In April 2024 the Medieval English Theatre conference was held at the University of Newcastle, admirably hosted by James Cummings. The theme was ‘Dramatic Margins’, and the papers covered a stimulating range of topics while exhibiting characteristic METh interest in manuscripts, historical records, and drama in performance. Papers invited us to consider how attention to margins, of various kinds, could illuminate questions about how to define ‘drama’, ‘performance’, and ‘theatre’ – questions which are theoretical but which are also made practical in the activities of collecting records of ‘early drama’ or taking words from page to ‘stage’.

Charlotte Steenbrugge discussed the play-frame of the Dutch Tspel van dOnghelycke Munte (‘The Play of the Fluctuating Currency’), with its creatively disruptive female character, Everyday Chitchat. Sarah Grandage, with Dana Key on Zoom, described a project on the use of marginal playing spaces in modern performance, in which students from the University of Nottingham presented performances of Joseph's Trouble and the Nativity among the medieval alabasters in the Nottingham Castle museum. Pamela King, joined on Zoom by David Parkinson, presented his new edition of Henry Adamson's The Muses Threnodie, a delightfully humorous Scottish seventeenth-century text which through argument and animated reading they persuasively demonstrated should be considered as para-drama. Eleanor Rycroft and Clare Wright led a lively and stimulating panel discussion of the term ‘Pre-Dramatic Theatre’, drawing on their current project with Greg Walker to explore the uses and limitations of terminology in current theatre studies.