Ronnie Mulryne took his BA, MA and PhD at St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, before becoming a Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute and then moving to the University of Edinburgh. He joined the University of Warwick as Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies in 1977 and remained at Warwick until he retired in 2004. He is now an Emeritus Professor. He was a member of the Arts Council of Great Britain, chaired the Drama and Dance Panel of the British Council and was a member of the AHRB as well as a board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Birmingham Repertory Theatre and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is Chairman of Governors at King Edward VI School in Stratford-upon-Avon.

At Warwick, Ronnie devoted a great deal of time to developing interdisciplinary postgraduate research in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. He set up the first postgraduate ERASMUS programme with the Universities of Paris, Sorbonne and Venice, Ca’ Foscari, as well as a research link with Tours. His energy and determination led to success in bringing Leverhume, AHRB, AHRC and European Science Foundation projects to the Centre which, from 1999-2004 was designated AHRC Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures.

Ronnie’s research has always has an emphasis on performance. His scholarship has ranged from editions of Renaissance plays (including being a general editor of the Revels Plays) to his role as founding general editor of the Shakespeare in Performance Series (Manchester University Press). He has published numerous essays on Renaissance plays in their European context. More recently he has brought his editorial skills to bear on Renaissance Festival Books as a general editor of the two-volume collection Europa Triumphans: Court and Civic Festivals in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot and Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2004; to be republished as an e-book, 2009) and as a project leader for the digitisation of 253 Renaissance Festival Books from the collections of the British Library (www.bl.uk/treasuresinfull) As a director of Mulryne and Shewring Ltd, Ronnie has also conceived and carried through ambitious publications on theatre spaces and performances ranging from the Swan (RSC) and the Cottesloe (RNT) to the reconstructed Globe and Shakespeare and the Japanese Stage as well as a publication on Making Space for Theatre published to coincide with a major British Council Exhibition.

Above all, Ronnie has always been generous with his scholarship, enabling many postgraduates and colleagues to contribute to conferences and to publish their work in an interdisciplinary and international environment.