ABSTRACT
Right, says the fledgling playwright as he carries the script of his national epic into the theater. Players know that speech is action, but the audience had better see speech referring to something substantive—a man, an army, a crown, something visible on stage. Of course, some of this speechifying is operative language: oaths, pledges, and ceremonies authorizing allegiance. Those passages ought to work well with an audience accustomed to ritualized occasions. But what to do about all these letters, bills, proclamations, edicts, writs, and verses from the beyond? Written words are false signifiers, attributable to no one and addressing only an educated elite; hence they are secret, “the devil’s writ.” Worse still, they are fixed and so pretend to be absolute. Writing, ergo, provides only the “shadow of a substance,” or an army, or a crown. Words in that form are not worth the paper they’re written on. Aha! About my brain! Paper!
