'We should note the force, effect, and consequences of inventions which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world'. Francis Bacon, Novutn Organum To grasp the conditions of writing in the early English Renaissance, we need to imagine a world poised between manuscript and print cultures. Although William Caxton set up the first press in England in 1476 and set into motion a slowly unfolding debate about the meaning and significance of print technology, a lively manuscript culture continued to thrive alongside the print marketplace for the next hundred years or more. The result is a fascinating cross-fertilization between two kinds of textual production, each with its own practices and forms. In turn, these new forms of production gave rise to new conceptions of authorship and meaning. It is impossible “to divorce the substance of a text on the one hand,” observes D. F. McKenzie, “from the physical form of its presentation on the other.”

In the prologue to John Dryden's revised version of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1678), Dryden had “Mr. Betterton, representing the ghost of Shakespeare” rise up and intone to the audience, 'Untaught, unpractic'd, in a barbarous age, /I found not, but created first the stage.' Before Shakespeare was the void - an uncouth, dark time with nothing to offer England's first master dramatic poet. There are traces of Dryden's perspective in the titles of this chapter and the one that follows it. While the age of Shakespeare proudly sets forth “Dramatic Achievements,” the pre- Shakespearean era can offer only “Experiments.” To be sure, we have abandoned Dryden's formulation in some ways. No scholar would now contend that Shakespeare took nothing from the drama that preceded him; indeed, a flourishing twentieth-century scholarly industry has devoted itself precisely to demonstrating how Shakespeare's achievement needs to be understood as the culmination of earlier developments in the Tudor theatre. Shakespeare was neither “untaught” nor “unpractic'd” in an earlier English drama, but found much to emulate and adopt.

In 1575, when Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare were eleven years old, Ben Jonson three, and John Lyly and George Peele Oxford students, they could hardly have envisaged their eventual careers as actors, playwrights, theatrical administrators and investors. There were no permanent theatres in London. Playing in the area was irregular, produced by traveling companies performing occasionally in inn yards. Yet the next year saw the construction of a playhouse at Newington Butts, the opening of the Theatre in Shoreditch to the north, and the movement of the Chapel Children into a hall theatre in the Blackfriars, thus establishing both the types of theatres - outdoor, multistory “public” amphitheatres and smaller, enclosed “private” theatres - and the types of company personnel - adult men, with a few boys to act the women's parts, or entirely boy choristers - that would obtain until the closing of the theatres in 1642. In 1583 a playing company bearing the Queen's name was established. In 1594 a reorganization officially restricted playing to two companies at two playhouses, the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the Theatre and the Lord Admiral's Men at the Rose.

Elizabeth I (1558-1603) may never have uttered the famous words attributed to her in a letter by Sir Francis Bacon: “I would not open windows into men's souls.” Her division between conformity in public worship and private religious sensibility reverses the authoritarian view that governmental fiat determines religious conviction. Elizabeth's acknowledgment of liberty of conscience free from surveillance sounds apocryphal, but the remark does correspond to the Queen's secretiveness about her personal beliefs. Liberty of conscience was not the case when Sir Thomas More, despite his legalistic strategy of maintaining silence concerning his refusal to acquiesce to the Royal Supremacy over the church, was convicted of treason at the outset of the political Reformation under Henry VIII (1509-47). Perjured testimony that the humanist scholar, lawyer, and former Lord Chancellor of England had denied the King's supremacy in the Church of England led to his condemnation. Before his death sentence was handed down, More discharged his conscience by defending ecclesiastical unity and objecting to royal control of the church.

It is hard, said the poet Juvenal as he looked around Nero's Rome, not to write satire (Satires i.i). But what is “satire”? Sometimes a form, often a mode, it can double as diatribe, sermon, parody, joke, Utopia, dystopia, epistle, or novel; its tone ranges from fury to faint irony, anguish to amusement. Is it, then, discourse with attitude? Any sendup or putdown? It must be more than irritability or grief, and that “more” is often some fantasy, conceit, myth, invention, or persona. Like allegory, it thrives in a fallen world of ambiguous signs, Augustine's “land of unlikeness.” Not all Tudor writers explore a deconstructionist's “differance,” but some adopt a distance or difference - fiction - that distinguishes their work from lament, polemic, or sermon. When such work holds something up to amused or scornful scrutiny, and at some length, the result is satire.

“This realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world.” With these words Parliament in 1533 declared England's independence from the Pope in Rome. Although our more familiar sense of empire as a political unit encompassing far-flung territories and heterogeneous peoples was current in the sixteenth century, the meaning here concerns absolute sovereignty. An empire is a polity that owes fealty to no one under God. Because England is an empire, England's king has, in Parliament's words, “plenary, whole, and entire power” in all matters within his kingdom. In place of the overlapping patchwork of regional, national, and international jurisdictions that had characterized medieval governance in Western Europe, monarchs in England and elsewhere were intent on seeing their rule penetrate more evenly into all aspects of life in the territories under their control. This “improvement of the sovereignty,” as the Elizabethan poet and historian Samuel Daniel was to call it, had an inevitable cultural dimension.

What makes a century? It is clearly something more than the simple passage of a hundred years, but equally clearly is something less than a perfectly connected sequence of events with an interconnected beginning, middle, and end. History rarely shapes itself to the motions of the planets or to the arbitrary divisions of the calendar: as Hayden White has shown us, it is more usually shaped by the demands imposed on it by different kinds of narrative structure. Monarchs do not obligingly succumb to fin de siecle gloom in order to die with the century, nor do social or literary movements terminate with a bang the moment a century draws to an end. The sixteenth century is particularly unobliging in its relation to the calendar. Nothing of great note happened in 1500, and nothing of great note happened in 1600 either, as the timeline appended to this volume shows.

In the sixteenth century poetry followed patronage like a shadow. At a time when the newly invented printing press was disseminating texts at a rate never before imagined, writers, editors, translators, and compilers did not earn a living from their labors. Receiving a single payment for their manuscripts but no royalties thereafter, writers remained as dependent on patrons for employment, retainerships, and cash rewards as they had done in the age of scribal reproduction. To publish was not to profit, and the days when a writer might make a fortune from his pen and claim, as Pope did, to be “Above a Patron,” were still a long way off. Literature that was written at the behest of a patron, literature that aimed to attract a patron, literature that ruminated the vagaries of the patronage system, literature that deplored its shortcomings - these account for so large a proportion of sixteenth-century writing that the literature of the period has not unreasonably been described as a “literature of patronage.”

What is “literature”? Who writes it, and who reads it? What good or harm does it do? How is it related to other cultural forms? And what is the appropriate language and kind of writing within which these issues can be framed and argued? These simple questions, which provide the fodder for the complex aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras and for the theory wars of the late twentieth century, were likewise disputed in the sixteenth century. It is possible, indeed, to think of the sixteenth century as the first great age of literary criticism, in which a distinctive category of literature was established, and a distinctive way of talking about it and the other arts was developed. For Tudor writers and readers, the answers to these questions depend primarily on their understanding of literature as a kind of imitation. The word imitation is a complex one, though, for it allows two important meanings.

In A Discourse of English Poetry, 1586, William Webbe claims that the need for such a text, designed to aid readers in identifying a native poetic tradition, emerges out of the explosive proliferation of printed works and the problems they pose for exercising judgment. 'Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardels of printed pamphlets, wherewith this country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished, the greatest part I think . . . are such as . . . tend in some respect . . . to poetry . . . If I write something concerning what I think of our English poets, or adventure to set down my simple judgement of English poetry, I trust the learned poets will give me leave, and vouchsafe my book passage . . . to stir up some other of meet ability to bestow [travail] in this matter: whereby I think we may not only get the means, which we yet want, to discern between good writers and bad, but perhaps also challenge from the rude multitude of rustical rhymers, who will be called poets, the right practice and orderly course of true poetry.'

SCHOPENHAUER’S QUESTION

In Book Five of The Gay Science Nietzsche writes that 'unconditional and honest atheism' is 'the locus of Schopenhauer's whole integrity' and 'the presupposition of the way he poses his problem'. If we reject the 'meaning' Christianity assigns to the world, then, writes Nietzsche, 'Schopenhauer's question immediately comes to us in a terrifying way: Has existence any meaning at all?' (Gay Science §357). It is true that, for Schopenhauer, everything in ordinary life is characterized by Nichtigkeit, or nothingness, which might suggest the thought that life is meaningless. (Payne translates the term as 'vanity', which loses much of its power.) But Schopenhauer tends to speak more often in the vocabulary of value, asking whether life is a business which covers its costs, whether the world is bankrupt, whether this world is the best, or the worst, possible. Thus, with regard to pessimism, I shall take Schopenhauer's prime question to be: What value does existence have? and more particularly: What is the value of my being what I am? For Schopenhauer, as Nietzsche implies, certain answers that were once thinkable on the assumption of Christian dogma - that each of us is an immaterial substance or a pure, rational soul or part of some supernatural design - are not available.

It is common to complain that Schopenhauer has not received the recognition he deserves. At first sight, this complaint may seem unfounded. Over the past 150 years, Schopenhauer has reached a wider general public than most great philosophers. He has also in- fluenced leading artists such as Wagner, Thomas Mann, and Proust. Finally, he has had a tremendous, if often indirect, influence on continental philosophy. His emphasis on the will and his anti-intellectualism were the driving forces behind life philosophy (Lebensphilosophie), a movement which, through Nietzsche, influenced existentialism and post-modernism. His pessimism was appreciated by unorthodox Marxists like Horkheimer. And his discussion of the unconscious has obvious parallels with psychoanalysis, which itself has exerted a significant collateral influence on continental philosophy.

Nevertheless, the worry that Schopenhauer may be unduly neglected is not without foundation. In the current climate, professional philosophy, as opposed to cultural studies or literary theory, is increasingly dominated by analytic philosophy, even on the Continent. And Schopenhauer’s influence on analytic philosophy in general has been even smaller than that of other nineteenth-century German philosophers like Hegel and Nietzsche. This is unjust, since his work features at least as many analytic arguments as theirs.

TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY WITHOUT TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS

As the title of his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation, suggests, Schopenhauer held that we know the world in two different ways, through our representations of objects in space and time and through our experience of our ability to move our own bodies by willing to do so. In his account of our knowledge of the world through representation, he accepted the core of Kant's transcendental idealism, the view that the spatial and temporal forms in which experience presents objects to us, as well as the basic structure of the concepts by means of which we think about and judge these objects, above all the category of causality, are impositions of our own minds on our experience, that is, they reflect the structure of our own perception and conception of reality but not any structure that reality has in itself independently of our representation of it. In his account of our knowledge of the nature of reality through our own will, however, Schopenhauer rejected Kant's inference that transcendental idealism, while it allows us to conceive of certain features of how things may be in themselves by means of our categories, and even to adopt certain postulates about them for the sake of our practical reason, that is, morality, completely precludes us from having any actual knowledge of them.

Many commentators accept Schopenhauer's claim that there are no significant changes in his thinking after 1818. I, however, argue that there are good reasons for maintaining that there are significant developments in his thought after that date and that these concern his doctrine of the thing-in-itself. Furthermore, I contend that it is Schopenhauer's increasing knowledge of and admiration for Eastern thought which provided the impetus for the changes in doctrine that occurred. I begin by outlining three significant shifts that occurred in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the thing-in-itself after 1818. I then discuss his degree of acquaintance with Eastern thought, and I suggest various similarities to and differences between Eastern teaching and Schopenhauer's doctrine. Finally, I argue that the identified shifts in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the thing-in-itself can be plausibly explained, at least in part, by his increasing familiarity with and appreciation of Eastern thought.

THE SELF AS WILL AND INTELLECT

In the German language, as in English, the pronoun or pronominal adjective selbst, or 'self,' lends emphasis to something or someone previously named. In its nominalized form, das Selbst, or 'the self,' the pronoun serves chiefly to identify a human being or person. A specifically philosophical usage of the nominalized form came into currency in England, chiefly through the work of John Locke, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, from where it seems to have made its way into German philosophical terminology a few decades later. A main function of the philosophical term has been to identify the core or essence of a human being, as opposed to what might be accidental or contingent about him or her. In particular, the self has been identified with a human being's soul or mind as opposed to his or her body. In a secondary usage, the term has been employed to distinguish between constituent parts or aspects of one and the same being, in particular to articulate the special status of someone's or one's own 'better self.'

AESTHETIC CONTEMPLATION: A PRELUDE

Schopenhauer devoted more than one-quarter of his principal work, The World as Will and Representation, to aesthetics. The chapters on aesthetics occupy the third section in both volumes of that work and depend for their clarity as much on the metaphysical theory that precedes them as on an acquaintance with the particular arts discussed. For Schopenhauer, genuine aesthetic experience, though rare, leads directly to an apprehension of metaphysical truth, to the core of genuine knowledge. This emphasis on aesthetic experience in obtaining knowledge is unusual, however, for by the middle of the nineteenth century the epistemological authority of the scientific method was pervasively secure throughout Europe.

No stranger to the empirical scientific disciplines, Schopenhauer began higher studies in a faculty of medicine and made progress for more than two years before switching to philosophy, which would become his life’s work. Although he insisted on separate emphases for science on the one hand and philosophy on the other, Schopenhauer nevertheless felt it prudent to corroborate his metaphysical claims by attempting to show their appearance in phenomena validated through scientific observation.