- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2019
Tiffany Stern is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham; she has previously held professorships at Royal Holloway, University of London; and Oxford (University College). Her work combines literary criticism, theatre history and book history from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She specialises in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, particularly Jonson, Brome, Middleton and Nashe, and also writes on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century playwrights and editors, including Wycherley, Farquhar, Sheridan, Theobald and Johnson. The theatrical contexts that bring plays about – by Shakespeare and others – is her particular focus. Having researched the theatrical documents put together by authors and others in the process of writing and learning a play, she is repeatedly drawn back to actors’ parts, the documents consisting of cues and speeches from which actors learned their roles. She also writes on prologues, epilogues, songs, letters, arguments, plots and other stage documents; acting methods; theatre props, music, marketing and architecture. General editor of New Mermaids, and the flagship Shakespeare series Arden Shakespeare 4, she is also on the editorial boards of the journals SEDERI, Shakespeare Bulletin, and The Hare. Her scholarship is widely used by theatre companies interested in historically inflected performances.
10-Minute Talks: Theatre marketing and ballads in the time of Shakespeare
17 Jun 2020 Professor Tiffany Stern FBA
Professor Tiffany Stern FBA discusses sales of printed songtexts in Shakespeare’s London and asks whether songs performed in, about or after plays were "product placement" for theatre sales.

Current post
Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Past appointments
Royal Holloway, University of London Shakespeare Chair and Professor of Early Modern Literature
2016 - 2017
University College, Oxford CUF in English
2005 - 2016
University of Oxford Professor of Early Modern Drama
2005 - 2016
Oxford Brookes University Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader
2001 - 2005
Merton College, Oxford Junior Research Fellow
1997 - 2000
Publications
The British Academy 10-Minute Talks: Theatre marketing and ballads in the time of Shakespeare
17 Jun 2020 The British Academy on YouTube
Why are Shakespeare plays filled with songs – not all of them relevant to the story? Tiffany Stern asks whether songs performed in, about or after plays were ‘product placement’ for theatre sales.
