Chapter 5

Performance Anxiety

William Shakespeare’s “Perfectness”

Even if, as Heminges and Condell suggest, his “mind and hand went together” such that he confidently produced unblemished sheets, William Shakespeare knew what it was like to be anxious and indecisive.¹ For example, he memorably dramatizes nervousness in his twenty-third sonnet:

As an unperfect actor on the stage

Who with his fear is put besides his part,

Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage

Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart,

So I, for fear of trust, forget to say

The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,

And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,

O’ercharged with burden of mine own love’s might.

Oh, let my books be then the eloquence

And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,

Who plead for love and look for recompense

More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.

 Oh, learn to read what silent love hath writ!

 To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.²

Overburdened and overprepared, the performance implodes before it begins. The sonnet’s speaker (or rather, writer) first likens himself to “an unperfect actor on the stage / Who with his fear is put besides his part,” explaining that he fails to deliver his lines “for fear of trust.” He discovers himself “unperfect” not because he has forgotten what to say (he has the “perfect ceremony” memorized), but because doubts about his beloved’s reciprocity have made him incapable of saying anything at all. Recalling, once more, Sidney’s account of the poetic “idea,” the “excellency” of which is discernible only if readers choose to “learn aright” why and how its maker made it, the speaker’s sense of perfection reveals itself to be contingent on the audience’s response.³ Recognizing this, the sonnet ends by turning to written performance as compensation for his failed recitation. As the poet makes this turn, he again rests his fate on the beloved’s response: if only the beloved will “learn to read what silent love hath writ” and so find in his writing the excessive outpouring that a tongue might express, these “dumb presagers” may seem appropriately eloquent. Thus the poem recognizes that authors, like actors, eventually put themselves at the mercy of responses that they cannot fully control. Even the poet who supposedly never blotted a line apparently knew that perfection must be granted and may not be claimed.

At some point, all authors must relinquish control over their work, because they cannot control what their readers will do with it. Balking at such disempowerment, they may prolong their labor and resist the stresses of publication by subjecting themselves to a taskmaster with a deceptively amiable name: “perfectionism.” Understood by psychologists as, in Joachim Stoeber’s words, “a multidimensional personality disposition characterized by striving for flawlessness and setting exceedingly high standards of performance accompanied by overly critical evaluations of one’s behavior,” perfectionism counterproductively endeavors to completely satisfy productivity’s inexhaustible demands.⁴ Striving (a condition of lack) after exceedingly high standards (a condition of excess), chasing after perpetually shifting goalposts, being ready to abandon a project near its completion—these perfectionist behaviors confuse work with toil.

Perfectionism, as Elizabeth Tallent puts it, is “a love letter the psyche sends to an unresponsive Other.”⁵ Riffing on the conceit of Sonnet 23, Shakespeare wrote an entire play preoccupied with the problem of winning love through writing. Set in and around the “little academe” of the French court of Navarre, Love’s Labor’s Lost (1594–96) is riddled with patchwork erudition, blocked speeches, frustrated revisions, and rejected appeals for collaboration. Beyond its scenes of both writerly and actorly failure, the play itself fails at the level of genre: it is a comedy that does not satisfy convention by ending in reconciliation or marriage. Moreover, the text of the play may also be read as fundamentally “unfinished.”⁶ The title page of its first quarto announces itself as “Newly corrected and augmented,” but it is unclear, H. R. Woudhuysen suggests, what the prior text it purports to have revised might have been.⁷ Even if a reprint, however, the play’s composition betrays many signs of authorial uncertainty and indecision.⁸ Grace Ioppolo specifically notes the “compelling evidence of second-thought revisions” in the play, going so far as to observe that in his special attention to revising Biron’s speeches, “Shakespeare revised his hero, his play, and his own artistic role, function and method. In other words, Shakespeare revised himself.”⁹ The play’s composition glimpses its playwright’s uncertainties, and its title page lays bare the false starts the play underwent in its life as a public document.

Reading Love’s Labor’s Lost as a finished, authored text falls into a trap the play itself sets; by prioritizing reciprocal, live exchanges over the written word, it challenges readers to recognize the interpretive limitations of solitary reading. Scholars have long seen the play as emphasizing the “folly of loving by the book,” with the term “book” metonymically extending across styles of discourse derived from courtly etiquette manuals, the Petrarchan tradition of courtly love, and the humanist curriculum.¹⁰ Each context against which the interpersonal exchanges of the play may be read—the spaces of courtly love, legal property disputes, the latter-day humanist academy, the modern Shakespeare classroom—finds it prompting a reconsideration of the means by which judgments are made, conclusions are drawn, and knowledge is discovered.¹¹ I argue that by rejecting a conception of “perfection” rooted in bookish adherence to conventional wisdom, the play dislocates perfectionism with a practice of trust. In this way, it can help us conceive a critical and poetic pedagogy that requires students and teachers, readers and writers, and actors and audiences to construct an environment wherein failure is seen not as a conclusion but as a prompt for further conversation.

Following Shakespeare’s lead, in this chapter I conflate the submission of written work with the staging of live theater, and in so doing recognize that the perfectionist anxieties that authors face may be understood as a form of performance anxiety. Psychologists such as Glenn D. Wilson and David Roland tell us that performance anxiety names “an exaggerated, often incapacitating fear of public performance,” a fear that Ariadna Ortiz Brugués observes as preconditioned on the existence of “high ego investment and evaluative threat.”¹² In actors, it derives from a fear of rejection, making one of its signal manifestations stage fright: what Donald M. Kaplan describes as a “state of morbid anxiety disturbing the sense of poise,” where poise “depends upon our anticipations of others’ receptions of how we are hoping to represent ourselves.”¹³ In writers, whose scenes of writing become “public” performances only at the threshold of submission, performance anxiety may blend concerns about demonstrations of skill with concerns about social and affective relationships. Academic writers who subject their work to peer review know this experience well. As Ronald Britton suggests, their publication anxiety “emanates from fear of criticism by third parties who are regarded as authoritative and from fear of disaffiliation from colleagues with whom the author feels the need to be affiliated.”¹⁴ While actors may be more likely to freeze up and become incapable of performing at all, writers, according to Britton, may produce “a superficial and complacent text” designed explicitly to please their imagined audiences.¹⁵ These wires can be crossed too: writers may experience blockage, and anxious actors may start pandering and hamming it up.

Throughout this book, I have suggested that experiences of discomposition are fundamental to the activation of poetic and critical insight. To promote these experiences, I have advocated for a pedagogy rooted in license, transparency, generosity, and a spirit of genuine collaboration between teachers and students. At the point of finally sharing their work with others, however, all writers—be they students or Shakespeare—confront the fearsome heart that animates all discomposition: the shame of failure. How do writers countenance “evaluative threat” in ways that are generative rather than paralyzing? How can we help students approach writing, if not with confidence, then at least with a conviction that failure, too, is an acceptable outcome? It may help, I propose, to think about writing as Shakespeare must have when he set about writing his plays: as something that invites, rather than fears, readers’ responses. Seen in this light, a piece of writing may fail only when it regards itself as having no need of further discomposition.

The primary form of failure dramatized in Love’s Labor’s Lost— awkward and disjointed conversation between lords and ladies—was an educational problem in early modern England.¹⁶ Continuing the previous chapter’s examination of poesy as a social and conversational process, the first section of this chapter tracks the parallels between Love’s Labor’s Lost and Stefano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation (first translated into English in 1581). I argue that by repeatedly dramatizing scenes of failed delivery—of speech, of letters, of theatrical performance—the play launches a sustained critique of verbal self-assuredness and unilateral social discourse. Relating the failures of the lords of Navarre to the play’s own depictions of theatrical failure, the second section then locates early modern playwrights in the moments prior to the first performances of their plays. What did they worry about? How did they conceive of the challenge of winning the audience’s love? Taking cues from Sara Jane Bailes’s account of the “poetics of failure” and its relationship to amateur theater, I connect metatheatrical depictions of actors going “out” of their parts—scripted scenes of actors forgetting or flubbing lines, losing their place, standing amazed—to the early modern construction of theatrical authorship as an exercise in imperfectness. The chapter’s third section then studies how twinned depictions of amateur theater and fractured conversation in Love’s Labor’s Lost index a conception of what it meant to write texts destined to be shared with potentially unreceptive audiences.¹⁷ At its anticlimactic close, the play encourages actors and audiences, authors and readers, speakers and listeners alike to reflect on what allows social interactions with the potential to be mutually beneficial—be they conversations, theatrical events, or any kind of written work—to fail.

In the reflection that closes this chapter—and this book—I take the revised image of failure offered by Shakespeare and train it on the unstable ground on which the early modern literature classroom currently stands. What would it mean, in practical terms, to let Shakespeare fail in the way we hope to encourage our students to fail—to risk something, to embrace possibility, to disaffiliate with the status quo and the institutions that prop it up? Doing so, I propose, requires professors to reckon with the limitations of their own hard-won expertise. Even though, as agents of professionalization, we cannot realistically play any role in the classroom other than that of the expert, we might remember that our students will always have new things to show us simply by virtue of being students. It is for this reason that Derek Attridge, championing amateurism as a breeding ground for critical insight, suggests that the “best hope for a new emphasis on the amateur impulse in literary studies … lies in the classroom.”¹⁸ To this, I add that the best hope for Shakespeare to evade prescriptive declarations of his perfectness— declarations that threaten to make him more irrelevant, because they suggest that he no longer has any work left to do—is to allow him to interact with readers who have not yet been professionalized.

Giving the Occasion

When the Princess of France and her retinue—Rosaline, Katherine, and Maria—first arrive in Navarre, they are immediately asked to play along with a prewritten script. On an embassy to settle a longstanding land dispute over the region of Aquitaine, the princess learns that the king of Navarre and his attendant lords—Biron, Longueville, and Dumaine—have vowed an oath to cloister themselves in study for three years and shun any interactions with women. Indeed, their anxieties about women are so great that their oath includes the provision that any woman who comes within a mile of the court will be punished by “losing her tongue” (1.1.122)¹⁹—and that any man seen speaking with a woman will be shamed by his peers.²⁰ The princess’s prescheduled arrival forces the lords to make some immediate exceptions, and so, minutes after making their oath, they breach it. Despite granting themselves this accommodation, however, they do not extend any to the princess herself: they do not let the women physically enter the court of Navarre. As a result, the first encounter between the lords and ladies takes place “in the field” where the princess is to be lodged not as a guest, but “like one that comes here to besiege his court” (2.1.86–87). Despite this treatment, the king’s first words to the princess are a flatly ceremonial performance of mock hospitality: “Fair Princess, welcome to the court of Navarre” (2.1.91). Spotting the facetiousness of these terms, the princess refuses to keep up the pretense, replying, “ ‘Fair’ I give you back again, and ‘welcome’ I have not yet” (2.1.92–93). She immediately perceives that the king’s unselfconsciously reflexive greeting betrays an inability either to think about what he is saying or to take his own words seriously.

Shortly after this encounter, Boyet, a lord accompanying the princess’s retinue from France, offers her an unnecessary explanation of the semiotics of masculine affection. The gist of it is that the princess does not know how to read the behavior of men. Boyet says that he immediately perceived the king to have fallen in love with the princess because the king’s “face’s own margent did quote such amazes / That all eyes saw his eyes enchanted with gazes” (2.1.245–46). Despite the king never actually confessing such affection, Boyet suggests that the princess soften her disposition toward him (2.1.247–48). Over the course of the next three acts, the king and the other lords affirm Boyet’s suspicion, and believe themselves to have fallen in love with the visiting ladies. They send love tokens and attempt to court the ladies with a masquerade, but the princess, fearing their insincerity, orders her masked retinue to swap their love tokens and confuse the approaching lords. Thwarted and confounded, the men then attempt to convey that their affections had been in earnest—Dumaine asserts that their letters “showed much more than jest,” to which Longueville adds, “So did our looks”—but Rosaline responds that the women “did not quote them so” (5.2.771–73).²¹ The lords might thus be understood as complaining that the ladies are misreading the text of their courtship, while the ladies might be understood as responding that the lords had miswritten it.²²

A prevailing conceit of Love’s Labor’s Lost is this clumsy imbrication of “penned speech”—letters, speeches, tokens, habituated gestures—and live conversation. As we saw in chapters 1 and 2, the rhetorical education that humanist students received in grammar school armed them with techniques for discovering arguments, organizing them, embellishing them with ornamentation, and reciting them with proper pronunciation. Lynn Enterline suggests that this “constant demand for the performance of eloquence and socially sanctioned affect under the threat of punishment” reverberated in the mature writings of schoolboys who had to endure “the drama, fears, and desires of their own schoolroom performances.” One way this manifested was in students’ fascination with “the hallmark Ovidian moment of vocal failure”—moments “when characters like Philomela, Orpheus, Echo, Io, and Actaeon try, in vain, to do something with words, only to find that their own tongues betray them.”²³ Shakespeare’s schoolroom, organized around students “taking the institutional scene of judgement inside, as their own,” offered practice in avoiding vocal failure via staged debates and theatrical productions.²⁴ These supervised encounters with classmates could not really substitute for real-world interactions, however, because forensic rhetorical training was fundamentally antagonistic.²⁵ This shift in emphasis correlated with an extension of eloquence beyond the domain of learned men. When women, the vast majority of whom were not permitted the excessively textual humanist education given to the men, joined men in courtly conversations, performances of book learning proved even less socially useful.

This is something Biron even anticipates, prior to signing his oath: “Small have continual plodders ever won, / Save base authority from others’ books” (1.1.86–87). Biron’s lesson, itself delivered aphoristically within the formal logic of a sonnet, does not appear to resonate with his peers or change his own disposition. When the king responds that Biron has only shown how “well he’s read to reason against reading” (1.1.94), this foreshadows how the sunk costs of the lords’ education overpower their ability to adapt to novel experiences. The comic scenes that follow largely dramatize how their pretensions repeatedly obstruct their own desires. For the lords, performances of verbal skill function as a sort of game for which emulation, memorization, and recitation are the only form of training. Being well read suffices to win an argument. When they confront situations in which this learned discourse proves insufficient or inappropriate, however, the lords find themselves overexposed. It is one thing to fail at performing eloquence by misremembering the topics of invention or misquoting a witty commonplace, they learn; it is another entirely to fail to make a good impression.

The lords fail to make their intentions clear in part because they approach communication primarily via ceremonial and scripted declarations. They are, as Carla Mazzio observes, “lovers full of text,” a surfeited state attributable to the “proliferation of amatory discourses in printed texts” during the early modern period.²⁶ Noting the increasingly formulaic nature of courtly interactions in general, the ladies do not take the lords’ words at face value (much less by virtue of whatever lies in the “margents”). As the men have already demonstrated through their lapsed oath, they do not take their own words either literally or seriously, despite publishing them broadly. Later in the play, when they each secretly write love poems and letters, they also do not commit to sharing their words openly or enthusiastically. Biron witnesses the king of Navarre contrive to drop the sonnet he had written for the princess rather than deliver it himself; both Biron and the king witness Longueville confess his fear that his “stubborn lines lack power to move” and that he will tear the verses and “write in prose” (4.2.50–51); Biron, the king, and Longueville observe Dumaine deciding to send Kate his poem alongside “something else more plain” (4.2.116); and, when Costard returns Biron’s letter to Rosaline to him within view of his compatriots, Biron tears it up and rails at Costard, “You were born to do me shame” (4.2.198–99). The lords’ anxieties about their writerly failure—anxieties determined in part by their self-appraisals, in part by the ladies’ responses, and in part by their fear of what their peers might think of them—make them evasive, stubborn, and insincere. The written word somehow proves too final, too determinative, and too vulnerable to misapprehension—yet it also allows the lords to disavow meaning and shield themselves from direct criticism. These qualities of writing insinuate themselves into how the lords speak; the lords cannot help but sound, as Mazzio suggests, “as if they were reading and writing.”²⁷ What they require, in a theme befitting the cultural moment in which the play was written, is an education in how to have a conversation.

The art of “civil conversation” arrived in early modern England in the sixteenth century by way of continental, and mostly Italian, treatises on etiquette and courteousness such as Baldessare Castiglione’s Il cortegiano (published in Italy in 1528), Giovanni Della Casa’s Il galateo (1568), and Stephano Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation (1574). Before long, aspiring gentlemen courtiers attempted to emulate the sparkling social skills fictionalized in these books, and they practiced at places where young gentlemen gathered. As discussed in chapter 3, such places were increasingly institutions of higher learning such as Oxford, Cambridge, and the Inns of Court.²⁸ Lynne Magnusson makes a persuasive case for the influence of the festival events at Gray’s Inn during the 1594–95 season on Love’s Labor’s Lost, noting how, during that season, students at the revels were assigned to “read and peruse Guizo, the French Academy, Galiatto the Courtier, Plutarch, the Arcadia, and the Neoterical Writers, from time to time” to bolster their social tact.²⁹ Seeing the play amid this heightened preoccupation with conversational sociability reveals the plot closely tracking Guazzo’s text in particular. The first three books of Guazzo’s The Civile Conversation were translated by George Pettie in 1581 (from a French translation), with the fourth book translated by Bartholomew Young and added for a reprinting in 1586. The Civile Conversation is largely a dialogue between the author’s infirm and solitary brother, William, who wishes to spend all his time in his library, and the worldly Annibal, an esteemed physician who happens to be William’s neighbor. The fourth book shifts the frame of their dialogue, allowing William to witness the “conversational games” played by a cadre of six lords and four ladies at a banquet.³⁰

Guazzo begins the dialogues with William complaining that he would rather hole himself up to “reade or write” (1.3r) than grow “acquainted with the course of the worlde” (1.5v).³¹ Explaining himself to Annibal, William proceeds like a dutiful scholar and cites biblical, philosophical, and literary passages affirming the value of reading and maligning the superficiality and crass immorality of society. Observing that public life is “full of suspitions, deceites, lasciuiousnesse, periuries, detractions, enuy, oppressions, violences, and other innumerable mischiefes” (1.6v)—not to mention boring small talk—he resolves that conversation is simply not as worthwhile as studying. William’s show of citational learnedness leads Annibal to remark, “[Y]ou haue here co[m]mended solitarinesse, partly by reasons deriued from your owne good wit, & partly by ye doctirine you haue learned of some famous writers” (1.8r). In this compliment, he identifies William as a compiler of sententiae adhering to Seneca’s widely reproduced recommendation to follow “the example of bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are suitable for producing honey, and then arrange and assort in their cells all that they have brought in.”³²

To counterpoint William buzzing through his library, however, Annibal twists the “example of bees”: “[C]onuersation is not onely profitable, but moreouer necessary to the perfection of man, who must confess that hee is lyke the Bée which cannot liue alone… . [M]an is created for the vse of man, to the intent that following nature as their guide and Mistres, they haue to succour one another, to communicate together common profites, in giuing and receiuing, vniting and binding themselues together by artes, occupations, and faculties” (1.12r). For Annibal, the introverted work of scholastic reading must eventually transform into the extroverted work of testing one’s ideas out in order to refine them. Study without disputation is barren, he argues, and learning how to productively engage with those different from oneself is both a necessary and a rewarding skill. Sometimes, Annibal suggests, he must embark in vessels “wherin there are sometime men, women, religious, seculer, Souldiours, Courtiers, Almans, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Iewes, and other of diuers nations and qualities” (1.5r). While he was at first upset about being in such mixed company, he eventually learned to derive pleasure from framing himself “to the humours of others” and departing “being verie well thought of by the companie when I was gone” (1.5r–v).³³

The hallmarks of the good conversationalist were awareness of the context and of the disposition of one’s interlocutors, creativity, and open-mindedness.³⁴ A bad conversationalist, by contrast, was identifiable by egotism, rigidity, and a propensity to cow others into silence.³⁵ Agreeable interlocutors, Annibal observes, “frame themselves to doe, to leave, to chaunge, to correct many things according to the judgement of others” (2.4v). The amiable companion gets goodwill “by giuing eare curteously, as by speaking pleasantly” because “wée thinke, they thinke wel of vs, which are attentiue to our talke, and wée sée our pleasant spéeche serueth vs to no purpose, if it bee not hearde of others” (2.7v).³⁶ Additionally, when speakers encounter correction of their own behavior, it is imperative that they take the note in stride and not grow defensive. In the same vein, being overly desirous of praise would lead to bad habits like repetitiveness, tedium, and defensiveness. In his essay “Of Discourse,” likely inspired by familiarity with texts like Guazzo’s, the notable Gray’s Inn alumnus Francis Bacon writes, “Some in their discourse desire rather commendation of wit, in being able to hold all arguments, than of judgment, in discerning what is true, as if it were a praise to know what might be said, and not what should be thought.” The worst of this lot “have certain common places and themes wherein they are good, and want variety; which kind of poverty is for the most part tedious, and when it is once perceived, ridiculous.”³⁷

Annibal points out to William that only active conversation—within which the possibility of discomfort always looms—may also provide the affective education of demonstrating what not to do:

These are thinges whiche are learned, not so muche by readyng, as by using company, for when an other speaketh, wée marke what liketh and what disliketh, and by that wée knowe what we ought to auoyde and what to followe: as when wee our selues speake, and that wee sée some of the hearers litle attentiue, or some other way to vse some yll behauiour, wée learn by his inciuilitie how we ought to behaue our selues in hearing others. It shall suffice then to say for this time, that touching this action, wee must frame all the bodie in suche sort, that it séeme neither to bée of one whole immooueable lumpe, neither yet to bee altogether loosely disioynted. (2.12r–v)

To train yourself in the art of conversation, you must listen to how others speak and remember what you disliked about their demeanor. The goal of a conversation is for all participants to gain something from the encounter.³⁸ If you attend a conversation with the goal of trotting out what sounds smart, of playing a zero-sum game of esteem and self-aggrandizement, you risk boring your company and—as happens to the lords of Navarre—leading them to laughter or disdain before departing from you.

Forms of conversational failure like these were most damning, the etiquette guides insist, when courtly gentlemen attempted to converse with ladies.³⁹ During the 1594–95 festival season at Gray’s Inn, revelers were rewarded with a broad license for mirth but warned (in the characteristically conceited copiousness then in vogue) that excepted from the general pardon were “All such Persons as have, or shall have any Charge, Occasion, Chance, Opportunity, or possible Means to entertain, serve, recreate, delight, or discourse with any vertuous or honourable Lady or Gentlewoman, Matron or Maid, publickly, privately, or familiarly, and shall faint, fail, or be deemed to faint or fail in Courage, or Countenance, Semblance, Gesture, Voice, Speech, or Attempt.” In other words, if a member were to “stand mute, idle, frivolous, or defective, or otherwise dull” or broadly “different from the Profession, Practice and Perfection of a compleat and consummate Gentleman or Courtier,” he would be soundly mocked.⁴⁰ Being a good courtier meant being nimble and charming in mixed company; it meant somehow exchanging what Magnusson terms the “scoff power” conditioned by institutions like Gray’s for gentleness and solicitousness.⁴¹ In practice, this process involved going outside, talking to people, and learning how it felt to be spoken with rather than at. In the spirit of this sentiment, the organizers of the Gray’s Inn revels insisted that in addition to their reading, the young gentlemen “also frequent the Theatre, and such like places of Experience; and resort to the better sort of Ord’naries for Conference, whereby they may … become accomplished with Civil Conversations, and able to govern a Table with Discourse.”⁴² Going to the theater—not only to see fluent actors deliver eloquent dialogue and portray characters in strange and surprising circumstances, but also to think about one’s own public presentation by engaging in discussion, interpretation, and argument—was one of the ways that young men supposedly learned how to converse.

Failing Out

As we observe the young men from the Inns at Court filing into London’s playhouses to develop their social skills, we might also consider the players therein, anxiously awaiting them. It was not just with other auditors that these city gallants practiced conversation; they were also known to talk back to, or over, the actors on stage as well.⁴³ While Love’s Labor’s Lost depicts the arrogant lords forced to confront the limitations of their “penned speech,” what must it have been like for its author, anticipating the opening performance, penning those speeches? Imagine our poet, working through issues of plot, theme, character, and style at his writing desk. The scene of writing buzzes with a host of real and imagined voices: those of his collaborators, who may need him to have finished certain scenes according to the agreed-on plot structure; those of the actors, who would suit his parts to their personalities and particular skills; and finally, those of the imagined audience, who may turn against the derivative, the tedious, the unskillful, and the outlandish. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, Shakespeare positions courtly conversationalists alongside amateur theatrical performers, exposing continuities between their experiences of sociable discourse. While I am certainly far from the first person to suggest affinities between early modern actors and aspiring courtiers, I emphasize that these figures were aligned not just in terms of their capacities for “self-fashioning” but also in terms of how their self-conscious artificiality left them vulnerable to performance anxiety.⁴⁴

Lynn Enterline observes that professional players in Elizabethan England proceeded on a “trajectory from one institutional scene of performance and judgment (the schoolroom) to another (the commercial theater)” as the rite of passage into social maturity.⁴⁵ Their humanist training, she argues, produced “divided, rhetorically capable, yet emotionally labile speakers for whom language learning and self-representation entailed the incessant dislocations of the theater.” These dislocations were associated with “the constant internal movement in [Shakespeare’s] characters between seeming and being, persona and person, address and self-representation; between assuming, whether successively or simultaneously, the positions of writer, actor, and audience.”⁴⁶ Enterline’s account of the schoolboy’s crisis resembles what Donald M. Kaplan calls “blocking,” which he identifies as the “split between a functioning and an observing self” that is symptomatic of stage fright.⁴⁷ Early modern theatrical culture anticipated this experience, and made much of it, through a metaphorical dislocation: one of the most common expressions actors used for the experience of stage fright was of being “out.”⁴⁸

To be out was to experience the breakdown of the theatrical event as a collaborative endeavor. Erving Goffman, developing his famous sociological study of “everyday life” by analogizing it with theater, observed that when an individual “projects” a situation onto others that others are responsible for “protecting,” they aspire to build something analogous to Guazzo’s civil conversation: a “working consensus.”⁴⁹ If a projection is disrupted and a consensus broken, however, “the interaction itself may come to a confused and embarrassed halt” and “the individual who has been discredited may feel ashamed while the others may come to feel ill at ease, nonplussed, out of countenance, embarrassed, experiencing the kind of anomy that is generated when the minute social system of face-to-face interaction breaks down.”⁵⁰ Anticipating Goffman’s account, early modern Londoners deployed terms such as being “out,” “at non plus,” “out of countenance,” or “without a prompter” to describe everyday interactions. By the end of the sixteenth century, theatrically going “out” had become a resonant shorthand for the disorientation that caused performances of all kinds to fail: those of schoolchildren before their masters, gentlemen at court speaking with social superiors, and lovers before their beloveds.⁵¹ Jonson, for example, describes courtiers as akin to “neophyte players” because they are “daunted at first presence or interview” with those of higher social station.⁵² Robert Greene’s Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (1592) recounts a character who “had a good meaninge to utter his minde” to a beautiful courtesan, but upon seeing her “want[ed] fit wordes” and so “stood like a trewant that lackt a prompter, a plaier that being out of his part at his first entrance, is faine to have the book to speake what he should performe.”⁵³ As the theater grew to be an increasingly popular cultural touchstone, early modern popular culture began employing its conventions and protocols for describing everyday life. Every social performance carried with it some theatricality, and its failures could be rendered in terms of theatrical failure.

As conversational breakdown grew metonymically linked with theatrical implosion, this analogy also began to work in reverse: players, composing themselves and their plays for public performance, began envisioning the encounter as a potentially tense conversation. Players deployed representations of their own theatrical incompetence to remind audiences that putting on a show was embodied, physical labor that could be applauded on merits distinct from the merits of the written play alone. In analogizing stage fright with scenes of abjection such as the schoolboy before his master, a subject before royalty, or the lover before a beloved, players implied that the presence of spectators was partly responsible for their mistakes. In so doing, they encouraged spectators to perceive themselves as collaborators in the success of a theatrical event. After all, a play, especially a new commercial play, had to court audiences and persuade them of its charms. By the end of the sixteenth century, according to Jeffrey S. Doty, players—a category of professional that includes poets, actors, and businessmen shareholders—were confronting “mass audiences who essentially voted on what they liked or did not like.”⁵⁴ To sustain their business, players needed and attempted to fashion what Paul Menzer calls a “cultivated crowd.”⁵⁵ In this sense, plays like Love’s Labor’s Lost aimed at a shifting target, one that they would need the audience’s trust to even attempt striking.⁵⁶ Audience members would interrupt performances, write their own revisions and original plays, and publicize their critiques, drawing on their experiences from other venues. Facing such crowds almost certainly gave poets and their professional companies pause.

As if to combat this likelihood by openly acknowledging it, players across early modern drama began to perform their stage fright. Actorly failure would be scripted into performances, confusing the player’s professional occupation with the audience’s interpretation of characters’ emotional lives. This happened most conspicuously through prologues and epilogues, which came to emblematize the ways in which both the composition and performances of plays were vulnerable to audiences.⁵⁷ As Tiffany Stern observes, the prologue and epilogue materialized onstage the ambivalences and contradictions of authorship on the early modern stage because “a prologue or epilogue heralded a play in its freshest and so most fluid state.”⁵⁸ Theatrical prologues offered plays up for revision and correction, and so the actors who would deliver the prologues grew stereotypically associated with weak knees and pale faces. These figures perform a kind of worry that sheds light on playwrights’ own worries about the difference between theatrical and compositional “perfectness.” Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, for example, have a prologue complain that “[a] play (expected long) makes the audience look / For wonders—that each scene should be a book, / Composed to all perfection; each one comes / And brings a play in’s head with him.”⁵⁹ In trying to address the varied and unknowable whims of audiences, play producers took on an impossible task; rather than making confident compositional decisions, they made guesses about what the audience might want and how they would react.

While writers and printers in Shakespeare’s time used “perfect” to suggest that a text was complete or no longer needed correction with reference to an original, the term had a broader range of associations.⁶⁰ Players often used the term to indicate the “word-perfect” memorization of their parts—when Letoy in Brome’s The Antipodes (1638) declares that his players “[a]re all in readinesse; and I thinke all perfect,” he renders “perfect” synonymous with flawless memorization and recitation.⁶¹ But John Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1601) clarifies some of the subtleties that attended the term: it begins with a mock prologue explaining that the playwright snatched the book of the play away from the players both because he had not finished writing it—“he was loth, / Wanting a Prologue”—and because the players were not ready to put it on: “& our selues not perfect, / To rush vpon your eyes without respect.”⁶² Perfect might have meant “completed,” but it also suggested an actorly disposition.⁶³ Evelyn Tribble describes this disposition as comprising “the skills behind the skills”: “memory, vigilancy, and pregnancy of wit.” Vigilancy, the cognitive glue of the actor’s onstage practice, accounts for an “alertness and attentiveness” and “flexible mindfulness” that underlie an “ability to perform whilst monitoring and appraising audience reaction, all the while adjusting on the fly.”⁶⁴ Vigilancy was not easily acquired, however, even though it was partly promoted by schoolroom performances as the acquisition of “audacity.”⁶⁵ Thomas Gainsford’s account of early players captures the affective and emotional dimensions of “perfectness,” revealing that players are “at the first very bashfull, as strucken with a maze at the multitude, which being of various dispositions, will censure him accordingly, but custome maketh perfectnesse, and emboldeneth him sometimes to be shameless.”⁶⁶ The perfectness alluded to here has little to do with the part the actor would be playing and relates more to experientially earned boldness—to the extent that perfectness could mean dangerous impudence.⁶⁷ Perfectness thus becomes roughly synonymous with both “completeness” and “readiness”: something finished in that it knows itself to be potentially unfinished. Its degree of completion can be discovered only through exposure to its own limitations—sufficient to seem successful, but free to fail.

The self-consciously failed text knows that an agreement has yet to be reached.⁶⁸ This allows it to be more responsive, and potentially more creative, because a potential breakdown, Sara Jane Bailes suggests, “indexes an alternative route or way of doing or making.”⁶⁹ Her paradigmatic example of vulnerable performance is an unperfect actor:

The order in which, for example, a line of playtext must be remembered and recited produces one solution. Forgetting that line produces the possibility of a number of versions (the ways of coping with forgetting and making-do as well as alternative versions of the line itself) that might stand in for the forgotten words, such as paraphrasing, improvising text that leads in another direction, standing in silence, reinventing the text through gesture, and so on. In this sense, strategies of failure in the realm of performance can be understood as generative, prolific even; failure produces, and does so in a roguish manner.⁷⁰

If failure is an outcome of evaluation, it is also a provocation to closer analysis, because it registers an intrusion on the evaluator’s horizon of expectations.⁷¹ For Bailes, this means that failure “enables us to perceive the processes of refinement expressed by mechanisms of choice and control” and the “disavowed workings of power and exclusion.”⁷² Forgetting a line during performance disarticulates the script, even if momentarily, by revealing it to be a script. It draws notice to the contingency and constructedness of success, making practice itself a referendum on the possibility of mastery.⁷³ Bailes’s view of failure echoes that of Jack Halberstam, who argues that failure may be read “as a refusal of mastery” and as “a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit.”⁷⁴ Julietta Singh develops these ideas to propose a method of “vulnerable reading” that deprioritizes conclusiveness, suggesting that “in failing to master, in confronting our own desires for mastery where we least expect or recognize these desires, we become vulnerable to other possibilities for living.” To accompany Singh’s championing of “vulnerable reading” as an “an open, continuous practice that resists foreclosures by remaining unremittingly susceptible to new world configurations that reading texts— literary, artistic, philosophical, and political—can begin to produce,”⁷⁵we might imagine a pedagogy of vulnerable writing: writing confident only in the knowledge that it will not end a conversation.

Not Generous, Not Gentle, Not Humble

Love’s Labor’s Lost itself memorably concludes with a performance reduced to unexpected silence—or, more precisely, it concludes with cascading failures of performance. Near the beginning of its final scene, Boyet reports to the princess that the men are planning to disguise themselves to “parley, court and dance” as they advance their “love suits” (5.2.122–23). To announce their arrival, they have enlisted Mote, “a petty knavish page” who “well by heart hath conned his embassage” as the prologue to their masque (5.2.97–98). Though Mote had received instruction in “[a]ction and accent” and in how to bear his body, the lords still worried—playing to the stereotype of the quaking prologue—that the princess’s “[p]resence majestical would put him out” (5.2.99–102). The lords could not have anticipated, however, that after hearing Boyet’s report, the princess would interpret their play as an attempt to mock the ladies with more superficial flattery. Preempting their performance, the princess advises the other ladies to turn away their faces and pay no attention to the lords’ “penned speech” (5.2.147). When Boyet warns that this may “kill the speaker’s heart” and “divorce his memory from his part” (5.2.149–50), she replies that this is precisely her goal, thereby making the men the recipients rather than the imparters of mockery.

The princess’s plan works perfectly. Figure 5.1 shows how the scene is presented in the 1598 quarto.

Mote (identified above as “Page” and “Pag.” in the speech prefixes, “Boy” in the stage direction, and “Moth” in the first folio, and whose name evokes the French for “word,” mot) enters alongside the masked courtiers of Navarre. As he begins to deliver his speech, which he has apparently brought in with him as a prop, the princess and her retinue turn their backs to him. The way the quarto is printed suggests this happens after he says, “turnd their backes to mortall views.” The logic of the scene suggests this happens just before he speaks this line, however, because as Biron prompts him, Mote was supposed to say, “their eyes.” I share the scene in its original published form because the bare evidence of the page elucidates the limitations of integrating “speeches penned” with live performance. Any actors performing this moment would need to make the adjustment to capture the way the ladies’ behavior inflects Mote’s delivery—the page makes it impossible for audiences to witness two things simultaneously. As a function of being ignored and heckled, Mote falls “out” of his part just as the word “Out” falls out of his mouth and hangs in the “margent” of the quarto, its italic typeface collapsing the distinction between stage direction and speech.⁷⁶ “They do not marke me, and that bringes me out,” he reflects, providing Biron the cue to literally pull Mote out of the production, yelling after him, “Is this your perfectnes?”

“Perfect” appears three times in Love’s Labor’s Lost, each time in relation to expectation and execution. Its first appearance is at the very start of the second act, when Boyet describes King Ferdinand of Navarre as “the sole inheritor / Of all perfections that a man may owe,” after describing the princess herself as “held precious in the world’s esteem” (2.1.4–6). In reply, the princess tactfully rejects Boyet’s flattery of her own beauty and, by implication, conveys skepticism about Navarre: “Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye, / Not uttered by base sale of chapmen’s tongues” (2.1.15–16). Like beauty, a courtier’s supposed perfections were to be demonstrated in person rather than simply claimed, and as we saw above, reports of Navarre’s supposed perfection immediately prove overblown. The second instance in which “perfect” appears is Biron’s lamentation about Mote’s “perfectness” (5.2.174), which extends the first usage by indexing the discrepancy between a presumed role and its embodied execution. The word’s final instance appears at the end of the play, during the performance of the Nine Worthies put on by Costard, Mote, and Armado. After flubbing one of his lines by calling himself “Pompey surnamed the Big” (5.2.547), Costard appears to laugh off his error: “’Tis not so much worth; but I hope I was perfect: I made little fault in ‘Great’ ” (5.2.556–57). Ironically hoping that he was “perfect” while also recognizing his own “little fault,” he effortlessly liberates perfectness from flawless recitation. Despite literally failing to play the role he was assigned, Costard, encouraged by the princess’s kind gratitude—“Great thanks, great Pompey” (5.2.555)—takes his imperfections in stride. The inability to laugh it off, to adjust, to reciprocally engage with the audience constitutes failure for theater just as it constitutes failure for a conversationalist—an analogy the play makes overt by repeatedly juxtaposing the lords’ conversational awkwardness with scenes of stage fright and theatrical implosion.

Once the ladies buffet the lords with wordplay and mockery, each of them suffers, like Mote, an experience of disturbed poise. Boyet gleefully remarks, as they depart, that they appeared as “[t]apers … with your sweet breaths puff’d out” (5.2.267). The princess similarly notes that Biron was “out of count’nance quite” (5.2.272), and Maria reports that Dumaine “straight was mute” (5.2.277). Later, once the ladies disclose their bait-and-switch of exchanging favors and masks, Biron appears so “[a]maz’d” that Rosaline worries that he may faint (5.2.391–92). By shunting these men from their prepared performances, the princess, to borrow Matteo Pangallo’s description of how audiences influenced early modern theatrical production, “reverses the conventional producer-consumer relationship” and puts “active consumers in control over responsive producers.”⁷⁷ By insisting on collaborating in the “mocking merriment” and not just being subjected to it, the ladies expose the lords’ failure to treat the women as interlocutors. Concertedly provoking amazement, the ladies offer precisely the kind of education that Annibal recommends in The Civile Conversation: firsthand experience of what it is like to confront a bad conversationalist.

The inexperienced lords repeatedly demonstrate that they have no idea what they sound like when they speak, or of how their words sound to the people who must listen to them. When the king returns unmasked to face the princess, again opening with a hollow pleasantry—“All hail, sweet madam, and fair time of day!”—she twists his clearly forced words once more by pointing out that hail is foul rather than fair weather (5.2.340–41). This prompts the end of the exercise, for once the flustered king replies, “Construe my speeches better, if you may,” the princess explains, “Then wish me better” (5.2.342–43). This disagreement precedes Rosaline mocking Biron’s “superfluous case” (5.2.388), indicating that she saw through his mask. At this, the gentleman renowned for his quick wit stammers in response, “Where? When? What visor? Why demand you this?” (5.2.387). The game now fully exposed, the lords recoil in embarrassment. The king blurts out, “We are descried! They’ll mock us now downright,” and Dumaine proposes to “confess and turn it to a jest” (5.2.390–91). They each proceed through the symptoms of stage fright, as the princess remarks on how they appear “amazed” (5.2.392), and Rosaline notices of Biron, “Help! Hold his brows! He’ll swoon. Why look you pale?” (5.2.392–93). Once he gathers himself, Biron claims to have learned his lesson:

Oh, never will I trust to speeches penned

Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue,

Nor never come in visor to my friend,

Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper’s song.

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,

Figures pedantical—these summer flies

Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.

(5.2.403–10)

Finally sensing that it is his rehearsed language, encrusted with affectation and rote learning, that keeps getting him into trouble, Biron declares, “Speak for yourselves. My wit is at an end” (5.2.431). The princess’s deception pressed the courtiers into an experience of conversational failure, exposing their mechanical commitment to “speeches penned,” “taffeta phrases,” and “figures pedantical” as making them worthy of ridicule. Biron’s recognition of his own ostentatious speech directly affiliates him and the other lords with the broadest caricature of pedantic academics within the play: Holofernes and Nathaniel. Holofernes’s fundamental gesture in his conversations is to adapt occasions into opportunities to demonstrate his learnedness. His first lines capture the flavor of his pedantic performance: “The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood, ripe as a pomewater who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth” (4.2.1–6). Complimented by Nathaniel for how his “epithets are sweetly varied, like a scholar” (4.2.8), Holofernes represents the copiousness of the humanist orator taken to its ludicrous limit. Deploying Latin interchangeably with English and parsing it with three translations, Holofernes blathers on, pleased by the sound of his own speech.

Even though Biron’s speech suggests that the lords have learned their lessons, there are over five hundred lines left in the play. These largely consist of the theatrical performance of the Nine Worthies, put on by Mote, Holofernes, Nathaniel, Costard, and Don Armado. Before these amateur players are about to enter, the king fears that they will shame the court of Navarre through their incompetence. In response, the princess explains that “sport best pleases that doth least know how” (5.2.514), and that zeal, even when coupled with ineptitude, generates harmless mirth. Biron then suggests that the “confounded” performance in fact may resemble the courtiers’ own masque (5.2.519), but despite having been exposed to what it feels like to confront “liberal opposition” (5.2.719) as performers, the men prove as poor spectators as they had been actors. In fact, they labor at length to ruin the amateur performance. They ridicule Costard for his “little fault,” “dismay” Nathaniel out of his part as Alexander the Great until he is “afraid to speak” (5.2.574), insult Holofernes as Judas Maccabeus until he declares himself “out of countenance” (5.2.615), and heckle Armado as Hector until he appeals directly to the princess, “Sweet royalty, bestow on me the sense of hearing” (5.2.654). Before departing, Holofernes stops serving as a satirical target and becomes, like Mote, pitiable. He storms offstage, attesting, “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble” (5.2.623).

While a theatrical catastrophe, as a work of amateur theater the pageant of the Nine Worthies complicates the conditions by which a performance may be regarded as a failure. Bailes, taking cues from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, articulates the distinction between amateur and professional theater in terms of the former’s capacity for soliciting aesthetic flexibility:

Amateur theatre was intriguing to both theorists [Brecht and Benjamin] for the way in which it could reveal the conditions of theatre and the potential for change in the world. Professional theatre, on the other hand, could not achieve such a revelation because of its slick façade which rendered most if not all of its labor invisible, presenting the ideology and values of bourgeois society as universal and unchanging. According to Brecht, professional theatre, founded on bourgeois aesthetic and cultural values, could learn from the “image of the world” presented by amateur theatre with its “rudimentary, distorted, spontaneous efforts”; for the ways, then, in which the inability to do something might overwhelm ability and instead radiate different values and beliefs.⁷⁸

While the princess and her ladies receive the pageant amiably, the lords, with Boyet in tow, behave boorishly; they try, conspicuously, to reaffirm the class distinctions between their own failed performances and those of the amateur actors. We might read the closing pageant, then, less as a play within a play than as two simultaneous performances: amateur and courtly. The amateur performers, lacking polish, skill, and technique, nevertheless manage to please the princess because of their earnest zeal. Costard, at least, manages to have a good time. The courtiers, however, in attempting to surpass one another’s scoff power, disclose the caustic rigidity of performances that yearn only to reassert preconceptions of ability and mastery.

The play’s final moments then reiterate the lords’ inability to adjust from their own conceitedness in the most awkward fashion: like a broken record, the king, to console a princess who has just learned of her father’s death, continues ornate and verbose attempts at courtship. The princess can only respond, “I understand you not; my griefs are double” (5.2.738). The ladies then decide to depart for France, leaving behind some final bits of advice. The king, who began the play by issuing hollow pleasantries to mask a failure of hospitality, concludes it with the princess asking him to live the life of a solitary hermit for a year. Biron, who began the play with a reputation for self-serving wit, concludes it by being tasked with learning how to translate others’ pain into their pleasure. Rosaline explains, “A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear / Of him that hears it, never in the tongue / Of him that makes it,” and so her concluding request to Biron is that he “never rest” and “[v]isit the speechless sick and still converse / With groaning wretches” (5.2.807, 836–37). This echoes one of Annibal’s points to William: “For you cannot goe to visite the sicke, to reléeue the poore, to correct and admonishe your brother, to comfort the afflicted, if you remain alwaies mewed vp” (1.8r). The lords who decided in their solitariness to deprive women of speech now must learn the value and virtues of conversation. Dramatizing poor spectatorship as of a piece with the lords’ poor conversational skills, the play serves as an object lesson to its own audience on how not to behave at a theatrical performance.

I conclude my reading of Love’s Labor’s Lost by returning to the scene discussed at the beginning of this section, in which the lordly actors prepare for their performance with Mote the page. As mentioned, prior to sending Mote out as their prologue, the lords were worried that the princess would put him out of his part and thereby spoil their whole production. I return to this passage now to observe how these players mustered the courage to get themselves out onstage:

And ever and anon they made a doubt,

Presence majestical would put him out.

“For,” quoth the King, “an angel shalt thou see.

Yet fear not thou, but speak audaciously.”

The boy replied: “An angel is not evil.

I should have feared her had she been a devil.”

With that, all laughed and clapped him on the shoulder,

Making the bold wag by their praises bolder.

One rubbed his elbow thus, and fleered, and swore

A better speech was never spoke before.

Another with his finger and his thumb

Cried “Via! We will do’t, come what will come!”

The third he capered and cried, “All goes well!”

The fourth turned on the toe and down he fell.

With that, they all did tumble on the ground,

With such a zealous laughter, so profound,

That in this spleen ridiculous appears,

To check their folly, passion’s solemn tears.

(5.2.101–18)

Mote, we are told, protested the king’s warning that he would not be flustered because the princess is “[a]n angel” and not “a devil.” This response elicited such good cheer from the others that they ended up tumbling over themselves into a heap of “zealous laughter.” Their anxieties about the performance were sublimated into a “spleen ridiculous” because Mote’s reply, gently reversing the king’s hyperbolic declaration, made fun of how severely the lords had been taking their own idolatry. This moment, presented to the audience entirely through Boyet’s reporting, captures in miniature what the play never manages to portray onstage: a failure that does not turn into a conclusion. Read in this light, the lords’ “come what will come” attitude and their resolution that “all goes well” foresee the comic resolution that Love’s Labor’s Lost as a whole refuses to supply. Its actors know what the script should say—“our wooing doth not end like the old play”—but the play itself cannot deliver it: “Jack hath not Jill” (5.2.860–61). Instead of finding ways to laugh at themselves, they stammer, freeze, and swoon as the play careens toward a confused and embarrassed halt.

Reflection: Ars Amateuria

“When we ask our students to be original—and we do ask that of them,” Kara Wittman cautions, “we ask them to occupy two positions at once.”⁷⁹ If our assignments say things like, “Your thesis should be original,” should be “imaginative, authoritative, with original insight,” or “original, interesting, and relevant,” Wittman argues, these assignments are asking students “to walk the line between expert and tyro; professional and amateur: to be enough of a naif to experience the wonder of ‘first-ness’ and knowledgeable enough to recognize that first-ness as such.”⁸⁰ Suspended between their own apparent amateurishness and the exemplary professionality displayed by their teachers, many student writers will come to distrust their own responses to course readings. Becoming a professional, they have come to learn, means rejecting the part of themselves that approaches texts naively. When trying to produce an original argument or to develop a critical insight, however, these students invariably find that following the instructions will get them only so far. In the empty space between perfectible instructions and open-ended interpretation yawns, to borrow a phrase from Constantin Stanislavski, an “awful hole.”⁸¹ Perfectionism, performance anxiety, and frustration emanate from it, and the fearful student writer vacillates between what feels like recklessness or automation.⁸²

How can we help our students learn that not knowing how to address a text need not lead to either blockage or canned arguments; that although the challenge to say something original may be discomposing, it need not be debilitating? We might start by recognizing that students do genuinely have insights to offer about the texts we have assigned them to read—even if these insights strike us as rudimentary, banal, or even wrong. Students approach early modern texts as amateurs, and as Derek Attridge points out,

[an] amateur reading, no matter by whom, involves an openness to whatever the work, on a particular occasion, will bring—a readiness to have habits and preconceptions challenged and a willingness to be changed by the experience. A professional reading in the narrowest sense of the word, by contrast, will approach the text instrumentally, scrutinizing it for such things as evidence of some historical trend, an insight into the psychology of the author, signs of the influence of a precursor, or examples of a stylistic device. Both kinds of reading, no doubt, bring pleasure, but the pleasure of the scholar who has added to a bank of data is different from the pleasure generated by a reading of the work as literature, which is to say as the product of an author’s (or authors’) creativity.⁸³

The professional knows how to make use out of the reading experience, but the amateur does not necessarily intend to put the reading to any specific use, at least not yet. An unperfect actor, the amateur inspired to be attentive and given leave to speak what he or she feels may well say something surprising. The amateur may even see things that professionals do not yet see or have trained themselves to stop seeing.

Recognizing this, the Shakespeare classroom may become one in which students are empowered by the fact that their responses have access to insights and experiences that their professors do not—that their readings, done with attention and care, are valuable. The classroom must be structured, in this light, to give students the occasion—to allow them to enter the dance without fear of being judged or laughed out of the room. Building this structure requires us, their teachers and interlocutors, to fully embrace and even lay bare the limitations of our own professional authority.

Discomposing a discipline, discomposing literary studies, discomposing Shakespeare all demand that we challenge ourselves to practice imperfectness. This does not mean that professors must aspire toward amateurism. Pretending not to know something is a masquerade; pretending that we do not know better than our students about some things makes our presence in the classroom trivial. The allure of presenting oneself as an amateur is the allure of shirking responsibility, and such performances of self-repudiation allow academics to disavow their complicity within the professional structure they inhabit. Only one person in the room is being paid to produce literary criticism, so try as we might, we will not become amateur Shakespeareans. Even so, the only way to improve our art as teachers, Shakespeare himself labors to teach us, is to recognize it as imperfect.

What does the art of teaching a text like Love’s Labor’s Lost involve? In one sense, it involves providing students with context and information: a teacher may direct students’ attention to topics such as courtesy and etiquette, illuminate how the play manipulates the contours of comedy’s generic conventions, or point out that it was potentially written concurrently with Shakespeare’s sonnets. In another sense, teaching the play may also involve offering close readings of it as models of interpretation. In yet another sense, teaching the play may involve curating an encounter between the play and other texts, such as The Lover’s Discourse or a modern romantic comedy, with the idea that these other texts will render the play more approachable. These forms of teaching rely on helping students reach some sort of elucidation about a difficult text; they shine a beam of light through an obscure tangle of language. These forms of teaching (which, to be clear, I have practiced and will continue to practice) proceed, simply put, via different forms of explanation: here is why this line is important, these are some things that the play is about, here is how to think about what you are seeing.

In a heartening article exploring the obscure and potentially “unteachable” words of Love’s Labor’s Lost, however, Adam Zucker reflects on the pedagogy of explanation in the Shakespeare classroom as at once inevitable and potentially undermining what students will learn:

The moment when a student clearly cannot understand something that I myself know; the moment when I say something like, “well, what Shakespeare means here is …” or “Actually, there’s a joke about sixteenth-century animal husbandry here” or something along those lines; that “teaching moment” is crucial, but it enacts over and over again the process that Rancière critiques in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. It is a moment that reminds everyone in the room that I know things that they do not. Our relative intelligences are created in those moments, no matter how often I let them know that I, too, rely on marginal glosses and past classroom lessons to guide me through semantic problems as I wend my way through Hamlet for the 700th time. Horrifyingly, the practical conversations I use to put my students at ease about ignorance simply reinforce the point: I know a lot about how to learn Shakespeare.⁸⁴

Zucker zeroes in on something elemental to teaching and learning with literature: acknowledging experiences of incapacity and failure as fundamentally constitutive of how readings of complex texts take shape. “We might perform Shakespeare’s unteachable words in ways that permit them to be just that,” Zucker proposes. “We might hold up their incomprehensibility not as something that always needs to be squashed out of existence in an edition or explicated into sense, but use them rather as the tools they are, use them to animate comic scenarios in which teachers and students share in the pleasure of befuddlement.”⁸⁵ To give students facility with Shakespeare’s work, failures of understanding might become part of our pedagogy. We must try to help students prioritize the value of not knowing the answer, the value of failure as the first step toward discovery.

Explaining a joke often ruins it. Love’s Labor’s Lost works very hard to make this clear. If explained, Mote’s quip to Costard—“They have been at a great feast of language and stolen the scraps” (5.1.35–36)—would not only render the joke lifeless but, in the expenditure of language meant to serve as an explanation, miss the very ironies the joke relies on. If explained, Dull’s reply to Holofernes’s remark that he has “spoken no word all this while”— “Nor understood none, neither, sir” (5.1.132)—would lose entire dimensions of comic effect. These moments are funny because the characters tap into something that the audience, the reader, and the actors themselves also perceive: there is a lot of confusing gibberish in here. Trusting that the audience is more akin to Dull than to Holofernes, the players allow the unlearned to get one over on the pedants. The joke here is not simply that Dull is dull, but that the scholars’ prolix posturing is visible even to someone like Dull. Winking at every corner of its audience, the play plays with the paradox that only a pedant would fully understand the polyglot errors being made by the conceited pedants; everyone else, it knows, can laugh at pedantry without falling into the crossfire. By satirizing such failed performances of erudition, a play replete with puns for the learned suggests that confessing one’s befuddlement can create opportunities for different sorts of pleasure: the pleasure of turning failure into fun, of robbing authoritativeness of its authority, of denying the bourgeois polish of professional performance its representational claims.

What kind of performance are we soliciting when we ask students to produce critical writing? To approach the question from another direction: in what ways are we inviting our students to fail? These questions hinge on the double meaning of performance as “the competence or effectiveness of a person or thing in performing an action” and as “an individual performer’s or group’s rendering or interpretation of a work, part, role.”⁸⁶ The former definition affiliates performance with proficiency, with the capacity to perfectly hit an implicit or explicit standard: were the singers able to reach the high notes, just like they do on the record? The latter definition, by contrast, invites affective and interpretive engagement: a singer’s voice cracking may be the most moving and memorable part of the concert. A performer committed to sounding exactly like the record while also endeavoring to generate spontaneous affective responses from the audience risks metastasizing perfectionism, because, like keeping too many plates spinning, perfectionism renders uncertain the terrain on which labor must be undertaken.⁸⁷ How might a student’s failure to match the terms of a discipline’s expectations become not a marker of writerly failure but the beginning of a conversation? What would it take to restructure a course, and the timeline whereby students undertake the work of writing, so that experiences of failure appear early and often, and are welcomed by both students and teachers alike? How might “failure” in a literature class be redefined not as an inability to meet tacit or explicit terms of engagement, but as a failure to listen and to share, a failure to see oneself as a work in progress?

Partway through writing this book, I realized that the feeling of suspended, thrilling uncertainty I have tried to locate at poesy’s scene of writing most closely evokes one of my favorite feelings: the feeling of the night before the first day of classes. I may have printed out the syllabuses and carefully drafted assignment prompts, but really, I know that how the class will go will not be entirely up to me. A new crop of readers, with predilections, histories, and attitudes of their own will meet Hamlet, or Viola, or Iago, or yes, even Costard. These readers will not arrive to class knowing which John Davies is the better poet or assume that Lady Anne Southwell has less of a claim to literary authority than Sir Walter Ralegh. My preparation, my prompts, my lesson plans will never fully anticipate what they will think, or say, or write upon reading these texts.

A class in literature is not like a how-two guide; we are not presenting students with a blueprint for enlightenment. We are, when we are at our best, inviting them to a conversation—a conversation often mediated through writing but hardly limited to the page. I wrote this book as a work of literary criticism and not as a how-to guide because I also wanted to participate in a conversation. I wanted to write back to the scholars I cite throughout it; I also wanted to write forward, to any scholars who happen across it in the future. At this late juncture, I resign myself to knowing that my ability to participate in a conversation means giving up some control. The perfectionist in me wants to work on it for just a few days more, but I know that I will never really be ready to find out whether what I have written clearly represents what I wanted to say. I must trust that I will learn as much from my failures as I have learned from the process of writing. The next part of the conversation is not mine; it is yours. I accept this just as I accept that my best teaching happens when I treat my students’ work with the same curiosity, critical attentiveness, and generosity that I grant to the poetry I love most.

1.Heminges and Condell, “Great Variety of Readers,” A25. Lucrece blots her lines for being either “too curious good” or “too blunt and ill,” and because her inventions throng “like a press of people at a door” (lines 1300–1301). The speaker of the sonnets repeatedly complains about the uncontrollable nature of readers’ responses: “If I could write the beauty of your eyes,” he conjectures in Sonnet 17, “The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies’ ” (lines 5–7). In Sonnets 76 and 105, he openly addresses his own repetitiveness and lack of inventive variation, and in Sonnet 103 (line 5) he defends his verse’s impotence in comparison with its object: “Oh, blame me not, if I no more can write.”

2.Greenblatt et al., Norton Shakespeare, 2258.

3.Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney, 217.

4.Stoeber, “Psychology of Perfectionism,” 3. Also see Frost and Marten, “Perfectionism and Evaluative Threat.”

5.Tallent, Scratched, 10.

6.Bevington, “ ‘Jack Hath Not Jill,’ ” 4, 9.

7.Wouldhuysen, taking cues from Paul Werstine’s work, supposes that Q1, the first quarto, may have been reprinted based on a print copy original, “Q0.” See Woudhuysen, “Appendix 1,” 302–7.

8.See Woudhuysen, “Appendix 1,” 307–17, for a full summary of the different forms of authorial revision visible in Q1, especially with respect to character names and speech prefixes.

9.Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare, 98.

10.Colie, Shakespeare’s Living Art, 47. David Bevington compares the play to how Lyly’s Sappho and Phao undermines “hoary formulas from the Ars Amatoria” for counseling “self-assurance” in male lovers. Bevington, “ ‘Jack Hath Not Jill,’ ” 4. William C. Carroll observes that “the lovesick Petrarchan wooer afflicted with melancholy and heart-burn requires a certain rhetoric and vocabulary.” Carroll, Great Feast of Language, 77. Eric C. Brown compares Love’s Labor’s Lost to Doctor Faustus, arguing that it “dramatizes the complications of learned authority, dependence, and influence.” Brown, “Shakespeare’s Anxious Epistemology,” 21. Mark Breitenberg observes how “[t]he play offers more than just a comic exaggeration of [the Petrarchan] literary convention: Petrarchism underwrites the economy of masculine desire that structures the play and shapes its action.” Breitenberg, “Anatomy of Masculine Desire,” 434. These readings corroborate Carla Mazzio’s sense that, in the play, “idealist conceptions of texts clash again and again with materialist conceptions of the physical book in the social world.” Mazzio, Inarticulate Renaissance, 161.

11.Lorna Hutson finds that “the language of love in this play is bound up at every turn with the terminology of good faith and of making bargains” in a way that entwines the love plot with the play’s marginal but serious negotiations over land and paternity. Hutson, Invention of Suspicion, 298. As Katherine Eggert suggests, Navarre’s courtly practices resemble a form of experimentation akin to the “sloppiness and imprecision” and “characteristically improvisational style” of alchemy. Eggert, Disknowledge, 193.

12.Wilson and Roland, “Performance Anxiety,” 47; Brugués, Music Performance Anxiety, 1.

13.Kaplan, “On Stage Fright,” 60.

14.Britton, Belief and Imagination, 199–200.

15.Britton, Belief and Imagination, 200. As Anne Lamott puts it, perfectionism “will ruin your writing, blocking inventiveness and playfulness and life force.” Lamott, Bird by Bird, 28.

16.See also Erickson, “Failure of Relationship.”

17.Bailes, Performance Theatre, 13.

18.Attridge, “In Praise of Amateurism,” 42.

19.All references to Love’s Labor’s Lost will be to Greenblatt et al, Norton Shakespeare, and indicated in-text by act, scene, and line numbers.

20.Wendy Beth Hyman pointed out in comments on this chapter that such antisocial vows are a recurring plot device in Shakespeare’s plays. Olivia makes one against men in Twelfth Night, as do the votaries of St. Clare in Measure for Measure.

21.As Douglas Bruster explains, in Elizabethan England “quoting” could call to mind a range of the OED’s definitions: the textual practice of marking books with marginal annotations “to give reference to other passages or texts” and, as is now more common, the practice of “reproduc[ing] or repeat[ing] a passage from (a book, author, etc.).” Bruster for this reason places quotation “midway between imitation and citation,” noting that it refers “to both the borrowed matter of texts and the activity of borrowing itself.” Bruster, Quoting Shakespeare, 4, 16; Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Quote, v., Def. 1,” accessed June 25, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/156908.

22.Rosaline’s “quote,” it is worth noting, appears as “cote” in the 1598 quarto and “coat” in the 1623 folio.

23.Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 79.

24.Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 44.

25.David Randall explains how the Renaissance recovery of Ciceronian sermo—“the private discussion of equal noblemen in their country villas” that served as a complement to oratio’s “address to a mixed multitude in the forum”—saw humanists begin to employ conversation itself as a metaphor for the rhetorical encounter. This not only promoted an education in “familiarity” and sociability (the general meaning of conversatio), but also worked to counteract rhetoric’s perceived affiliation with deceptive manipulation. See Randall, Concept of Conversation, 5. For more on conversatio, see 30–32.

26.Mazzio, Inarticulate Renaissance, 143.

27.Mazzio, Inarticulate Renaissance, 145.

28.Bruce Smith notes how, along with being law schools for aspiring statesmen, the Inns were engines of socialization. Smith, “Night of Errors.”

29.Magnusson, “Scoff Power,” 197. For the revelers’ reading list, see Davison, Gesta Grayorum 1688, 29–30. At the neighboring Middle Temple in 1597–98, the reading list expanded, especially with respect to textbooks on amorous courtship. There, revelers were charged with contemplating the art of love and defending what they perceived as its foundational texts: “If any man deprave the books of Ovid de Arte amandi, Euphues and his England, Petite Pallace, or other laudable discourses of Love; this is loss of his Mistris favor for half a year.” Rudyerd, Le prince d’amour, 57. This syllabus corroborates Gabriel Harvey’s account to Edmund Spenser that students at Cambridge no longer read Aristotle and other classic works, in favor of “outlandish braveryes” in order to “helpe countenaunce owte,” such as “Philbertes Philosopher of the Courte, Castiglioes fine Cortegiano, Bengalassoes Civil Instructions to his Nephew, Guatzoes new Discourses of curteous behaviour.” Harvey, “Third Letter,” 137. Also see Stamatakis, “ ‘With Diligent Studie.’ ”

30.For another reading of the links between this play and Guazzo, see Larson, “Conversational Games.” Randall attributes to Guazzo a reconception of classical “conversatio in secular terms as the realm of society and manners intermediate between the oikos and the political world.” Randall, Concept of Conversation, 12. As Jennifer Richards observes, Guazzo’s text “allows the rules of conversation to emerge from its representation of the speech form”; the text recognizes that its dialogic form creates knowledge through the incidence of contradictions, interruption, and changing perspectives. Richards, Rhetoric and Courtliness, 30.

31.Guazzo, Civile Conversation. References will appear in-text and indicate book, page number, and recto/verso.

32.Pervasive throughout the humanist curriculum—Erasmus renders it as “So our student will flit like a busy bee through the entire garden of literature, collect a little nectar from each, and carry it to his hive”—the “example of bees” was a commonplace about making commonplace books. Erasmus, quoted in Crane, Framing Authority, 59.

33.This strikingly tolerant perspective complicates historical narratives about the development of civility in European society. Whereas Norbert Elias (Civilizing Process) tracks the transformation of “courtesy” into “civility” as a function of elite moral codes permeating and homogenizing European society in the late middle ages, and Jorge Arditi (Genealogy of Manners) sees “civility” decoupling from moral ideals and arrogating distinction for aristocrats by becoming “etiquette” in the eighteenth century, Guazzo’s text sits in murky in-betweenness, charting an emerging and pluralistic discursive public sphere. Guazzo’s civil conversation, Anna Bryson observes, produces an “intermediary ideal” that requires a “science of sociability” attentive to one’s integration within a “whole social world.” Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 55.

34.Cicero, De officiis, 137, 139.

35.Annibal’s account of conversation anticipates Michael Oakeshott’s sense of conversation as an “unrehearsed intellectual adventure.” He goes on to affirm that conversation “is impossible in the absence of a diversity of voices: in it different universes of discourse meet, acknowledge each other and enjoy an oblique relationship which neither requires nor forecasts their being assimilated to one another.” Oakeshott, “Voice of Poetry,” 198–99. For Oakeshott, human conversation is “the meeting-place of various modes of imagining” by individual subjects, one where there is “no voice without an idiom of its own,” because, in the space of conversation, “voices are not divergencies from some ideal, non-idiomatic manner of speaking, they diverge only from one another” (206). Oakeshott’s “conversation of mankind” is one concerned not simply with practical application (“the voice of a self among selves”) or making knowledge (“essentially a co-operative enterprise”); the voice of science began as “a conversible voice, one speaking in an idiom of its own but capable of participating in the conversation” (208).

36.Cicero similarly advises that it is proper to express anger and reproach others when they misstep, but even in such circumstances, those doing so must be attentive to how they themselves are being perceived: “For what is done under some degree of excitement cannot be done with perfect self-respect or the approval of those who witness it.” Cicero, De officiis, 141.

37.Bacon, “Of Discourse,” 191. Della Casa makes the same point: “Most people are so infatuated with themselves that they overlook other people’s pleasures; and, in order to show themselves to be subtle, intuitive, and wise, they will advise, and correct, and argue, and contradict vigorously, not agreeing with anything except their own opinions.” Quoted and discussed in Miller, Conversation, 54–55.

38.Bacon recommends sticking to asking questions, because “he that questioneth much, shall learn much, and content much.” Bacon, “Of Discourse,” 193–94.

39.Thomas Gainsford’s The Rich Cabinet describes courtiers as “companions with Schollers” because “vnlesse they study and read histories, they will faile in discourse & conuersation, the principall end of a courtiers life.” Even with such preparation, however, courtiers could fail in their “principall end”: those “of the vainer sort” were still predisposed to being “puzzeld in amorous encounters” because “a crosse answer of their Mistres crosseth their armes, hangs downe the head, and puts a willow branch in the hat-band” (20–21).

40.Davison, Gesta Grayorum 1688, 16.

41.See Magnusson, “Scoff Power.”

42.Davison, Gesta Grayorum 1688, 30.

43.See Preiss, Clowning and Authorship, esp. 18–59.

44.See Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning; Gaylard, Hollow Men; Whigham, “Interpretation at Court.”

45.Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 40.

46.Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom, 47–48.

47.Kaplan, “On Stage Fright,” 64. Nicholas Ridout suggests that stage fright emerges because of “the absence of reciprocity in the encounter between professional and consumer.” Ridout, Stage Fright, 29. While Ridout associates the phenomenon with “urban modernity,” and while the term “stage fright” was apparently coined by Mark Twain, early modern players often alluded to how they could swoon, freeze, or, turn “wooden.” For studies of stage fright and early modern actors, see Nardizzi, “Wooden Actors”; Skura, Shakespeare the Actor, 9–28.

48.For more on actors going “out,” see Palfrey and Stern, Shakespeare in Parts, 84–88.

49.Goffman, Presentation of Self, 9–10.

50.Goffman, Presentation of Self, 12.

51.For example, when Simon the mayor in Thomas Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent; or, The Mayor of Queenborough encounters some cheaters promising to put on a play, he warns, “Have you audacity enough to play before so high a person? Will not my countenance daunt you?” (5.1.81–87). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus overrules Philostrate’s warning that the performance by Athens’s “rude mechanicals” (3.2.9) will be a stammering failure by recounting how “great clerks have proposèd / To greet me with premeditated welcomes” but ended up having to “[t]hrottle their practiced accent in their fears” (5.1.93–99).

52.Jonson, “Cynthia’s Revels,” 174 (3.1.3–5).

53.Greene, Greenes, Groats-Vvorth of Witte, sig. C3r.

54.Doty, Shakespeare, 21.

55.Menzer, “Crowd Control,” 21.

56.Mark Bayer identifies a fundamental problem recognized by players: “that part of their challenge was to appeal to multiple and stratified audiences simultaneously.” Bayer, “Curious Case,” 57–58. Matteo Pangallo summarizes how “playgoers and playmakers in the period understood the audience’s relationship with the stage to be fluid, open, and dialogic, in which playgoers’ creative input could be just as authoritative as that of professional playmakers.” See Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, 27, 52–60.

57.Douglas Bruster and Robert Weimann explain how early modern prologues ushered playgoers over “an imaginary threshold” and performed a “differentiating function” that “helped isolate dramatic form from non-verbal types of performances.” Bruster and Weimann, Prologues to Shakespeare’s Theatre, 37.

58.Stern, Documents of Performance, 82.

59.Middleton and Dekker, “Roaring Girl,” 727 (prologue.3). As Stern observes, during the initial performances of new plays, what players were testing was not the actors’ ability to perform, “for they can put on another play if this one is damned”—the trial was of “the playscript itself.” Stern, Documents of Performance, 88–89.

60.See Massai, Shakespeare, 5–10; Zurcher, “Deficiency and Supplement.”

61.Brome, Antipodes a Comedie, sig. D2v. The same may be said of when Bottom, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, instructs his company, “Take pains; be perfect” prior to their rehearsal (1.2.90), or when Tharsalio, in George Chapman’s The Vviddovves Teares a Comedie, asks of his nephew preparing to perform, “Is he perfect in’s part? has not his tongue learn’d of the Syluans to trip ath’ Toe?” (sig. Gv).

62.Marston, Iacke Drums Entertainment, sig. A2r–v.

63.As Richard Preiss points out, actors could be “prepared” for a performance without having memorized their parts at all. In the same speech from The Antipodes quoted above, Letoy explains that despite not being perfect in his part, the clown Byplay could “frible through” his lines by making “shifts extempore.” See Preiss, “Undocumented,” 76–77.

64.Tribble, Early Modern Actors, 125–26. Tribble suggests that the ability to cope with interruptions is a salient distinguishing mark between pros and amateurs. Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 117–50. When Viola in Twelfth Night observes what it takes to be “wise enough to play the fool” (3.1.53), the labors she documents account for some of this invisible theatrical skill.

65.Thomas Heywood notes that universities saw acting as “necessary for the emboldening of their junior scholars to arm them with audacity again when they come to be employed in any public exercise.” Heywood, “Apology for Actors,” 227. Acting, he adds, “not only emboldens a scholar to speak, but instructs him to speak well” and “fit his phrases to his action, and his action to his phrases, and his pronunciation to them both” (227).

66.Gainsford, Rich Cabinet, 117r–v.

67.Tribble points out how early modern players accommodated a “range of levels of fidelity to the author’s words”; see Tribble, Cognition in the Globe, 75. Richard Preiss discusses how the threat posed by improvisatory clowning, from the perspective of the playing company, was “not the sheer fact of deviation from the script, but the surrender of institutional autonomy thereby.” Preiss, Clowning and Authorship, 186.

68.Bailes, Performance Theatre, 2.

69.Bailes, Performance Theatre, 2.

70.Bailes, Performance Theatre, 2–3.

71.Alison Carr makes a similar point, noting that “when failure causes notice—when it provokes fits of shame, anxiety, tears, loss of confidence, paralyzing fear and isolation—it exposes the bones and sinews, the unique and messy and sometimes improvised structure of the thing we’re trying to create.” Carr, “In Support of Failure.”

72.Bailes, Performance Theatre, 34.

73.Bailes, Performance Theatre, 109.

74.Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 11–12.

75.Singh, Unthinking Mastery, 21–22. For Singh, these alternative possibilities represent an embodied resistance to colonialist fantasies of domination; failures of mastery reveal ways to imagine “being together in common” and “feeling injustice and refusing it without the need to engage it through forms of conquest.”

76.For a compelling reading of this scene’s bibliographical theatricality, see Bourne, “Typography after Performance,” esp. 208–9.

77.Pangallo, Playwriting Playgoers, 42.

78.Bailes, Performance Theatre, 33.

79.Wittman, “Epilogue,” 244.

80.Wittman, “Epilogue,” 244.

81.Stanislavski, Actor Prepares, 7.

82.As Peter Elbow observes, these conditions do not apply to just our students: “Have you ever noticed that when we write articles or books as academics, we often have the same feeling that students have when they turn in papers: ‘Is this okay? Will you accept this?’ ” Elbow, “Being a Writer,” 82.

83.Attridge, “In Praise of Amateurism,” 39.

84.Zucker, “Antihonorificabilitudinitatibus,” 140.

85.Zucker, “Antihonorificabilitudinitatibus,” 149.

86.Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Performance, n., Definitions 1b. and 4c.,” accessed June 25, 2021, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/140783.

87.The perfectionist performer thus recalls Sianne Ngai’s account of the theatrical “zany,” a figure whose excessively unproductive work happens at the “politically ambiguous intersection between cultural and occupational performance, acting and service, playing and laboring.” Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 182. In a similar vein, Richard Schechner observes that in the world of business, “to perform means doing a job efficiently with maximum productivity,” but the ways in which efficiency relies on routinization, optimization, and best practices reveal how performance in this context is, like all performance, a collection of “twice-behaved behaviors.” Self-consciously attentive to the material conditions of the present as well as to the residual influence of past performances, performances both take up and render obsolete the behaviors that gave birth to them; in this way, Schechner suggests, performances “resist that which produces them.” Schechner, Performance Studies, 34, 30.