Since the late 1980s, Samuel Beckett's plays have come to epitomize the conflict at the heart of dramatic performance in the age of print: do we understand dramatic theatre, as Hans-Thies Lehmann puts it, as the "declamation and illustration of written drama" (21), or as a means for using writing in the production of an independent artwork, one agency among many in framing the theatrical event? While Lehmann frames these alternatives polemically, we might well think that this notion of "dramatic" fidelity is itself a form of theatrical rhetoric, a way of situating the audience within the performance event; in this case, in a gesture extending back to Aristotle, it urges the framing of the mimesis of the literary action as the sustaining purpose of dramatic performance. Like all rhetoric, though, it operates through a system of identifications that can be denied but not ideologically evacuated. In the modern realistic theatre, we pay to sit in the dark, occupying a position of economic privilege identified within the event as representational, ethical, and active absence, neutrality; realistic mimesis is defined as much by this structure of identifications as Aristotelian mimesis was defined by the manifest structure of the agon, the contest. Writing provides one of the agencies of Western dramatic performance, and different systems of dramatic performance understand the instrumentality, the use-value of writing in different ways. And Beckett's plays – perhaps like all dramatic writing – provide a kind of allegory of this condition, of the tension between poetry and performance in framing the work of drama.