Professor Tiffany Stern FBA

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.