ABSTRACT
books, theatres) of cultural production today. This “Shakespeare” points not so much to an Eliotic “tradition,” but to the function that such traditions fulfill: effacing the dynamic of cultural change behind the mask of permanence. Performance, as Clifford Geertz recognizes, is a way of interpreting ourselves to ourselves; performance of the “classics” necessarily threatens to become an act of transgression, in which the cultural tradition embodied by the text is forced to tell a new story. Of course, this act is transgressive only if we believe that there are other alternatives, if we think that both the text and the tradition it metonymically represents can be known apart from their performance, if we think that the past is not constantly being remade by-and remaking-the present. Legitimating the Author is a way of authorizing ourselves, which perhaps explains the anxious acts of filiation that, surprisingly, continue to animate accounts of stage performance. But by allowing “Shakespeare” such authority, we reify Shakespearean drama-and the past, the tradition it represents-as sacred text, as silent hieroglyphics we can only scan, interpret, struggle to decode; we impoverish, in other words, the work of our own performances, and the work of the plays in our making of the world.14
