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Dr Eleanor Rycroft

Lecturer in Early Modern Literature

Degree: DPhil, MA, BA(Hons) Sussex.

Current Teaching

I teach on the Shakespeare (306) and Renaissance to Restoration: English Literature, 1580-1688(202)modules, and supervise undergraduate dissertations (301).

Research Interests

Originally a theatre director, I returned to academia to write an AHRC-funded doctorate on facial hair in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in 2004 (currently being revised for publication). Following this I was appointed as the Postdoctoral Research Assistant on the AHRC funded 'Staging the Henrician Court' project run by Oxford Brookes and Edinburgh Universities. The project staged John Heywood's The Play of the Weather in the Great Hall of Hampton Court Palace in order to investigate the organisation and policing of space through drama at the court of Henry VIII. My report on this performance can be read in Medieval English Theatre, Vol. 31 (2009) 13-27. During the project, I organised a symposium on the 'Early Tudor Theatre' at Hampton Court in 2010, bringing together international scholars to discuss issues of space, audience, and modes of performance at the Henrician Court. I also produced work on gender and performance, the figure of the Vice and audience/actor relations in the early English drama: all of which demonstrate my interest in the practice and performance of early modern theatre.

My work is interdisciplinary and draws on a wide range of printed sources, historical records and objects in order to present fresh ways of thinking about Renaissance literature and identity. My other main research interest concerns the gendered subjectivities of the Renaissance and especially how manhood and boyhood were constructed during the period. I have work scheduled for publication on 'Masculinity and Morality in Youth and Hick Scorner' for The Oxford Handbook to Tudor Drama (eds. Tom Betteridge and Greg Walker, OUP), 'Gender and Status in The Play of the Weather' for Henry VIII and the Court:Art, Politics and Performance (eds. Tom Betteridge and Suzannah Lispcomb, Ashgate) and and entry on John Rastell for the Blackwell Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature (eds. Garrett Sullivan and Alan Stewart). I also have an article accepted for publication for Literature Compass (ed. Claire Jowitt) on 'Hair, Beards and the Fashioning of Early Modern Manhood in Early Modern Travel Texts'. My other work on beards can be found online at the Richard Brome online project and in Locating the Queen's Men, 1583-1603 (Ashgate, 2009).

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