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The article presents a discussion on one of the chapters of the book "Shakespeare, Theory and Performance," which deals with the works of English poet and dramatist William Shakespeare. This article has a history relevant to the position it takes and the ground it seeks to occupy. It began as a contribution to a seminar at the 1991 World Shakespeare Congress in Tokyo, Japan, on "The Body as Site of Gender and Class Hierarchy and Differentiation," chaired by Peter Stallybrass and Steven Mullaney, and was designed to pose a number of questions. The seminar clearly assumed that the body was such a site, but the author wanted to approach the topic interrogatively, refusing the implicit assumptions. One of the questions the author had, and still have, concerns the relation between what he calls in this article "discourse theory" and theatrical performance. He wanted to raise the matter of performance in the discussion of Shakespearean texts and the body, since cultural materialist criticism has frequently failed to take the measure of the stage, and yet the stage is one place where the body is clearly on the line.