Jeffrey Masten was awarded the 34th Calvin and Rose G. Hoffman Prize for a Distinguished Publication on Christopher Marlowe. The Hoffman Prize is a peer-judged, international competition administered by the King’s School, Canterbury, which Marlowe attended in the sixteenth century. It’s a substantial prize awarded annually to an essay that “most convincingly, authoritatively and informatively examines and discusses in depth the life and works of Christopher Marlowe and the authorship of the plays and poems now commonly attributed to William Shakespeare.”
Masten’s essay was entitled “Marlowe’s Queer Futures: Edward and Richard, the Second” and focuses on conceptions of sexuality and futurity in Marlowe’s Edward II, on which Shakespeare’s Richard II is commonly said to be modeled. The essay also highlights the figure of the queer child in recent film, stage, and operatic adaptations of Marlowe’s play. The essay was one of the projects completed during Matsen’s Guggenheim fellowship.
Jeffrey Masten (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) teaches and writes at the intersection of early modern English literature, book history, and sexuality studies. He has written influentially about collaboration, authorship, and discourses of sexuality in early English drama in Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge), and about sexuality and the history of the language in Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time (Penn). Queer Philologies received the 2018 Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award for best book in early modern drama studies. Masten was named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2022-23.
Masten also teaches in the Gender & Sexuality Studies Program at Northwestern and is a former director of the program. With Northwestern colleague William West, he co-edits the bi-annual scholarly journal Renaissance Drama (University of Chicago Press Journals).