Setting aside the fancy (pleasing though it is) that Elizabethan and Jacobean society pullulated with hot lovers, critics have offered a range of weighty explanations for the popularity of the literature of obsession, from attracting the attention of the monarch, to artistic rivalry, to making subjectivity the subject of study.1 This article suggests a more tongue-in-cheek approach to advice on love in Sidney and Shakespeare, based on recent reappraisals of the use to which self-help books are put. Readers approach these as refreshing fantasies of a radical potential change in lifestyle, but with little intention of putting most (if any) of their advice into practice. From this perspective, Astrophil and Stella (1591) depicts a lover who encourages counsel only to resist it, a move which gives a new view of the love-cure game played between Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It (1599).

Problems with putting on a play are a staple feature of drama at the turn of the seventeenth century, in both tragic and comic modes. Revenge tragedies, for example, use theatrical errors to correct moral errors, in productions like ‘Soliman and Perseda’ (in The Spanish Tragedy) and the ‘The Masque of Juno’ (in Women Beware Women). City comedies use problems on stage to comment on class, as when setting the script of ‘The London Merchant’ against the improvised plot of The Knight of the Burning Pestle. Literary critics tend to approach such moments in two ways, either relishing their metadrama or finding parallels with the main themes of the play. Only William West deals with early modern confusion in plays as a topic in its own right, arguing that plays of the 1580s and 1590s dramatized errors to prompt questions of epistemology and hermeneutics; he does not discuss real-life mistakes on stage. Roger Savage looks at continental (especially Italian) playbook prefaces and production manuals which have advice implying a pragmatic understanding of what can go wrong.