By 1812Blockhouse
When an academic article wins an international prize, it is rarely because it confirms what everyone already believes. More often, it unsettles something comfortable. That is what happened when Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, an associate professor of English at The Ohio State University at Mansfield, received the 2025 Prize for Best Article in Theatre History from the journal Early Theatre.
Her article, “Chaste, Fair, and Bountiful: Marston, Fletcher, and the Countess of Huntingdon’s Patronage,” appeared in Early Theatre 27.1 (2024), pages 77–104. The award covers volumes 26–27 of the journal and puts a Mansfield-based scholar in the middle of a wider conversation about Renaissance drama.
Why This Article Matters
At first glance, the topic sounds highly specialized. Kolkovich examines John Marston’s Ashby entertainment (1607) and John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1608). These are not the titles most readers know.
But the point is larger than the texts. Kolkovich uses them to highlight the influence of Elizabeth Stanley Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, and other women who shaped early 17th-century theatre in ways that are often minimized or missed. Her approach blends literary criticism, gender theory, and social history to show women as patrons, organizers, and creative forces within the theatre world, not as footnotes to it.
A Career Built on Recovering What Was Overlooked
Kolkovich earned her PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009. Her work centers on Renaissance literature, theatre history, gender studies, and book history, with a consistent focus on how performance functioned socially and politically.
Her 2016 Cambridge University Press book, The Elizabethan Country House Entertainment: Print, Performance, and Gender, made a similar case: women were often central to these performances, even when later print versions reduced or erased their labor. The prize-winning article extends that effort, restoring women’s influence to the record through close reading and careful contextual work.
Teaching, Making, and Public Scholarship
Kolkovich’s contributions extend beyond research. She has received Ohio State’s Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching and additional campus honors for teaching and scholarship. She is also known for helping students connect early modern literature to present-day questions through active, hands-on work.
That includes a documentary she directed with students about the history and performances of Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam. She edits book reviews for Shakespeare Bulletin and serves as a contributing editor and advisory board member for The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, a digital humanities initiative centered on the 17th-century poet Hester Pulter.
What Comes Next
Kolkovich is currently writing two books on Shakespeare, one on court masques within his plays and another on how gender and sexuality were performed on the all-male stage. Both projects reflect the same guiding idea behind her award-winning article: theater history changes when you pay attention to who held influence, who organized culture, and who was written out afterward.
The full article is available through its DOI: 10.12745/et.27.1.5421.
