ABSTRACT
The struggle between text and performance that has been waging in recent years has always been implicit in Robert Weimann's work, albeit complicated by nuance and qualification. The battle lines were redrawn in a recent exchange between W. B. Worthen and R. A. Foakes in Shakespeare. The rhetorical impasse between Foakes and Worthen on the contest between text and performance indicates a conceptual confusion that systematically prevents not merely agreement, but debate itself. In addition to using "derivative" without making it clear whether the use is pejorative or descriptive, Worthen moves between the two different senses of "the text" that have been analysing. Worthen's new metaphor thus reiterates the most problematical aspects of his old impulse to leave the text behind through the force of performance'. In Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, Worthen entertains a philosophically complex relationship between text and performance that is flattened by the more polemical tenor of his later book, Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance.
