In this chapter, I consider the outlines of a pedagogy for leisure, offering examples that aim to show, more than tell, what a leisure-informed pedagogy looks like. While there is no surefire recipe or formula for leisure, certain parameters can help us cultivate leisure. The three guidelines outlined in the previous chapter – apprenticeship, study, and epiphany – are present in all three examples noted below, but each illustrates one particular guideline more prominently than the others.

In this chapter, I first consider Alasdair MacIntyre’s neo-Aristotelian notion of “practices.” For MacIntyre, practices refer to special forms of human activity that harbor what he calls internal goods, goods to which practitioners progressively gain access as they acquire more experience. Part of what it means to enact a leisurely state of mind is to become attentive to the internal goods of our practical engagements. At the same time, the activities in which we can cultivate and enact leisure should not only be thought of as “practices,” in the MacIntyrean sense. Attending only to such practices would narrow the range of human engagement in which leisure can be experienced. More provocative is the philosopher Albert Borgmann’s  notion of a focal practice, which resonates with MacIntyre’s account, but includes a broader range of activities that count as worthwhile practices. While Borgmann’s account of focal practices covers what MacIntyre has in mind, it also includes simple activities such as cooking, walking, and reading. Borgmann shows that even, and especially in such engagements, we can experience and further cultivate leisure. Drawing from both MacIntyre’s and Borgmann’s insights, I sketch out three tangible ways to cultivate leisure.

This chapter examines some of the trends that emerge in roles written for child actors in Shakespeare’s early plays. It considers some similarities in types of roles and asks how we might weigh this evidence in complementing recent research on how child actors develop in the period. In surveying the range of smaller child roles in the early plays it raises interesting possibilities for the nature of in-troup pedagogy and/or training. It further raises questions about the relationship between text and performance, and between one text and another, and between Shakespeare and the various companies that he is associated with and the collaborators that he works alongside. It argues that we can learn something about how child actors develop in the period by re-examining the roles that were written for them in this early period of Shakespeare’s career.