The gutenberg galaxy 103 King Lear is a working model of the process of denudation by which men translated themselves from a world of roles to a world of jobs. King Lear is a kind of elaborate case history of people translating themselves out of a world of roles into the new world of jobs. This is a process of stripping and denudation which does not occur instantly except in artistic vision. But Shakespeare saw that it had happened in his time. He was not talking about the future. However, the older world of roles had lingered on as a ghost just as after a century of electricity the West still feels the presence of the older values of literacy and privacy and separateness. Kent, Edgar, and Cordelia are “out of phase” in the language of W.B.Yeats. They are “feudal” in their total loyalty which they consider merely natural to their roles. In role they exercise no delegated authority or powers. They are autonomous centres. As Georges Poulet in his Studies in Human Time points out (p. 7): “For the man of the Middle Ages, then, there was not one duration only. There were durations, ranked one above another, and not only in the universality of the exterior world but within himself, in his own nature, in his own human existence.” The easy habit of configuration which had lasted through several centuries yields with the Renaissance to continuous, lineal, and uniform sequences for time and space and personal relationships alike. And the analogous world of roles and ratios is suddenly succeeded by a new lineal world, as in Troilus and Cressida (III, iii): Take the instant way; For honour travels in a strait so narrow Where one but goes abreast. Keep then the path, For emulation hath a thousand sons That one by one pursue. If you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an ent’red tide, they all rush by, And leave you hindmost… The idea of homogeneous segmentation of persons and relations and functions could only appear to the sixteenth century as the dissolution of all bonds of sense and reason. King Lear offers a complete demonstration of how it felt to live through the change from medieval to Renaissance time and space, from an inclusive to an exclusive sense of the world. His changed attitude to Cordelia exactly reflects the idea of the Reformers concerning fallen nature. Poulet says (p. 10):