Some time before hearing Arj Barker's stand-up routine, Heavy, I had an idea, which I still long to pursue, of a Shakespeare production pop-up book. In it, iconic Shakespeare productions pop out from the page. Sally Dexter's white box set for Peter Brook's Dream opens up and Alan Howard's Oberon is levered up and down perhaps followed by William Dudley's cathedral setting for Antony Sher's Richard III to scuttle across. In the meantime I submit Writing Performative Shakespeares, an attempt to evoke, with a nod back to Pascale Aebischer at the beginning of this book (p. 4), perhaps 2½ dimensions of the Shakespearean performance event. And here I offer some concluding remarks on the form and content of those Shakespeares and the various modes and methods by which I have performatively written them.

One of the most insistent themes of this book has been that of failure, a theme perhaps in closest alignment with Della Pollock's characterisation of performative writing as nervous. I have described the genesis of this project as a failure to be able to represent Shakespearean performance via linear form and needing to find an alternative. Most of the productions discussed in this book instance some kind of failure or limitation. I suggested that the very best moments of the productions described in Chapter 1 occurred during the rehearsal processes and did not fully translate to the finished productions, when the vast majority of their audiences encountered them. The productions I have worked on and that have featured in this book have been described at times as either hopelessly wayward in terms of the effects and meanings I was hoping to generate, or defective of execution or prone to unintended and sometimes quite (similarly unintended) comic effects.