TIFFANY STERN. Documents of Performance in Early Modern England.

Abstract

Documents of Performance in Early Modern England is a fascinating and compelling monograph, not least because Tiffany Stern's passion for the archival remains of early modern theatre is comparable to the irresistible, insatiable longing that some lesser mortals might feel for the most delectable creations of a Parisian pâtissier. Her previous, well-regarded publications have expressed her kid-in-a-candy-shop enthusiasm for the archival quest, and here, in Documents of Early Modern Performance, she turns her attention specifically towards two categories of material: on the one hand, the documentary evidence that, to a great extent, scholars think they know but that, as Stern demonstrates, bear further scrutiny, and, on the other hand, evidence that is no longer extant but may be inferred by someone with Stern's extensive knowledge of the field. This combination of analysis and inference accounts for both the considerable strengths and the limitations of Stern's project. Stern's sheer delight in the pursuit of archival evidence, her close engagement with the relevant scholarship, and also her own keen intellect, are abundantly clear in this major contribution to early modern theatre research, but the second category of ‘evidence’ is somewhat problematic. Stern's authoritative handling of the actual evidence lends credibility to her speculations, to be sure, and the move from analysis to embellishment is usually clearly signposted, but readers who fail to distinguish between the two categories may run into trouble because Stern's enthusiasm and her imagination sometimes overtake her scholarly circumspection. The absence of the thing itself tends to enlarge its significance, like Proust's madeleines, and the evidence lost to posterity becomes the pretext for flights of fancy that make for an engaging read and align with the tendency of recent novelistic biographies of Shakespeare to couch speculation in a few perhapses and surelys to preserve scholarly modesty.