In this essay I argue that early modern plays regularly failed in the theatre, indeed that early modern plays were built to fail. In making this argument I push back against the familiar idea that the early modern theatre was an “industry”: an essentially efficient commercial undertaking, governed by a set of conventionalized, rationalized practices, in which the product was carefully calibrated to the tastes of the consumer. Against the “industrial” view of early modern drama I attempt to oppose an “artistic” view, in which dramatists’ concern with audience response is primarily rhetorical—a displaced way of articulating a commitment to formal complexity and an indifference to the limitations that the commercial context might seem to make inevitable. The argument encompasses a wide range of examples, including plays by Jonson, Dekker, Webster, and Fletcher; it concludes with a discussion of one of Shakespeare’s greatest failures, the final scene of Winter’s Tale.