English professor awarded prize for work in early English theater, staging

Scott McMillin, Cornell professor of English, has been awarded the Sohmer-Hall Prize for outstanding work in early English theater and staging. McMillin shares the honor with his collaborator, Sally-Beth MacLean, executive editor for the Records of Early English Drama project at the University of Toronto.

The award is for their book, The Queen's Men and Their Plays (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and carries a cash stipend of 5,000 pounds, with the prize to be presented at lectures delivered by McMillin and MacLean at the Globe Theatre in London, in the spring. The prize is intended to further the pursuit of new information or ideas about the original staging of Elizabethan plays.

In The Queen's Men, McMillin and MacLean argue for a radical revision of Elizabethan theater history, with a focus on acting companies as opposed to authors.

McMillin has taught at Cornell for 35 years and is the author of three previous books: The Elizabethan Theatre and the Book of Sir Thomas More (1987), Shakespeare in Performance: Henry IV, Part One (1991) and the Norton Critical Edition of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama (second edition, 1997). He also has authored two dozen articles on Elizabethan theater history. In January he will serve a fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. A recipient of the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching at Cornell, McMillin directs first-year writing seminars in drama and poetry, teaches the history of English drama and has initiated a new course in American musical theater. He has served as chair of the Humanities Council and the Faculty Committee on Music, and is co-founder, with Cornell trustee Joseph Holland, of the Harlem Literacy Project for Cornell Cooperative Extension.

McMillin and MacLean were selected by a panel of judges who represent both the academic and theater worlds and included Andrew Gurr, director of research at the Globe Theatre; David Kastan, professor of English at Columbia University; Mark Rylance, artistic director of the Globe; Patrick Spottiswoode, director of education at the Globe; and Stanley Wells, former director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon.