ABSTRACT
In twentieth-century Wlliam Shakespeare studies, the different constituents of Elizabethan drama were by and large recognized; in fact, in the late mid-century and after, a sense of complementarity, even cooperation of a sort, prevailed between page-centred and stage-centred approaches. Shakespeare's dramatic dialogue is a "double-voiced discourse" par excellence that conveys "different intentions" and, as poetic language, "has a double, even a multiple, meaning". One of the earliest modern performance displays without language was the three-day cohabitation of Joseph Beuys with an untamed coyote in the New York Rene Block Gallery, between 23 and 25 May 1974. On contemporary stages, language and show, text and performance, experience a reversal in the order of which is magisterial and which is ministerial it appears only appropriate for Shakespeare's plays in mise-en-scene to put up some resistance. Shakespeare's is an actor's theatre, a stage run by performers.
