In an account of the best books she had read in 2010, Katherine Duncan-Jones gave Documents of Performance in Early Modern England a remarkable accolade: "Stern, still young, already outstrips the magisterial E. K. Chambers". The parallel is apposite, but not in the way Duncan-Jones means. In a Textual Note at the start of her book (xiii-xiv), Stern explains that because early printings often reproduce texts written over a considerable amount of time, "dates of performance are not generally supplied". This approach has the tendency of making everything seem equally representative of early modern theatrical culture, which was how early-twentieth century scholars did theatre history. In fact, Stern is even more of a generalizer than Chambers, who confined his theatre histories to The Mediaeval Stage (1903) and thenThe Elizabethan Stage (1923), leaving the Jacobean and Caroline stages for others to tackle. Stern, however, brings in material from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, and treats it all as more-or-less equally illustrative of a singularity her title characterizes as "performance in early modern England".

Stern begins by stating her foundational principle that "a play . . . was not a single whole entity" (1). She lists the various bits of plays that scholarship has previously neglected: scenarios (that is, author plots), prologues and epilogues, songs, scrolls (letters and the like), 'arguments' (handed to the audience) and playbills. Of course, none of these is the work of genius that many readers find to be the essence of early modern drama's achievement,