Understanding McLuhan/Understanding McLuhan (1996)(Voyager)[Mac-PC].iso/pc/mcluhan.dxr/08909_Field_TCGG T674.txt

Text File | 1996-04-10 | 947b | 16 lines

conduct their amours in all earnestness, like the heroes of
Stendhal, in another in all flippancy, like the heroes of Noel
Coward.” But whereas the Elizabethan was, like the Chaucerian
“I,” able to shift into a variety of public and private roles, so he
was able to play with language on various levels. The old oral
bond with its flexibility of pitch held between reader and writer.
Lever in explaining the nineteenth-century failure to grasp
Sidney’s procedure comments (p. 57) “It was the atrophy of
positive convention during the nineteenth century, and the
consequent splitting of the individual into a public and a private
self, that explains why so much personal verse of the Victorians
evokes a sense of embarrassment.”

     S. L. Bethell’s Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic
Tradition  takes up this theme thoroughly, showing how the
break-up of the older bonds between author and public led