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I'm primarily interested in the period artificially delimited as 1485-1714, including all the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, along with the Commonwealth.  I especially care about the social and cultural history of London during this period, and of its various forms of public entertainment, including principally stage players and their playing spaces, from the itinerant players under Henry VII to the post-Restoration playhouses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, from John Skelton to John Dryden.  I include in this period any and all English activity in North America, from the earliest settlements through King Philip's War.

Ancillary to this interest, and vital to it, is a concurrent interest in the study and transcription of manuscript material from the period, both literary and non-literary, and the requisite familiarity with the forms of old handwriting, especially secretary hand and chancery hand.

I have taught, at both the undergraduate and graduate level, in all the above areas.

I use computers in my research, and am interested in database structure and the flexibilities of the Perl programming language, which has been important to me in the processing of my research materials. 

BOOKS:

   England, 1530-1642, volume 7 in the series The Theatre in Europe: Documents and Sources; co-edited with Glynne Wickham and Herbert Berry (Cambridge, 2001).

    The Business of Playing: the beginnings of the adult professional theatre in Elizabethan London (Cornell, 1992).  (This book was nominated for the George Freedley Award of the Theatre Library Association, for the Bernard Hewitt Award, for the Roland H Bainton Book Prize, for the British Council Prize in the Humanities, for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the MLA, and for the J A Calloway Prize.)

    A London Life in the Brazen Age: Francis Langley, 1548-1602 (Harvard, 1978).

    A Concordance to John Milton’s English Poetry (Clarendon, 1972).

ESSAYS IN BOOKS:

    An essay on theorizing theatre history, the introductory essay to A Handbook on Early Modern Theatre, ed. Richard Dutton (Oxford, 2009).

    “The Economics of Playing”, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Columbia, 1998).

    “The ‘Evolution’ of the Elizabethan Playing Company,” in The Development of Shakespeare’s Theater (AMS Press, 1992).

    “The Early Career of James Burbage,” The Elizabethan Theatre X (1988).  (Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference on Elizabethan Theatre).

    “Henry Laneman’s Curtain Playhouse as an ‘Easer’ to the Theater, 1585-1592,” in The First Public Playhouse: The Theatre in Shoreditch 1576-1598, ed. Herbert Berry (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979).

[Plus essays in such periodicals as Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, Shakespeare Quarterly, English Literary Renaissance, Essays in Theatre, Theatre Notebook, Renaissance Drama, Modern Philology, Computers and the Humanities, and Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies.]