Some pieces of what would become McLuhan’s topic were already in place when he left Winnipeg for Cambridge in the fall of 1934. Most importantly, Henry Wright had introduced him to the central role of communication in all the provinces of human activity from individual thought to social life and culture.  And Wright and Rupert Lodge (see here for further discussion) together had introduced him to the idea going back to Hegel and ultimately to Plato that there are plural possible approaches to the consideration of all things and that a prior consideration of these approaches¹ was necessary if a new foundation was to be won for civilization (which the first world war and the depression beginning in 1929 had already showed — not needing the second world war — to be in extremis).²

At Cambridge, further pieces of his topic came into focus.  As will be shown at length in future posts, the project of I.A. Richards to establish a new basis for criticism, specifically in the service of communication, supplied McLuhan with problems and methods which would occupy him for the rest of his life. Jacques Maritain gave him a more sophisticated way to approach the philosophical notions he had from Manitoba and a way to link these both to aesthetics and to religion, specifically Catholicism. First exposure to Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Lewis revealed developments in literary practice which were new to him and which necessitated a complete renovation of his ideas about literature and the literary tradition. 

In early November, 1934, only a month into his Cambridge career, McLuhan attended a lecture before the Cambridge English Club by “the great Dover Wilson” (Letters 32) on ‘Hamlet’s Make-up’.  Dover had just published his controversial edition of Hamlet within the New Cambridge Shakespeare where, for example, he replaced “O that this too solid flesh would melt” with “this too sullied flesh”. McLuhan declared himself “unconverted” (ibid). But the occasion seems to have acted as a catalyst in setting all the new influences flooding into him at Cambridge into combined motion.³ He immediately began to report in his letters home how he was experiencing a strange sort of welcome unsettling (that he would ever after associate with “perception”):

My mind is a ferment these days — boiling with new ideas and experience. (McLuhan to his family, December 6, 1934, Letters 44; see similarly in his letters from January and February, 1935, as discussed in Autobiography – encountering Shakespeare.)

Biographers and commentators have described McLuhan at this time as a kind of hayseed from the prairies who was bowled over by the sophistication of Cambridge. But this is to underestimate both McLuhan and Cambridge.  How could anybody — be they from Winnipeg or from Paris — not be impressed, even incredulous, at the intellectual firepower assembled at Wilson’s lecture?  Here were people, including Muriel Bradbrook⁴, Arthur Quiller-Couch⁵, Joan Bennett, George (Dadie) Rylands and others from the English School whose knowledge of Shakespeare and the Elizabethan age was so precise and so alive that the discussion following Wilson’s lecture lasted, as he reported, “far into the night” (What Happens in Hamlet, 22). McLuhan was stunned by the vivacity of the occasion, not because he was a hayseed, but because he was smart enough and prepared enough to appreciate what was taking place before him. In comparison, he would shortly afterwards judge his own competence as “scarcely literary”⁶, but would then spend the remaining 45 years of his life turning out an enormous volume of published and unpublished writings whose main aim would be to help resuscitate the tradition to which Cambridge had exposed him in unforgettable ways. (Uniquely among literature and communication scholars, McLuhan saw that such resuscitation work entailed a confrontation with nihilism and it is just in this — as yet completely unappreciated, of course — that the fundamental importance of that work lies.)

Here is a part of what McLuhan would have heard from Wilson:⁷

… it is probable that the aesthetic standard of both playwright and audience is lower to-day than it was in the age of Elizabeth. It was killed, like so many of the old art-forms, by mechanical invention. The printing-press brought about the multiplication and the cheapening of books, and, as the reading habit became general, dramatists took more and more to writing with publication in mind, until today plays with any pretension to literary merit appeal quite as much to the reader as to the spectator. This is one, perhaps even the chief cause of the decline of the poetic drama; for, directly a dramatist begins to keep one eye upon a reading public, he is obliged, or at least feels himself obliged, to conform to the rigid consistency which the novelist must observe.  Nor dare he leave points in doubt or intentions obscure. Both the chiaroscuro and the orchestral scope of the Elizabethans are denied him. Yet modern critics, instead of envying Shakespeare the liberty of his art and praising the masterly use he makes of it, condemn him for not obeying the “law of writ”⁸ that binds an Ibsen and a Bernard Shaw.⁹

If The Gutenberg Galaxy could be seen as a footnote to the work of Harold Innis, as McLuhan himself observed, so can it be read as an expansion, thirty years removed, of what McLuhan heard in Dover Wilson’s lecture at the very beginning of his Cambridge studies regarding the “law of writ”.