its poetic dialogue. Stern believes that dialogue too could have been created patchily, by collaboration, but accepts that on occasion it existed as "something like a unified text". Yet this too was decomposed in the theatre to make parts, casting table, playhouse plot, properties list, and so on (3). The patchy nature of early modern drama is not, she insists, a figment of the modern historical imagination: there was an "early modern distrust of the unity and completion of the playscript" (4). Stern admits the thinness of the evidence, and that she is concerned with "documents not extant". This concern distinguishes her from the mainstream New Textualism that emerged when post-structuralists became interested in early modern textuality (in the materialist sense) in the 1980s and 1990s. Although theybeing antagonistic to performance--this is not relevant to the early modern stage.[1] Stern's third example of a plot-scenario is the amateur dramatist Edward Dering's incomplete plot (acts 1-3 only) for Philander, and she tries to tie him to the professional stage by his acquaintance with and interest in the professionals (13-15). Her fourth example is Jonson's insertion of action summaries before each act in his unfinished play The Sad Shepherd (also in the 1641 Workes), which Stern assumes shows him copying out the relevant part of the plot for each act and then, with that as his guide, composing the appropriate action and dialogue underneath (16). (That is one explanation of what he was up to, but there is nothing to prove it.) Stern's fifth example is another