Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan

As Tiffany Stern demonstrates in her remarkable Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, it may be possible to know more about the preparations for an early modern performance than about the performance itself. Assembling a truly daunting number of instances from archives and from references embedded in playtexts themselves, Stern offers a wonderful three-dimensional look into the process of preparing and performing plays between 1567 and 1780. This encyclopaedic study is indispensable for those interested in the conditions of England¹s early modern theatre. * Seventeenth-Century News *
One of the outstanding features of Tiffany Stern's highly original monograph is the amount of research that has gone into its preparation...The persuasive and intelligently constructed argument is its second outstanding feature. * Notes and Queries *
The book goes well beyond the limitations of its title, providing a comprehensive survey of the whole process of theatre work, form the first consideration of a text to the first night and beyond...Provides a rich repository of newly assembled information for theatre historians. At the same time it offers an unsentimental account of the life in the theatre during 200 formative years, from which actors and directors in "the business" can draw both fun and profit. * Essays in Criticism *
It deserves to become a long-lived reference work.... This is a mature book, one based on a reassuringly large and diverse body of evidence, moving from Shakespeare's to Garrick's theatre with no sense of strain, and elegantly written throughout, with several good new stories for connoisseurs of theatrical anecdote.... Its wide range makes it of especial use for Restoration and eighteenth-century material. * Times Literary Supplement *