Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, Making Shakespeare, Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey) and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England. She has co-edited a collection of essays with Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare's Theatres and the Effects of Performance, and has edited King Leir, Sheridan's The Rivals, Farquhar's Recruiting Officer, and Brome's Jovial Crew. She is general editor of New Mermaids and the Arden Fourth series.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Note on the Text
Notes on Contributors

Introduction
Part One: Documents Before Performance
1 Writing a Play with Robert Daborne: Lucy Munro (King's College, London, UK)
2 A Sharers' Repertory: Holger Syme (University of Toronto, Canada)
3 Parts and the Playscript: Seven Questions: James J. Marino (Cleveland State University, USA)
4 Undocumented: Improvisation, Rehearsal and the Clown: Richard Preiss (University of Utah, USA)
Part Two: Documents of Performance
5 'Rethinking Prologues on Page and Stage': Sonia Massai (King's College, London) and Heidi Craig (The Folger Shakespeare Library, USA)
6 Title-and Scene-Boards: The Largest, Shortest Documents: Matt Steggle (Sheffield Hallam University, UK)
7 'What is a staged book? Books as 'Actors' in the Early Modern English Theatre' (Sarah Wall-Randell, Wellesley College, USA)
Part Three: Documents After Performance
8 Flowers for English Speaking: Play Extracts and Conversation: András Kiséry (The City College of New York, USA)
9 Shakespearean Extracts and the Misrepresentation of the Archive: Laura Estill (Texas A and M University, USA)
10 Typography After Performance: Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
11 Shakespeare the Balladmonger: Tiffany Stern (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK)
Part Four: Documents Beyond Performance
12 Lost Documents, Absent Documents, Forged Documents: Roslyn Knutson (University of Arkansas, USA) and David McInnis (University of Melbourne, Australia)
13 Afterward: Peter Holland (Notre Dame University, USA)
Notes
Bibliography
Index

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched.
Rethinking Theatrical Documents brings together fifteen major scholars to analyse and theorise the documents, lost and found, that produced a play in Shakespeare's England. Showing how the playhouse frantically generated paratexts, it explores a rich variety of entangled documents, some known and some unknown: from before the play (drafts, casting lists, actors' parts); during the play (prologues, epilogues, title-boards); and after the play (playbooks, commonplace snippets, ballads) - though 'before', 'during' and 'after' intertwine in fascinating ways. By using collective intervention to rethink both theatre history and book history, it provides new ways of understanding plays critically, interpretatively, editorially, practically and textually.