ABSTRACT
In Robert Weimann's Shakespearean scholarship, representation and performance – representational meaning and performative eloquence – have always been in flexible relationships with each other. Shakespearean studies have been drawn, with particular force, in all of these directions, because Shakespeare's genius, so often invoked, described and mythologized, can also be said to have revealed the strength and the complexities of performative, semantic and representational urges. First, Weimann appeals to two "cultural constellations" that "appear to facilitate the proposed conjunctural operation". Theatrical performance practices then and now do not take the architectural – and that means also the mental, that is, fictional/real – closure of the stage for granted. Second, both Shakespeare's and our time respectively constitute hybrid communicative structures. Challenge and clarification derive from the fact that both performance and its extension by other media have infiltrated the scholarly scene. Weimann was and remains an optimist of the theatre as a crucial cultural form.
