Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

by Tiffany Stern

As well as 'play-makers' and 'poets', playwrights of the early modern period were known as 'play-patchers' because their texts were made from separate documents. This book is the first to consider all the papers created by authors and theatres by the time of the opening performance, recovering types of script not previously known to have existed. With chapters on plot-scenarios, arguments, playbills, prologues and epilogues, songs, staged scrolls, backstage-plots and parts, it shows how textually distinct production was from any single unified book. And, as performance documents were easily lost, relegated or reused, the story of a play's patchy creation also becomes the story of its co-authorship, cuts, revisions and additions. Using a large body of fresh evidence, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England brings a wholly new reading to printed and manuscript playbooks of the Shakespearean period, redefining what a play, and what a playwright, actually is.

Genres: Shakespeare, Nonfiction, Theatre

378 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 2009

Reviews

[Michael P.]

Edited from the introduction I'm doing for an interview with the author:
David Scott Kastan said: “I think Tiffany Stern’s Documents of Performance in Early Modern England is the most important new book I have read in a few years. It is remarkable and game-changing. She makes us rethink everything we thought we knew about playscripts by thinking hard, and amazingly uncovering new information, about all “the bits of paper,” as she puts it (that is, the prologues and epilogues, songs, playbills, even the actors’ parts) involved with performance in Shakespeare’s England. The book has so many new facts about the ways in which plays were staged and printed . . . her accumulated theatrical history forces a new way of understanding the very activity of playmaking in the period.”

Dr. Stern also uncovers hitherto unknown or little commented upon scraps of paper such as arguments (summaries of the story given to some patrons), plot-scenarios (which make it possible for so many of the plays to be co-authored, each writer followed the plot-scenario that had been written sometimes by someone else and sometimes by one of the co-authors), masques, scrolls and letters read on stage, the backstage plots used by the prompter (a sort of stage manager) and company to keep the performance in its correct order and get everyone on stage at the correct time). Stern reveals that plays were composed and marketed by patching together a lot of pieces of paper, often including the dialog itself. No one has ever looked at the bits of paper in this way, this systematically, or with these primary sources.

The book was a finalist for the George Freedley Award in 2010, was the Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year that year, and won the David Bevington Award for Best New Book in Early Drama Studies 2010. Read it. Twice.

[Matt]

A work of marathon scholarship that is clearly organized, well-written, and thorough, this text deconstructs the very notion *of* a text in such a way that I now have to reexamine everything about the lines we draw between text and performance.
Stern has reversed and inverted hundreds of years of scholarship in such a way that makes off-the-cuff phrases such as "from the page to the stage" turn into gibberish. This monograph blurs the lines between concepts and reality so thoroughly that I now have to reconsider whether the page even exists at all in a meaningful way.