27 May 2026
Girls on the page and stage with Mahayla Galliford
Who comes to mind when you think about playwrights? Authors like William Shakespeare tend to dominate the conversation, but this doesn’t reflect the incredibly diverse history of playwriting.
In this episode, English master’s student Mahayla Galliford discusses her work on Lady Rachel Fane’s May Masque, a play written by a fourteen-year-old girl roughly 400 years ago.
Music credits:
“Symphony No. 4 in A Major, Op. 90 'Italian' - I. Allegro vivace” by Felix Mendelssohn, performed by The Czech National Symphony Orchestra
Licensed under CC PDM 1.0
www.classicals.de (http://www.classicals.de/)
“String Quartet No. 12 in F Major, Op. 96, American - I. Allegro ma non troppo” by Antonín Dvořák, performed by The Musopen String Quartet
Licensed under CC PDM 1.0
www.classicals.de (http://www.classicals.de/)
“armonk” courtesy of mobygratis
Resources:
Linked Early Modern Drama Online: https://lemdo.uvic.ca/lemdo/ (https://lemdo.uvic.ca/lemdo/)
Mahayla's bio for LEMDO can be found on this link (Student and Early Career Team Members): https://lemdo.uvic.ca/lemdo/ECRs.html (https://lemdo.uvic.ca/lemdo/ECRs.html)
Kent History and Library Centre: https://www.kentarchives.org.uk/collections/getrecord/GB51_U269_3_2_60 (https://www.kentarchives.org.uk/collections/getrecord/GB51_U269_3_2_60)
Works Cited:
Bishop, Tom. “Lady Rachel Fane’s Apethorpe Masque, May 1627. Transcription and Modernisation from the MS and the ELR text of Marion O’Connor.” Unpublished MS, 2023.
Findlay, Alison. Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
O’Connor, Marion, 2006. “Rachel Fane’s May Masque at Apethorpe, 1627.” English Literary Renaissance, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 90–113, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2006.0073a.x (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6757.2006.0073a.x).
O’Connor, Marion, 2015, ed. Entertainments and Poems by Lady Rachel Fane. Malone Society Collections 17. Malone Society, 2015, pp. 151–195.
Pollock, Linda A. With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620. Collins & Brown, 1993.
Williams, Deanne. Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
A very short podcast episode might be of interest to listeners, the episode discusses Alison Findlay’s staging of the masque in 2025: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lady-rachel-fanes-household-masque-behind-the-scenes/id1377754037?i=1000698052567 (https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/lady-rachel-fanes-household-masque-behind-the-scenes/id1377754037?i=1000698052567)
Produced by Isobel Barlow-Busch
