Review
`This book, the first on the subject, is both timely and valuable for stage historians and performance critics ... Stern offers synthesis and stimulating reinterpretation' Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol.32, No.4
`It deserves to become a long-lived reference work.' Alison Shell, Times Literary Supplement
`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.' Alison Shell, TLS, 4 May 2000
`Astonishing but true - this invaluable study is the first to examine rehearsal before 1800.' Plays Int. Mag., Dec.00.
`Stern really picks up speed, deftly juggling a wealth of hint and anecdote to construct an authoritative picture of how rehearsal actually worked.' Plays International Magazine, Dec. 00.
`Our ideas of what constitutes appropriate preparation, a desirable production, even a play itself are set in historical relief by this cracking book.' Plays Int. Mag. Dec. 2000.
Product Description
Attention is often given to the performance of a text, but not to the shaping process behind that performance. The question of rehearsal is seldom confronted directly, though important textual moments--like revision--are often attributed to it. This is the first history of the subject, from
the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. It examines the nature and changing content of rehearsal, drawing on a mass of autobiographical, textual, and journalistic sources, and in so doing throws new light on textual revision and transforms accepted notions of Renaissance, Restoration, and
eighteenth-century theatrical practice.
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