ABSTRACT
This book has argued for a reassessment of tragedy, and more generally of early modern drama, in the context of a larger cultural transition, from a social structure that, in spite of pervasive uses of literacy in many areas, was still very much oral in its organization of aspects of knowledge and thought. The transition to commercial drama did, as literacy did in other venues such as logic, replace systems of knowledge based in repetition and memory with ones based in singularity, innovation, division, and permanent records. In doing so, it initiated a chain of developments through a defined sequence. While the development of individual plays was the work of creativity and genius, the development of the larger pattern enforcing those changes was neither intentional nor well understood, but we have all lived in and many cases benefited from the result. It has also produced developments such as the Indian residential schools through which alternative modes of perception based in stability and connection, like those oral structures with which commercial dramas began, have become hard to see just when we may need them most.
