Since Samuel Beckett lamented to his official biographer, James Knowlson, that his ‘texts are in a terrible mess’, much attention has been paid to the issues of textual accuracy and fidelity, much written about textual variance in the Beckett canon, and many attempts made and considerable money spent to remedy such variation and publishing inconsistencies, many the unavoidable result of simultaneous but separate publishing processes, issues leavened by publishers’ eagerness to launch Beckett's new work, especially for the theatre, even as he was often still developing the piece in rehearsals. Add to such creative issues something of a general slovenliness, inattention, oversights, and blunders by everyone involved in the process of publication, and we have the current state of the Beckett texts, still apparently ‘a terrible mess’. For those of us involved with such issues these past forty (or so) years (see preceding chapters, 6 & 7, for instance), an unacceptable level of textual variance and inconsistency persists even as concurrent and persistent calls for an adherence or return to the Beckettian text resound. The retort has often been to ask, ‘Which Beckett text?’, or rather, where might one find ‘the Beckett text’? Is one publisher more faithful, more attentive, more reliable, more scrupulous, say, than another, for instance? In the theatre especially the question can be reframed more theoretically to ask whether ‘the text’ is located on the page or on the stage, literary scholars tending to favour the (semi)stability of the former at the expense of the latter, performance specialists favouring the energy and vitality of the latter, often at the expense of the former, Beckett himself somewhere in between, neither vacillating nor undecided but attracted to the possibilities of each position. Either answer, however, draws us towards plurality, towards textual multiplicity, towards the slippery issue of what is a text anyway? Apparently, the purity or stability of the Beckett text, its sanctity and inviolability, may be a remnant of an earlier age persisting as one of the great fictions or myths of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and theatre performance. It might be more useful to consider texts and textuality as mobiles rather than stabiles, mutable rather than immutable, variable rather than stable. That apparently was a, if not the, central issue as early as Watt, at the cusp of Beckett's linguistic, aesthetic shift.