Simon Williams is Emeritus Professor of Theater Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has published widely in the fields of acting history, Shakespeare in performance, and opera, with previous books including German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Greenwood, 1985) and Shakespeare on the German Stage, 1586–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 1990). He also co-edited A History of German Theatre (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and edited the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Stage Actors and Acting (2015).