Research
My research asks how early modern plays engage with their sites of performance.
Most accounts of Shakespeare's theatre centre on the Globe and the permanent London playhouse. I treat that playhouse as one venue among many, alongside inn-yards, guildhalls, great halls and open ground. I work from the archaeological record of excavated sites, including the Theatre, the Curtain, the Boar's Head and St George's Guildhall, and test what it suggests through performance.
Archaeo-PaR
Archaeo-PaR is the method that ties this together: practice-as-research that starts from the archaeological evidence for a performance space and stages the plays against it. My doctoral work applied it to the Curtain Playhouse, excavated by Museum of London Archaeology, and became Shakespeare in Shoreditch. A collaborative model of the method appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin in 2025.
Current projects
Rethinking Shakespearean Original Practices
University of York, 2026–. Historically informed performance across European early modern drama, led by Oliver Jones.
Rollo, Duke of Normandy
A new Revels Plays edition of Fletcher and Massinger's tragedy, with Jade Standing (Manchester University Press).
A Contested Globe
An edited collection on Shakespeare's Globe, performance and cultural power, for Arden Bloomsbury.
Next book
A study arguing that the permanent London playhouse was the exception, not the rule, in early modern theatre.
Football and spectatorship
An article on mobile spectatorship and early modern football.
The York Plays
An article with Jacqueline Jenkins for Early Theatre, from our 2025 production of two York pageants.