Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan by Tiffany Stern (review)

72 mains a useful literary life of Defoe. Furbank and Owens have published an eightvolume edition of Defoe’s political and economic writings, the first of a number of sets in their projected Works of Daniel Defoe from Pickering and Chatto. Mr. Novak and others have published several volumes of a competing edition of Defoe from AMS Press, which no doubt will include titles not in the Furbank-Owens bibliography. The sparks generated by these complementary and in some ways contradictory versions of the Defoe corpus may be expected to touch off new brushfires of debate about his contributions to the narrative, constitutional, and financial formations upon which the early modern world was constructed. Clearly it is Defoe scholarship itself that benefits from such controversies, which, as Mr. Novak concludes in his biography, is just how Defoe himself would have wanted it to be. Geoffrey M. Sill Rutgers University TIFFANY STERN. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Oxford: Clarendon, 2000. Pp. xii ⫹ 337. $65. Make room on the shelf, right next to The London Stage, for this book. Ms. Stern’s meticulous research provides a wealth of information on every aspect of dramatic activity over a long period. Even though the focus of this review is restricted to the period of most interest to readers of The Scriblerian, I recommend highly the chapters on Renaissance/Shakespearean drama and the Age of Garrick. Initially, Ms. Stern mines the period’s primary sources: individual plays (many still in manuscript) and prologues, letters and memoirs, periodicals and miscellaneous papers , and anecdotes. Up on the scholarship, she also takes issue with or supplements conclusions made in the ‘‘Introductions’’ to The London Stage volumes. For example, ‘‘There is no real evidence’’ for the assertion that ‘‘it was usual to give two weeks over to rehearsal before performance,’’ and she offers a number of fresh perspectives on the relationships among playwrights, actors, managers, and audiences. Each chapter is buttressed with copious footnotes (and here it is a great relief that they are foot- and not end-notes), the major chapters averaging over 200. ‘‘Rehearsal’’ had several meanings in the English theater world. Many readers may be surprised by the infrequency of larger full-cast preparations and the fact that often rehearsals did not begin in earnest until after the initial performance. Ms.Sternissimply excellent at portraying complex factors in sharp detail, for example the dwindling significance of the author’s presence at initial readings, rehearsals, and the immediate post-debut period; the growing power of the actor to influence and even dismantletexts; the multifaceted role of the prompter; the growing dominance of theater managers; and the emerging influence of the audience in the revision process. Also here: actors often knew very little, other than their own parts, about the play in which they appeared; and the emphasis was primarily on rigid and familiar portrayals (or at least rigid expectations for the portrayals): ‘‘originality of performance was not a goal.’’ For Ms. Stern, Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (in its original and later manifestations) is both a ‘‘hurdle and a starting point,’’ and her commentary on this piece and other theatrical parodies (such as The Female Wits) is especially worthwhile. She provides a clear and at times amusing impression of the actual rehearsal process, which often 73 took place during the ‘‘vacation for the season to come’’—often in the morning or after the end of the theatrical evening, most of the time spent in ‘‘private study’’(sometimes in individual instruction or in ‘‘nurseries’’) rather than in group rehearsals.Accordingly, many plays were woefully underrehearsed and thus woefully presented, often partially sabotaged by egocentric and at least periodically indolent actors: ‘‘Sometimes attendance at rehearsal was grudging and unproductive’’; therefore, ‘‘Over time, rehearsal attendance seems to have become selectively worse.’’ These plays were additionally ‘‘rehearsed’’ during repertory seasons along with other plays performed in the same week, and Ms. Stern offers interesting assessments of the different treatments given to new and to revived plays. New playwrights, she adds, ‘‘felt—or were encouraged to feel—that an active role in the production of their plays was socially unsuitable’’—‘‘Women [authors] in particular .’’ Playwrights peep out from behind the curtain, attempting, often...