Recent decades have seen a proliferation of critical discourses challenging an ostensible immutability of meaning and valuation in Shakespeare's texts, as the worlds they represent and even the manuscripts themselves are increasingly negotiated as ambivalent cultural constructs. Poststructural figurations of the instability of language and systems of representation inform Brian Vickers's and Gary Taylor's considerations of how Shakespeare is continuously “remade” vis-a-vis ever-evolving philosophical and sociopolitical mores. Stephen Greenblatt's seminal explorations of historicity, “cultural poetics,” and the performance of power likewise continue to bear fruit in recent works such as David Scott Kastan's Shakespeare After Theory. Invaluable as these branches of critical inquiry have been to countless scholars and practitioners alike (myself included on both counts), there is nonetheless a potential inattention to the core theatricality or playability of a text once it becomes embroiled in these larger discourses. Certainly, there are numerous branches of performance theory which address the performative act itself: Marvin Carlson's explorations of theatrical dialogism, Bert States's work on phenomenology in the theatre, or Patrice Pavis' postmodern ruminations on the plurality of significance in a critically self-reflective mise-en-scène. Yet critical considerations of individual plays in performance remain the exception rather than the rule.