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Understanding McLuhan
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08274_Field_TCGG T39.txt
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1996-04-10
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Competitive individualism had become the scandal of a society
long invested with corporate and collective values. The role
played by print in instituting new patterns of culture is not
unfamiliar. But one natural consequence of the specializing
action of the new forms of knowledge was that all kinds of
power took on a strongly centralist character. Whereas the role
of the feudal monarch had been inclusive, the king actually
including in himself all his subjects, the Renaissance prince
tended to become an exclusive power centre surrounded by his
individual subjects. And the result of such centralism, itself
dependent on many new developments in roads and commerce,
was the habit of delegation of powers and the specializing of
many functions in separate areas and individuals. In King Lear ,
as in other plays, Shakespeare shows an utter clairvoyance
concerning the social and personal consequences of
denudation and stripping of attributes and functions for the