ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a dichotomy in the advanced academic study of William Shakespeare and other authors – the split between the text and the poem. For Shakespeare, and for his work, theory has recently been reducible to the search for the external conditions of his rhetoric, with very little attention paid to his dramatic poetry as such. The theory of literature is, then, not the theory of its history, its sociology, its politics or its ideological components. Theory even seems antisocial, since it tends to cut through the normal conversations and repetitions of symposia, meetings, networks, round tables, seminars and Internet messages, what are usually and euphemistically called debates, or, these days, contestations. For constructionist theory to work, Shakespeare the poet and author has to disappear. The question of theory in regard to Shakespeare appears then to involve a permanence of the ephemeral.
