Early modern theater was a diverse and richly textured world of performances, both scripted and improvised. Our evidence about it, however, depends almost entirely on texts: a small number of descriptions, a very few manuscripts, and a substantial number of published plays. In this collection, a group of innovative and original theater historians considers both the process and the implications of the transformation of staged drama into reading texts--a complex process, not at all direct or unmediated, with broad implications for the developing concept of drama, the changing cultural and commercial status of theater, and the history of the book.