Professor Tiffany Stern

Professor Tiffany Stern's research combines literary criticism, theatre history, book history, and textual editing, with a particular focus on the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Her work explores the theatrical contexts that shaped the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, with a sustained interest in the documentary practices of early modern theatre. She has published extensively on the theatrical documents produced by playwrights and theatre personnel during the processes of writing, rehearsing, and performing plays, including actors' parts, prologues, epilogues, songs, letters, arguments, backstage plots, plot scenarios, and other discrete stage documents. 

As General Editor of the New Mermaids play series and Arden Shakespeare 4, Professor Stern also examines the transmission of plays in both manuscript and print, while considering innovative approaches to textual editing in the digital age. Her current research includes Playing Fair, a study of early modern theatre and popular entertainment that investigates the cultural exchanges between playhouses and fairgrounds; Shakespeare Beyond Performance, which explores the theatrical documents generated in response to performance, such as ballads, chapbooks, commonplace books, and annotated ("noted") texts; and a new scholarly edition of Shakespeare's The Tempest.