Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

Documents of Performance in Early Modern England, by Tiffany Stern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 362 + xiv. Hardback, $95.00 Reviewer: DOUGLAS BRUSTER This important book explores "documents of performance" in early modem England--such papers (and passages) as plot-scenarios (chapter 1), playbills and title-pages (chapter 2), arguments (chapter 3), prologues, epilogues, and choruses (chapter 4), songs and masques (chapter 5), scrolls (chapter 6), backstage-plots (chapter 7), and approved books and actors' parts (chapter 8). Each chapter of this massively researched study offers a monograph's worth of insights about the essence of early modem playbooks and the performances to which they were connected. Stern's first chapter treats "plot-scenarios," forecasts and distillations of a play's actions, often composed by someone other than the writer or writers responsible for a play's dialogue. Together with the third ("arguments") and seventh ("backstage-plots") chapters, this one opens up a rich field for exploration. Put simply, we are not very good at talking about what happens in a play. This affects (even as it may come from) our teaching: we tend to respond negatively to "plot summary" in our students' papers, rather than imagine ways in which their interest in action might be turned to more so-phisticated uses. Stern's "plot" chapters give us material for such a project. Chapter 2 focuses on playbills and title-pages, arguing that these two types of documents may have been, in some cases, not so different at all. Stern sets out what we know about playbills, which have disappeared for the period under consideration but which once blanketed early modern London as advertisements for performance. She then proceeds to suggest that playbills may have served as the source of some title-pages' language, and that some of these playbills may have been authorial in nature. A thought experiment with the title-page of Q1 Merchant of Venice leads to the possibility of Shakespeare's hand in both the playbill and title-page. In intimating a larger role for playwrights vis-a-vis printed playbooks, this argument goes against the grain of much of the rest of the study, where Stern largely and usually persuasively disintegrates published texts. At the same time, it constitutes one of the more provocative suggestions in a book full of original ideas. The next chapter, concerning 'arguments,' is the book's shortest. In it, Stern examines manuscript and printed arguments connected with early modern plays: those brief summaries (often in prose) that share many features with the plot-scenarios treated in chapter 1. Many such arguments clearly imitate classical precedent, and seem intended to lend gravitas to printed playbooks. Yet Stern also takes up what she calls "audience Arguments," printed plot summaries that were sometimes distributed to audiences. Masques and foreign-language plays seem particularly generative of such arguments, owing to the need for supplemental explanation of the actions occurring therein. Prologues, epilogues, and choruses--perhaps the most familiar paratextual forms in early modern drama--lie at the core of chapter 4. Their motley publication history allows Stern to draw several important conclusions. Most generally, these forms were invariably detached from play texts. They were not always written by the author (or authors) of the main play, or when the main play was composed. Nor were they always published with the relevant plays, or--when they were--in the textual place corresponding to their performance. What makes this chapter pivotal to the book is the idea of textual independence: the fact that prologues, epilogues, and choruses seem usually to have been written on separate pieces of paper. This must have been in part a function of the varied demands they served, and in part so that they might be carried onstage and consulted by the actors who may not have had the time or inclination to commit them to memory. …