Dr Eleanor K Rycroft

I am a theatre historian of early British drama, whose research often involves practical explorations of early modern plays. I have worked on major collaborative projects that staged theatre in the historic sites of Hampton Court, Stirling Castle, Linlithgow Palace, and Lancaster Castle, including the AHRC-funded 'Staging the Henrician Court' and 'Staging and Representing the Scottish Renaissance Court'.

I have a special interest in gender and its relationship to ideologies of manhood during the period. My monograph - Facial Hair and the Performance of Early Modern Masculinity (Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama, Routledge, 2019) - concerns the role of beards in the construction of masculinities on the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century stage. My second monograph Predramatic Theatre: the Radicalism of Early British Performance (Palgrave Pivot, 2026), co-authored with Greg Walker, considers the distinctiveness of premodern theatre from a historical and theoretical standpoint. 

My current research project investigates the staging of walking in early modern theatre, for which I was awareded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship in 2025/26. This research has led to several contemporary-facing  impact projects, including 'Stepping into Women's Shoes,' 'Fear and Freedom', 'Women, Walking and Performance', 'Walking and Re-Creation', 'Nightwalker' and 'Walking with Toddlers'. These projects have been funded by the British Academy, Research England, AHRC and ESRC Impact Acceleration Accounts, and the Brigstow Institute. We have worked in schools, with community groups, walking activists, and policy-makers, and in 2023, we produced the award-winning soundscape, 'Night-Walk'.

My work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals such as English Literary Renaissance, Medieval English Theatre, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Survey, London Journal, Journal of the Northern Renaissance and Shakespeare Bulletin, and has been published by Oxford University Press, Manchester University Press, Bloomsbury, Palgrave, Wiley-Blackwell, and Ashgate. I have written on material cultures and spatial practices of the early modern stage, hair and beards in travel literature, theatre at the court of Henry VIII, early Tudor and Stewart drama, practice-based research as a research methodology, women walking in Shakespeare, walking in medieval Mystery plays, and the historical performance of witchcraft. I have co-edited special issues of journals on the topics of 'Shakespeare in Action' and '(Re)constructed Spaces for Early Modern Drama: Research in Practice'. I am currently co-editing the Arden Shakespeare Intersections volume on Shakespeare/Movement: Contemporary Readings in Embodied Mobilities with Susan Anderson and Harry R. McCarthy.

I have externally examined PhDs at King's College London, the University of Roehampton, and the University of Lausanne.