An idea I have repeatedly returned to in Part 1 is the potential for failure: the potential for conventions not to work efficiently, for dramaturgy not to be plausible, for theatrical information not to be conveyed clearly or coherently. The success of Renaissance drama, I have suggested, especially in its most spectacular, hyperbolic, theatrical moments, is fueled by this potential for failure. Dramatists and playing companies, writing and performing under conditions of the most exacting and even limiting kind, were unafraid to undertake any task of dramatic representation, no matter how difficult. The awareness dramatists and their plays show of their audiences, and the concessions they make to them, suggest that the potential for failure could as often as not have been a reality; the joy of the drama lies in the space for negotiation between success and failure, a space made most wonderfully vivid in the anecdote of Fowler and his “dead men” with which this book began.

In The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull, G. F. Reynolds says of the final scene of Heywood's 2 Iron Age, in which nine people die, two after having feigned death and risen to fight some more,