Professor Lucy Munro took her BA in English Language and Literature at Manchester University, moving to King’s College London for her MA and PhD. She worked at the University of Reading and Keele University, where she taught for the English, Film and Media degree programmes, before returning to King’s in September 2013.

She is President of the Marlowe Society of America and Website Officer for the Malone Society, and she has served as a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America (2019-22).

The thread that runs through Professor Munro’s research is an interest in the dynamic relationship between old and new in literary cultures and their afterlives.  As a scholar, editor and teacher of early modern literature, she is often concerned with presenting old texts to new audiences.  Moreover, her research has dealt explicitly with questions such as: the place of youth in early modern theatre; the function of outmoded style in early modern literary culture; the histories of early modern playhouses and the people who worked in them; the revival and reshaping of old plays in performance; and the role of ageing and memory in the theatre.

She has published three books to date. The first, Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge University Press, 2005), focused on the most prominent of the children’s playing companies of early modern London - the ‘little eyases’ of Shakespeare’s Hamlet - examining the company’s history and their involvement in crucial developments in dramatic genre in the early 17th century. 

The second, Archaic Style in Early Modern Literature, 1590-1674 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), is a study of the ways in which early modern writers use linguistic, poetic or dramatic styles that would have seemed old-fashioned to their first audiences or readers.  Looking at the works of canonical figures such as Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser and Jonson alongside those of Robert Southwell, Anna Trapnel, William Cartwright and others, it argues that the attempts of writers to reconstruct outmoded styles within their own works reveal a largely untold story about the workings of literary influence and tradition, the interactions between past and present, and the uncertain contours of English nationhood.

Her most recent book, Shakespeare in the Theatre: The King's Men (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2020), examines the role of the playing company in the genesis and early performance lives of Shakespeare's plays. It looks in detail at some of the plays with the strongest performance records in the early seventeenth century, such as Othello, Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Richard II and Henry VIII. It argues that the King's Men, as theatre-makers in their own right, exercised a generative and transformative influence on Shakespeare's plays, and that their practices over four decades shaped traditions that would define Shakespearean performance.

Professor Munro's work as a textual editor includes editions of Edward Sharpham's The Fleer for Globe Quartos (Nick Hern Books, 2006), Richard Brome's The Demoiselle and The Queen and Concubine in Richard Brome Online, gen. ed. Richard Allen Cave (2009), John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed for New Mermaids (A&C Black, 2010), Thomas Dekker, William Rowley and John Ford's The Witch of Edmonton for Arden Early Modern Drama (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2016), Philip Massinger's The Picture, in The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama, ed. Jeremy Lopez (Routledge, 2020), and James Shirley's The Gentleman of Venice, in The Complete Works of James Shirley, vol. 7, gen. ed. Eugene Giddens and Teresa Grant (Oxford University Press, 2022). She is currently editing King Henry IV, Part I, for the Arden Shakespeare's Fourth Series.

She has also been involved with three major funded projects, 'Ages and Stages: The Place of Theatre in Representations and Recollections of Ageing' (2009-13), led by Professor Mim Bernard; 'Before Shakespeare' (2016-18), led by Dr Andy Kesson; and 'Engendering the Stage: The Records of Early Modern Performance' (2020-3), which she led with Professor Clare McManus. 

Professor Munro is currently working on a new history of the Globe and Blackfriars Playhouses. It investigates the lives of men and women whose labour sustained the construction of early modern playhouses and their use as performance venues; the circumstances in which women and children acquired and profited from shares in the playhouses; and the ways in which the playhouses were tied to the early modern colonial project through shared patronage networks, the circulation of commodities and the direct investment of playhouse sharers in colonial projects.

Professor Munro would be happy to supervise PhD research in any area of early modern studies, including textual and performance studies.  She has particular interests in drama of the period 1580-1660 and its afterlives on stage and screen, literary style and genre theory, literature and ageing, and childhood studies.