Which conventional phrase best describes the author of Hamlet, 'the world's greatest poet' or 'the world's greatest playwright'? The two are often used interchangeably, but their different emphases, defining Shakespeare as first and foremost a literary artist or as primarily a man of the live theatre, adumbrate a genuine and enduring demarcation dispute between the library and the playhouse which has conditioned the reproduction of Shakespeare's works from his own lifetime to the present. At its heart is the question of how we are to understand the relation between the publication and the performance of Shakespeare's works. Is a play's printed text to be seen as prior and superior to its theatrical embodiments, which if so are only belated, partial, and imperfect glosses upon an essentially literary artifact? Or is that text itself to be seen as only a belated, partial, and imperfect souvenir of a theatrical event, the incomplete written trace of a dramatic work which can only fully be realized in performance? The ways in which this issue has been approached over the centuries since the writer's death, and the changing boundaries between its possible resolutions, have done much to shape both conceptions of Shakespeare and the nature of Shakespeare studies, and it is a problem which remains close to the centre of current debates in editing, in performance studies, and in biography. Some understanding of its origins and progress is therefore essential to any account of their development.