Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Book Review‪)‬

Stern, Tiffany. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, xii+362 pp, ISBN 978 0521842372 1. In an account of the best books she had read in 2010, Katherine Duncan-Jones gave Documents of Performance in Early Modern England a remarkable accolade: "Stern, still young, already outstrips the magisterial E. K. Chambers". The parallel is apposite, but not in the way Duncan-Jones means. In a Textual Note at the start of her book (xiii-xiv), Stern explains that because early printings often reproduce texts written over a considerable amount of time, "dates of performance are not generally supplied". This approach has the tendency of making everything seem equally representative of early modern theatrical culture, which was how early-twentieth century scholars did theatre history. In fact, Stern is even more of a generalizer than Chambers, who confined his theatre histories to The Mediaeval Stage (1903) and then The Elizabethan Stage (1923), leaving the Jacobean and Caroline stages for others to tackle. Stern, however, brings in material from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, and treats it all as more-or-less equally illustrative of a singularity her title characterizes as "performance in early modern England".