ROMA GILL PRIZE

EVERY TWO YEARS, THE MARLOWE SOCIETY OF AMERICA AWARDS THE ROMA GILL PRIZE TO THE BEST NEW WORK IN MARLOWE STUDIES. WE ARE ESPECIALLY HONORED TO NAME OUR AWARD AFTER ROMA GILL (1934-2001), A DISTINGUISHED SCHOLAR AND TEACHER WHO WAS HERSELF A MEMBER OF THE MARLOWE SOCIETY OF AMERICA. 

In 1954, Roma Gill was one of the fifteen founding undergraduate members of New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), Cambridge—the first women’s college at the university in nearly a century. She studied under Helen Gardner at Oxford (St. Hilda’s) and then, beginning in 1963, taught at Sheffield under William Empson, where she was the only woman in the department and became Reader in English Literature in 1979. She was best known for her general editorship of the Oxford School Shakespeare and, of course, her editions of Marlowe. She was general editor of the Oxford University Press Works (1987-98) herself editing the first volume on the poems and translations. She also published editions of Doctor Faustus (1965) and Edward II (1967), as well as a one-volume complete plays (1971).

PAST WINNERS OF THE ROMA GILL PRIZE

2017–2018

FIRST PRIZE

RACHEL EISENDRATH

“Playing with Things: Reification in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander”

in Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis

University of Chicago Press, 2018

This chapter offers a new and formidable answer to a major question: what is the source of Marlowe’s aesthetic sensibility, specifically his “peculiarly elusive and mercurial style”? To answer this question, Eisendrath turns to the literature of post-Augustan antiquity, an important influence that, despite considerable work on Marlowe’s engagements with Ovid, Lucan, and Musaeus, remains relatively unexamined. Eisendrath finds within that literature an “ekphrastic aesthetic,” one that translates linguistic utterances into things in an attempt to deny their historicity. She then demonstrates “how Marlowe challenges this reified literary inheritance, even as he uses it,” deploying ekphrasis to push beyond late antiquity’s deliberate rigidity into a new dynamism of “poetic motion” that better represents the fluidity of human experience and insists on its historicity both positive and negative. Through her dazzling reading of Hero and Leander, Eisendrath shows that, for Marlowe, “extreme linguistic thingliness is actually linguistic emptiness” accompanied by a fantasy of ahistoricity, a fantasy that he exposes as regressive. Eisendrath thus views Marlowe’s poetry as “a model for literary criticism—as a process of thought that speaks for the unfolding of historical meaning held in tension by the artwork’s form.” Her argument challenges one of the most enduring critical commonplaces about Christopher Marlowe—that he is an unabashed poet of things—at the same time that it provides a fresh and compelling account of Marlowe’s style. At once deeply learned and theoretically deft, this tour-de-force distinguishes itself through the scope, precision, and complexity of its argument.

SECOND PRIZE

KIRK MELNIKOFF & ROSLYN L. KNUTSON, eds.

Christopher Marlowe, Theatrical Commerce, and the Book Trade

Cambridge University Press, 2018

This important collection fills a gap within early modern studies by situating Marlowe within “the overlapping commercial spheres of the playhouse and the print trade.” It is divided into three sections: one that investigates Marlowe’s place in the theatrical marketplace of the late 1580s and early 1590s, one that examines the early printing of Marlowe’s works, and one that documents the reception and afterlives of Marlowe’s texts. Taken together, the volume’s clear and well-written essays make a compelling case that Marlowe as we understand him is in large measure a construction of the early modern book trade that embraced his works posthumously. In demonstrating that Marlowe’s texts have come down to us in highly mediated forms, they suggest that the future of Marlowe studies lies to a large degree in sustained attention to the material conditions of production of both his texts and the reputation of the man himself.

2015–2016

FIRST PRIZE

REBECCA LEMON

“Scholarly Addiction: Doctor Faustus and the Drama of Devotion”

Renaissance Quarterly 69.3 (2016): 865-898

This essay offers a striking new perspective on one of the most studied of Marlowe’s works, offering a wide-ranging and rigorous exploration of the play’s interactions with an often-overlooked classical and early modern notion of addiction as a “state of deep dedication and surrender.” The essay is absorbing on many levels, not least because Faustus’s addiction to academic study is so familiar to that of modern scholars. Faustus’s gradual relinquishing of his will to the false promise of necromancy has been described before as analogous to pathological compulsive behavior. But Lemon historicizes the concept in surprising and illuminating new ways, tracing “addiction” to its root as the state of being in debt or service in ancient law, through Ciceronian and Senecan permutations passed on via humanistic study, and its appropriation in the writings of Calvin and other reformist theologians. A version was recently republished in Lemon’s book, Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England (U Pennsylvania P, 2018).

2013–2014

FIRST PRIZE

MICHAEL L. STAPLETON

Marlowe's Ovid: The Elegies in the Marlowe Canon

Ashgate, 2014

The first book of its kind, Marlowe's Ovid explores and analyzes in depth the relationship between the Elegies—Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores—and Marlowe's own dramatic and poetic works. Stapleton carefully considers Marlowe's Elegies in the context of his seven known dramatic works and his epyllion, Hero and Leander, and offers a different way to read Marlowe. Stapleton employs Marlowe's rendition of the Amores as a way to read his seven dramatic productions and his narrative poetry while engaging with previous scholarship devoted to the accuracy of the translation and to bibliographical issues. The author focuses on four main principles: the intertextual relationship of the Elegies to the rest of the author's canon; its reflection of the influence of Erasmian humanist pedagogy, imitatio and aemulatio; its status as the standard English Amores until the Glorious Revolution, part of the larger phenomenon of pan-European Renaissance Ovidianism; its participation in the genre of the sonnet sequence. He explores how translating the Amores into the Elegies profited Marlowe as a writer, a kind of literary archaeology that explains why he may have commenced such an undertaking. Marlowe's Ovid adds to the body of scholarly work in a number of subfields, including classical influences in English literature, translation, sexuality in literature, early modern poetry and drama, and Marlowe and his milieu.

2011–2012

FIRST PRIZE

CHLOE PREEDY

Marlowe's Literary Scepticism: Politic Religion and Post-Reformation Polemic

Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013

Marlowe's Literary Scepticism re-evaluates the representation of religion in Christopher Marlowe's plays and poems, demonstrating the extent to which his literary engagement with questions of belief was shaped by the virulent polemical debates that raged in post-Reformation Europe. Offering new readings of under-studied works such as the poetic translations and a fresh perspective on well-known plays such as Doctor Faustus, this book focuses on Marlowe's depiction of the religious frauds denounced by his contemporaries. It identifies Marlowe as one of the earliest writers to acknowledge the practical value of religious hypocrisy, and a pivotal figure in the history of scepticism.

SECOND PRIZE

JEFFREY MASTEN

"Bound for Germany: Heresy, Sodomy, and a New Copy of Marlowe's Edward II," TLS: The Times Literary Supplement, 21 and 28 December, 2012, 17–19

2009–2010

FIRST PRIZE

PATRICK CHENEY

Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime

Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

FROM THE BOOK JACKET: ...the first attempt to situate Marlowe’s iconoclastic dissidence within the context of Elizabethan republican thought. Recent studies locate Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson within this context, but not Marlowe. The primary rationale for filling the gap comes from Marlowe's translation of Book 1 of Lucan’s Pharsalia, the central poem of the republican imagination. Not simply does Marlowe build the Lucanian battle between Republic and Empire into his plays, but in each he foregrounds Lucan’s achievement: out of the imperial narrative of defeated liberty, he invents a poetics of the sublime. Marlowe’s commitment to liberty and the sublime has long been understood as the apex of his achievement, but Cheney’s book is the first to contextualize both in terms of Lucan’s haunting republican poem. The book demonstrates that he is the literary pioneer of a Lucanian republican authorship in English. Like Lucan, Marlowe makes the freedom–seeking author of the sublime the imagined leader of a new republican art.

2007–2008

FIRST PRIZE

ROBERT LOGAN

Shakespeare's Marlowe: The Influence of Christopher Marlowe on Shakespeare's Artistry

Ashgate, 2007

Shakespeare's Marlowe critiques the traditional concept of rivalry and is instead devoted to “the uncommonly powerful aesthetic bond” between the authors as “practicing dramatists and poets.” Shakespeare’s undoubted incorporation of “dramaturgical and literary devices that resulted in Marlowe’s artistic and commercial success” manifests itself in three areas of influence: a “remarkable verbal dexterity,” an “imaginative flexibility in reconfiguring standard notions of dramatic genres,” and an “astute use of ambivalence and ambiguity.”

SECOND PRIZE

JOHN PARKER

"Barabas and Charles I," in Placing the Plays of Christopher Marlowe: Fresh Cultural Contexts, ed. Sara Deats & Robert Logan

Ashgate, 2008

The essay argues the The Jew of Malta was dangerously topical in Caroline England, and that it represents an attempt to use "dated material" in the form of a dramatic revival to critique what was perceived by some to be the king's increasingly Catholic revision of the Anglican liturgy.