piazza del Campo as a Performance Space," delivered at SITM in Elche in 2004.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS - MRDS ANNUAL AWARDS 2006 The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society seeks nominations for its annual awards; 1. The David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies ($150 and two years membership in MRDS) 2. The Martin Stevens Award for Best New Essay in Early Drama Studies ($100 and one year membership in MRDS) 3. The Alexandra Johnston Award for Best New Conference Paper in Early Drama Studies by a Graduate Student ($100 and one year membership in MRDS) Entry Information: Deadline: January 15, 2006.

Eligibility: Works by any MRDS member in good standing. Members may nominate their own works.

The Judges: For each category, two MRDS Executive Council members and one non-council member of MRDS. Submissions: For the Bevington and Stevens Awards: Any book or essay published within 18 months of the deadline. For the Johnston Award: Any conference paper delivered by a graduate student within 12 months of the deadline. Entries for the Johnston Award should not exceed 5,000 words, excluding notes, and should include the name and date of the conference at which the paper was delivered and, where appropriate, the title and sponsor of the panel.

Send one copy of each book or three copies of each essay or paper to: Dr. David Klausner Centre for Medieval Studies University of Toronto

39 Queen's Park Crescent E Toronto, ONT M5S 2C3 CANADA Awards announcement and presentation will take place during the annual MRDS business meeting in May 2006, at the 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI Questions about the awards: Contact David Klausner at klausner@chass.utoronto.ca MRDS Business Fall 2005

MRDS Business ELECTION OF OFFICERS Nominations have been made for the following positions. Please return your ballot with your dues by March 1, 2006. (Ballots will be sent by postal mail) Nominees for Council (vote for two) Vicki Hamblin is Professor of French Language and Literature at Western Washington University. She teaches courses at all levels in an undergraduate curriculum. In that capacity, she also serves as study-abroad advisor and as faculty mentor for the Mu Pi chapter of Pi Delta Phi. Her research focus is French theater of the fifteenth-century, and especially non-biblical mystery plays. She has published a critical edition of the Mistere du siege d'Orleans (Droz 2002) in addition to numerous articles in professional publications in the U.S., Europe and Australia. She is currently on professional leave to produce a book entitled Saints at Play: The Performance Features of French Hagiographic Mystery Plays. In this comparative analysis of some 35 plays, textual remnants of performance will be analyzed as a study-set for reconstructing the staging features of mystery plays at the height of their popularity in France.

Gordon Kipling is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He writes on civic and courtly spectacle in the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period. His most recent book, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph won the first annual David Bevington Prize as well as the Otto Grundler prize. He is presently working on three books: one on the Early Modern civic triumph, another (with Meg Twycross) on the theatrical illustrations of the entry of Princess Joanna into Brussels (1496), and another on modern conceptions of the medieval theatre.

Eckehard Simon has taught at Harvard University's German Department since 1964 where he is currently serving as Victor S. Thomas Professor. His college course on The Medieval Stage reconstructs performances of major plays from France and England in their historical context. The "Swabian Christmas Play" (Constance, 1417), which he discovered in Houghton Library in 1975, expanded the repertory of early German Christmas plays from six to seven. In 1991 Cambridge University Press published The Theater of Medieval Europe, essays from a Harvard conference on theater scholarship. His 2003 history of non-religious German theater (1370-1530) is based on newly harvested performance records and won the 2005 Bevington Prize for the Best New Book in Early Drama. The last two articles he has written deal with German Mary Assumption plays and the Strasbourg Mary Portal (European Medieval Drama, 9) and with staging the Reformation in the Nuremberg Carnival (to appear in Transatlantic German Studies). He is currently writing a history of medieval and early modern German theater for colleagues in the field.

Jenna Soleo-Shanks is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, on which she is currently at work, examines the political function of performance in the city-state republic of Siena, Italy. For the upcoming 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies, she has organized the MRDS session on "What Theater Studies Brings to Medieval Studies." Her most recent conference papers have focused on the semiotics of performance space in the Sienese Republic, and her presentation "'Teatro' in Piazza: Siena's Piazza del Campo as a Performance Space," delivered at SITM in Elx in 2004, won the Alexandra F. Johnston Prize in 2005. Her article on the Assumption drama of Elx, its performance tradition, and its the elaborate aerial machinery (dating from the 16th century) was recently published in Western European Stages (Winter 2005). She has received grant money for dissertation research from the Program for Cultural Cooperation, and has taught theatre, speech,

and humanities classes at Hunter, Baruch, and Marymount Manhattan colleges as well as at St. John's University in New York.

CONSTITUTIONAL AMMENDMENT The vote on this ammendment will take place at the 2006 MRDS Business Meeting. Proposed changes to the MRDS Constitution appear below. It is proposed that [text in bold and bracketed be deleted] and text underlined, italicized, and in bold be added.

1. There shall be a non-profit educational society called the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. Its purposes shall be to effect annual meetings of scholars and other persons interested in medieval and Renaissance drama, to sponsor long-range projects of interest to such persons, and to support the publication of [publish] material of interest to the Society, including the Early European Drama in Translation (EEDT) Series and Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama [and its Medieval Supplement].

MRDS Officers Fall 2005

MRDS Officers (2005-2006) President: Pamela Sheingorn, CUNY Baruch College and The Graduate Center psheingorn@gc.cuny.edu Vice President: David Klausner, University of Toronto klausner@chass.utoronto.ca Secretary/Treasurer: Gloria Betcher, Iowa State Univ. gbetcher@iastate.edu Council Members Jody Enders (2008), Univ. of California Santa Barbara jenders@french-ital.ucsb.edu Martin Walsh (2008), Univ. of Michigan narenlob@umich.edu Peter Greenfield (2007), Univ. of Puget Sound greenfield@ups.edu Carol Symes (2007), Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign symes@uiuc.edu Richard Rastall (2006), Univ. of Leeds g.r.rastall@leeds.ac.uk Victor Scherb (2006), Univ. of Texas at Tyler Victor_Scherb@mail.uttyl.edu Colophon Fall 2005

MRDS Newsletter © 2005 Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society Editor: Jesse D. Hurlbut Department of French and Italian

3134 JFSB Brigham Young University Provo, UT 84602 © 2005 Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society