Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08749_Field_TCGG T514.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 827b | 16 lines

          And thus the native hue of resolution
          Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
          And enterprises of great pith and moment
          With this regard their currents turn awry
          And lose the name of action. (III, i)

This is the identical division we have already seen in Thomas
More’s contrast: “Your scholastic philosophy is not unpleasant
among friends in familiar communication, but in the councils of
Kings where great matters be debated and reasoned with great
authority these things have no place.”

     Hamlet is repeating a commonplace conflict of his
century, that between the old oral “field” approach to problems
and the new visual approach of applied or “resolute”
knowledge. And “resolution” is the cant or conventional term