Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (review)

Tiffany Stern's insistently written book changes the ways in which we must think of early modern playtexts. The eight chapters of Documents of Performance are held within — or flanked by, to use one of Stern's favourite phrases — an introduction and conclusion, and together explore the idea of a play patched by its author(s) and forever destined to be repatched by its editor(s) and future reader(s). The chapters follow through the stages of a play's composition from plot-scenarios to an approved 'book' and actors' parts; each is self-contained, rigorously subdivided, and capped with a conclusion. The chapters can be read then, as stages in the sequence of events that shape the play from the page to the stage, or as independent case-studies of the forms that different dramatic documents took, the mechanisms within which, and personnel among whom, they circulated, and the traces that they have left in the surviving archive. As Stern writes: 'The patchwork construction that defines early modern plays thus also defines the way this book has been designed and written' (p. 5).

Stern's central argument, richly documented, is that the temporality and indeed the ontology of the early modern play are far more varied and disjunctive than earlier commentators supposed. Only by attending to the different documentary narratives that run through, across, and away from the play, she contends, can we start now to resituate ourselves and our accounts of what went on in the early modern theatre in relation to the play's many parts. By placing the 'plot-scenario' first, Stern draws attention immediately to the kinds of disjunction that (paradoxically) conjoin in a play. She shows from a widely drawn survey of quotation from early modern sources that to playwrights and audiences the action of a play was very separate from its dialogue. Why was there, she asked, 'a separation amounting almost to a rivalry between a play's plot and its language?' (p. 9).

As the larger argument of the book develops through the detailed examples around which each chapter is organized, rivalries and relations of similar kinds recur, plays existing always in tension between their parts. This is seen, for instance, in the relationship between playbills and title-pages, through which the bills that once would have hung on the posts of London, though they are now vanished, might be re-imagined in part thanks to the title-pages of surviving printed texts that are, like playbills, 'particular varieties of advertising' and probably so preserve more than has been previously realized of this lost class of documents (p. 62). Or, to take another example, the 'to-and-fro' that Stern describes between 'the paratexts of enacted and printed play' (p. 80) in her chapter on the 'arguments' of early modern plays. Once thought to be a strictly literary, and effectively antitheatrical element of a play, the 'argument' becomes in Stern's account part of the moment of performance, rendering, as she puts it 'the performance a conflation of staged action and written, textual, information' (p. 71).

One of the great strengths of Stern's account is that, in a manner similar to her first book, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2000), she draws on a field of evidence that stretches from the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, and sometimes beyond (as when Stern uses the example of a modern opera programme to gloss her account of arguments, for instance). Stressing an abiding continuity of English theatrical practice, without neglecting the historical specificity of individual examples, Stern is able to link suggestively and effectively case studies that would previously have been the preserve of very different theatre historians. This happens brilliantly, and often — as, for instance, in Stern's chapter on backstage-plots, which explores evidence ranging from late sixteenth-century notes in Robert Wilson's hand, jotted on the back of a letter from Robert Shaa to Philip Henslowe (pp. 205...