The Oxford Handbook to Early Modern Theatre, a collection edited by Richard Dutton, Humanities Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of English, is the 2012 recipient of Rice University’s Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award for the best book published in Early Modern studies.

The Handbook was chosen for this honor from an exceptional field of some 200 qualifying publications. One judge declared the book “a magnificent achievement. This is, in short, a book that any scholar of early modern drama will want to have, and it should retain that status for a long time.” Another judge extolled the book as “the most comprehensive and informative study of the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries since E. K. Chambers produced his Elizabethan Stage (1923) and G. E. Bentley followed that with his no less monumental Jacobean and Caroline Stage (1941-68).” The same judge went on to say, “Its strengths are many. Chambers and Bentley had the luxury of multi-volume overviews, eleven volumes in all; The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Theatre manages to compress into a little over 700 affordable pages an extraordinary body of scholarship.”

The Dietz Award was presented to Professor Dutton and the Oxford University Press in early January 2013 at a ceremony and reception hosted by SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, during the annual Modern Language Association Convention. This is the second consecutive Dietz Award winner published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Dutton's previous publications include Ben Jonson: To the First Folio (Cambridge University Press, 1983), An Introduction to Literary Criticism (Longman, 1984), Modern Tragicomedy and the British Tradition (Harvester, 1986), Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Macmillan, 1991), Ben Jonson: Authority: Criticism (Macmillan, 1996), Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2000), and Ben Jonson, Volpone, and the Gunpowder Plot (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He was general editor of the Macmillan “Literary Lives” series, which includes his own William Shakespeare: A Literary Life (1989), and he has edited several collections of critical essays: The New Historicism and Renaissance Drama [with Richard Wilson] (Longman, 1992), A Midsummer Night's Dream, New Casebook (Macmillan, 1996), and four volumes of Companions to the Works of Shakespeare [with Jean Howard] (Blackwell, 2003).