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 Sally-Beth MacLean at the University of Toronto for collaboration on their book, The Queen's Men and Their Plays (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

The prize carries a cash stipend of £5,000 and will be awarded at lectures to be given this spring by McMillin and MacLean at the Globe Theatre in London. 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. The Queen's Men was the most famous and profitable company of the 1580s and early 1590s, and yet most of its extant plays are anonymous. McMillin and MacLean explore the company's political connections, its playhouses, the patterns of its provincial tours, its staging and casting practices, the nature of its printed texts and the dramaturgy of its plays. They argue that a series of similar studies would produce a new historical picture of the Elizabethan drama, less geared to the modern interest in Shakespeare and better framed by Elizabethan theater history.

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. He now is working on a new textual theory for Elizabethan printed plays, and his edition of the quarto version of Othello soon will be published by Cambridge University Press.

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, American Musical Theatre. He has served as chair of Cornell's Humanities Council and the Faculty Committee on Music. And he is co-founder, with Cornell trustee Joseph Holland, of the Harlem Literacy Project for Cornell Cooperative Extension.

MacLean is executive editor for the Records of Early English Drama project at the University of Toronto, which has published 18 volumes of county-by-county records relating to dramatic activity in medieval and renaissance England.

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.