KW
Team
Dr Héloïse Sénéchal set up the KW project following research into the social and kinship networks of London’s early modern theatrical communities. She has a special interest in mapping the intersections of people and places within theatrical districts, and in the evolution of playhouse-adjacent forms of entertainment and commerce. Having recently completed a critical edition of Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, she is now editing some of Dekker’s prose works, whilst researching a monograph on leisure and the community in early modern Bankside. Her work for the KW focuses on the women hidden within the interstices of the record, part of an ongoing interest in improving access to archival material. She has degrees from the universities of Cambridge and Birmingham (The Shakespeare Institute), is an experienced teacher, and serves as Executive Secretary of The Malone Society.
Find Héloïse’s work in Shakespeare Quarterly here.
Dr Lucy Holehouse is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Royal Holloway, where she researches sixteenth- and seventeenth-century civic performance in London and the intersections between player, playgoer, playwright, and playreader. Her research exists at the cross-section of theatre history, material culture studies, audience studies, and identity studies. She previously completed her PhD at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. The Materiality of Disguise in the King's Men's Repertory, 1603-1625 explores costumes, cosmetics, prosthetics, props and characterisation in the King's Men's repertory to argue that the company were at the forefront of disguise innovation on the early modern commercial stage. She is interested in how the heterogenous audience and consideration of the individual demonstrate the ambiguity of the early modern stage and in how acknowledgement of uncertainty can illuminate, not obscure, our understanding of disguise drama and the questions of identity therein. She is currently developing her first monograph.
Find Lucy's work in The Theatrical Legacy of Thomas Middleton, 1624-2024 here.
Dr Meryl Faiers completed a PhD at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, following a career as a producer/general manager of commercial theatre in the West End of London and Australia. Her doctoral research focused on the ownership, operation, and financial management of the early modern playhouse, through studies of her sixteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors Philip Henslowe and John Heminges. For the KW project she has written on three women of the Heminges family and is currently researching women workers at the playhouses of the King's Men. Other research interests include early modern London and its parishes; women connected with the London livery companies; palaeography; user interaction with printed texts of the period; and the development of models of theatre organisation and finance from the Shakespearean playhouse to current practice.
​Find Meryl's work in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Authorship here.