Essential McLuhan 100 Meantime we shall express our darker purpose. Give me the map there. Know we have divided In three our kingdom… The map was also a novelty in the sixteenth century, age of Mercator’s projection, and was key to the new vision of peripheries of power and wealth. Columbus had been a cartographer before he was a navigator; and the discovery that it was possible to continue in a straight-line course, as if space were uniform and continuous, was a major shift in human awareness in the Renaissance. More important, the map brings forward at once a principal theme of King Lear, namely the isolation of the visual sense as a kind of blindness. It is in the first scene of the play that Lear expresses his “darker purpose,” using the Machiavellian cant term. Earlier in the first scene the darkness of Nature, as it were, is shown in the boasting of Gloucester about the illegitimacy 1 The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. G.L.Kittredge. All quotations from King Lear, unless otherwise noted, are from Act I, scene i. Kittredge’s edition is cited throughout. of his handsome love-child Edmunch “But I have, sir, a son by order of law, some year older than this, who is yet no dearer in my account.” The gaiety with which Gloucester alludes to the begetting of Edmund is later alluded to by Edgar: The dark and vicious place where thee he got Cost him his eyes. (V, iii) Edmund, the love-child, opens the second scene of the play with: Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law My services are bound. Wherefore should I Stand in the plague of custom, and permit The curiosity of nations to deprive me, For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines Lag of a brother? Edmund has l’esprit de quantité so essential to tactile measurement and to the impersonality of the empirical mind. Edmund is presented as a force of nature, eccentric to mere human experience and “the curiosity of nations.” He is a prime agent in the fragmentation of human institutions. But the great fragmenter is Lear himself, with his inspired idea of setting