Attention is often given to the performance of a text, but not to the shaping process behind that performance. The question of rehearsal is seldom confronted directly, though important textual moments--like revision--are often attributed to it. This is the first history of the subject, from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. It examines the nature and changing content of rehearsal, drawing on a mass of autobiographical, textual, and journalistic sources, and in so doing throws new light on textual revision and transforms accepted notions of Renaissance, Restoration, and eighteenth-century theatrical practice.