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Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets

Fulke Greville

by Jeanie R. Brink

Other literary forms

Fulke Greville (GREHV-ihl) wrote three verse dramas modeled on Seneca: Mustapha (pb. 1609), Alaham (pb. 1633), and Antony and Cleopatra. He destroyed Antony and Cleopatra because he feared that it contained material “apt enough to be construed, or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governors, and government.” Mustapha exists in three different versions: one published without Greville’s permission in 1609, two identical manuscripts that seem to have been written before the printed edition, and the 1633 version, which appeared along with Alaham in the collection of Greville’s works titled Certain Learned and Elegant Workes of the Right Honourable Fulke, Lorde Brooke. It was probably the translation of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1592) by Sir Philip Sidney’s sister, Mary, the countess of Pembroke, that initiated the fashion of the “French Seneca” to which Greville’s plays were a contribution.

Of Greville’s titled prose works, the two most important are A Letter to an Honourable Lady (1633) and The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (1652), containing a survey of international relations in the 1580’s and a history of Elizabeth’s reign as well as an account of Sidney’s life. Of particular interest to the literary historian is Greville’s discussion of the difference between his view of poetry and that of Sidney.

Fulke Greville

ph_cspbic-Greville.jpg

(Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Achievements

Fulke Greville’s reputation as a poet has grown appreciably. In Poetry (1939), Yvor Winters announced that Greville was “one of the two great masters of the short poem.” Commenting on the great lyrics of the sixteenth century, Winters described them as “intellectually both profound and complex . . . restrained and direct in style, and . . . sombre and disillusioned in tone.” While more recently critics have questioned the appropriateness of using the term “plain style” to describe Greville’s verse, the poems in Caelica, his sonnet sequence, are now highly regarded.

His verse treatises, with the exception of G. A. Wilke’s perceptive and informed comments (Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, the Remains: Being Poems of Monarchy and Religion, 1965, G. A. Wilkes, editor), have received little attention. Didactic in tone, they are sententious and restrained in diction, but their very austerity can be moving to a reader interested in intellectual verse. Summarizing his own aesthetics in A Treatie of Humane Learning, Greville describes poetry and music as “things not pretious in their proper kind,” but he adds that they can function “as pleasing sauce to dainty food . . . [c]ast upon things which in themselves are good” (stanza 12).

Greville has found some appreciative readers among men of letters and poets: Charles Lamb surprised his friends at a dinner party by selecting Greville and Sir Thomas Browne as the two writers whom he would most have liked to meet; Algernon Charles Swinburne, T. S. Eliot, and Theodore Roethke have praised Greville’s works, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge paid him an especially high tribute when he imitated Caelica, “LXXXIV” in “Farewell to Love.”

Biography

Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke, supplied a structure for his own biography by having an epitaph engraved on his tomb at Warwick Castle that sums up his life in exemplary brevity: “Fulke Greville/ Servant to Queen Elizabeth,/ Councillor to King James,/ And Friend to Sir Philip Sidney,/ Trophaeum Peccati [Trophy of Sin].” His father, also named Fulke, married Anne Neville, who came from a family with landed wealth and a titled past. The relationship to which Greville gave most prominence on his tombstone, his friendship with Sidney, began when they entered Shrewsbury grammar school on the same day, October 17, 1564. Before he was fourteen, Greville matriculated at Jesus College, Cambridge. Sidney went to Oxford, but they were reunited when they were introduced to Elizabeth’s court in the late 1570’s. Both young men joined the political party of Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester, Sidney’s uncle and an old friend of the Greville family.

Leicester’s radical Protestant party thought that religion should determine domestic and foreign policy and opposed the more conservative faction led by William Cecil, Baron Burghley, and his son Robert Cecil. Both Sidney and Greville wanted to engage in more adventurous activities than Elizabeth was willing to sanction. In their early thirties, they ran away from court to join Sir Francis Drake on a voyage to the West Indies, but the Queen sent after them. After Sidney ignored the first messenger, the second messenger brought with him an offer of employment for Sidney under Leicester in the Low Countries. Greville remained in England, and Sidney’s appointment ended tragically.

Sidney was wounded at Zutphen on October 12, 1586, and died three weeks later. The entire court went into mourning. Greville was overwhelmed. Later, he took upon himself the task of protecting his friend’s reputation as an author. Rather than let an inferior version of Arcadia be made public, Greville interested himself in which manuscript was to serve as the source for William Ponsonby’s 1590 quarto edition of the first two books and a part of the third. The chapter divisions, chapter summaries, and the arrangement of the eclogues were supplied by an “over-seer” who may have been Greville himself.

By 1594, Greville had joined the Essex circle, led by Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, nephew to Leicester and political heir of Sidney. Essex had both married Sidney’s widow, Frances Walsingham, and established himself as the leader of the radical Protestant faction. The influence of Essex assisted Greville in obtaining his first important political appointment as treasurer of the navy in 1598. By 1601, Essex had rebelled against the Queen and had been executed for treason; the death of Essex and disgrace of his party enabled Robert Cecil, Greville’s great antagonist, to solidify his power. It was probably in 1601 that Greville destroyed his copy of Antony and Cleopatra because it might be interpreted as a political commentary on Elizabeth, Essex, and Cecil.

Prior to Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Greville expected to be appointed to the Privy Council, but when James came to the throne, he lost his position as treasurer of the navy. Because Cecil regarded him as a dangerous political opponent, it was not until after his death in May, 1612, that Greville was able to enter the phase of his life that he himself labeled “Councillor to King James.” Following Cecil’s death, Greville shrewdly sought (and bought) the favor of all the leaders of the important political factions at court. On October 1, 1614, he became chancellor and under-treasurer of the Exchequer and Privy Councillor. After a decade of retired life, Greville entered the politically corrupt Jacobean court to serve for seven years as a prominent and powerful official. In 1621, an aging man, he lost his position as chancellor and under-treasurer, but the king created him Baron Brooke of Beauchamp’s Court on January 29, 1621. Greville had requested two baronies so that he could leave two heirs, but the second, which he claimed on the basis of descent from Robert, Lord Willoughby de Broke, was denied.

Greville died on September 30, 1628, after having been stabbed by his servant Robert Hayward a month earlier. The servant’s motives remain in doubt, but Greville’s contemporaries speculated that Hayward might have felt angered by Greville’s will. He left Hayward only twenty pounds a year for life. Greville gave orders that if his assailant had escaped, no one should pursue him: He desired that no man “should lose his life for him.” The doctors replaced the “kell,” a fatty membrane around the intestines, with “fat thrust into the wound of his belly . . . which putrifying, ended him.” Ronald A. Rebholz, Greville’s modern biographer, has suggested that his “temperamental incapacity for a prolonged relationship with a woman” might have resulted from a “homosexual bias which he controlled or could not admit” (The Life of Fulke Greville: First Lord Brooke, 1971). A contemporary, Sir Robert Naunton, however, describes him as “constant courtier of the ladies.” His descendants quarreled over his property, taking opposite sides in the Civil War that was to divide England during the reign of Charles I. The last phrase that Greville caused to be placed on his tombstone, “sin’s trophy,” suggests the degree to which his youthful idealism had given way in his last years to a grim disillusionment.

Analysis

At the age of fifty-eight, Fulke Greville wrote to Sir John Coke his much-quoted statement: “I know the world and believe in God.” Critics have interpreted this comment as emblematic of Greville’s thought. He is described as a worldly man whose experience led him gradually to reject this world as vain; these feelings of contemptus mundi are also supposed to have led him to attack human learning as a preparation for divine revelation. C. S. Lewis has described him as having the intellectual orientation of an Existentialist, the cast of mind of Søren Kierkegaard or Blaise Pascal (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama, 1954). Greville’s pessimism, however, may have been influenced by things external as well as internal. He outlived most of his contemporaries, but those who lived well into the seventeenth century shared his nostalgia for the Elizabethan court of their youth.

Greville’s own analysis of his aesthetic intentions deserves careful attention:

For my own part, I found my creeping Genius more fixed upon the Images of Life, than the Images of Wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the black Oxe had not already trod, as the Proverbe is, but to those only, that are weather-beaten in the Sea of this World, such as having lost the sight of their Gardens, and groves, study to saile on a right course among Rocks, and quicksands.

His readers, then, will be those who want instruction and who do not need to be engaged by “the images of wit.” The fiction or feigning that Sir Philip Sidney regards as the essential feature of poetry was not important to Greville. He wanted to present his ideas in restrained diction, preferring plain statement to the ornateness that was popular earlier in the sixteenth century.

It is misleading to speak of Greville’s development as a poet because, except for a pirated version of the verse drama Mustapha, none of his work appeared during his lifetime. Since the Warwick manuscripts demonstrate that he revised his poetry and prose repeatedly, it is difficult to establish a reliable system of dating. Ronald Rebholz and G. A. Wilkes have each proposed plausible chronologies for composition and revision, but it is impossible to draw final conclusions because of the complexity of the manuscript evidence. Without suggesting that Greville moved from one phase to another, it is possible to differentiate three somewhat distinct literary styles: (1) the meditative style that Greville uses in Caelica, (2) the strenuous, involuted manner of the verse dramas, which led Swinburne to compare Greville’s work to that of George Chapman, and (3) the analytical and discursive verse of his poetical treatises, poetry containing some of Greville’s most profound thoughts. Rather than viewing Greville’s literary career as a progression from Caelica to the treatises, or, conversely, as a movement from success with the lyric to failure with the philosophical poem, one should assess each of these styles in terms of its own literary objectives.

Caelica

Although frequently included in discussions of the sonnet sequences that became popular in the 1590’s, Caelica might be more accurately described as a collection of short lyrics. In forty-one poems, Greville uses the English sonnet form of three quatrains followed by a couplet, rather than the Italian form favored by Sidney, but he often breaks the poems before the sestet, as was customary in the Italian sonnet tradition. His other poems are usually composed of stanzas of four or six lines. Some evidence exists that the first seventy-six poems were composed prior to Sidney’s death in 1586, and most scholars think that the sonnets are now arranged in the order in which they were composed.

Rebholz has described Caelica as evolving into a “series of anti-love poems.” A large number of poems attack the inconstancy of women and men in a tone reminiscent of John Donne at his most cynical. The latter part of Greville’s sequence is dominated by religious themes and images. His philosophical insights can be as moving as they are profound. In Sonnet LXXXVII, which Lewis singles out for special praise, Greville describes the soul as having fled the body: “To see it selfe in that eternall glasse/ Where time doth end and thoughts accuse the dead,/ Where all to come is one with all that was.” Sonnets LXXXIV and LXXXV are companion poems that present a contrast between earthly love governed by Cupid and the heavenly love governed by a “Nature by no other nature knowne.” These two contrasting poems illustrate the conflicting themes and unresolved tensions in Caelica.

Mustapha and Alaham

Greville’s two surviving verse dramas, Mustapha and Alaham, both use plots derived from Eastern sources. In Mustapha, Soliman the Magnificent (1520-1566) murders his loyal and virtuous son Mustapha because Rossa, a freed bondwoman for whom he feels a destructive sexual passion, persuades him that his son is plotting against him. Rossa wants to make her own son the sultan’s heir. Her daughter Camena tries to warn Mustapha, but he will not save himself if it means causing disorder in the state. Ironically, the people almost rebel over the murder, but Achmat, Soliman’s chief adviser, decides that order must be preserved in the state even if it means allowing Soliman’s wicked act to go unpunished.

Alaham, like Mustapha, examines sexual lust and lust for power within a political context. Alaham is the second son of a sultan, but he is so consumed by a lust for power that he is willing to burn his father, brother, and sister alive on a funeral pyre in order to seize the throne. Hala, his unfaithful wife, decides to revenge herself on Alaham for murdering her lover and plots a violent revenge. She contrives a suitable punishment for him by devising a poisoned crown and cloak. She tortures him further by killing their child in front of him while he writhes in agony. After murdering the child, she realizes that she has killed the baby she had by her lover, not by her husband. Then she kills her other child and rejoices that she is going to hell, where she can indulge her passion for excess.

Treatises

Rebholz has suggested the following chronology for the composition of the treatises: A Treatise of Monarchy (1599-1604, pb. 1670), An Inquisition on Fame and Honour (1612-1614, pb. 1633), A Treatie of Warres (1619-1621, pb. 1633), A Treatie of Humane Learning (1620-1622, pb. 1633), A Treatise of Religion (1622-1628, pb. 1670). Greville, however, seems to have intended to print first the treatise on religion, then the one on humane learning, the one on fame and honor, and finally the one on war. The order is given in Greville’s hand in a manuscript of the treatises. The problem of chronology is complicated also by the omission of A Treatise of Monarchy and A Treatise of Religion from the first posthumous collection in 1633; these two treatises were published separately in 1670 as The Remains of Sir Fulke Greville, Lord B. In the case of A Treatise of Religion, Greville’s antiprelatical stance probably led authorities to suppress the work.

The poems’ titles accurately reflect their content. Greville the statesman and thinker presents his arguments in unadorned but powerful simplicity. As he observes in A Treatie of Humane Learning, he regards music and poetry as “ornaments to life,” but only “whiles they do serve, and not possess our hearts.” To interest oneself in art for art’s sake would lead to a “disease of mind.” Greville acknowledges that arts, like music and poetry, if they are used in church or military ceremonies, can “enlarge the mind” and suppress “passions of the baser kind.” He, however, remains skeptical about the value of any knowledge other than the knowledge of God’s grace.

By the end of his life, Greville felt the world to be so corrupt that reform was impossible. He had abandoned his faith in two of the basic tenets of Christian humanism: confidence that rational inquiry might result in the reform of institutions and conviction that each man was obligated to serve the state in order to promote the common good. In the last poem printed in Caelica, he prays for an apocalypse: “Rather, sweet Jesus, fill up time and come/ To yield the sin her everlasting doom.”

Bibliography

1 

Alexander, Gavin. “Fulke Greville and the Afterlife.” Huntington Library Quarterly 62, nos. 3/4 (2001): 203-231. Alexander discusses Greville’s preoccupation with his posthumous influence. It is characteristic of Greville to look back to the dead, but it is equally his habit to think forward beyond his own death.

2 

Greville, Fulke, Baron Brooke. The Complete Poems and Plays of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (1554-1628). 2 vols. Edited by G. A. Wilkes. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. This collection, edited by a prominent Greville scholar, presents a detailed examination of Greville’s sonnets, verse plays, and treatises.

3 

Hannay, Margaret P. Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Greville regarded his close friendship with Sir Philip Sidney as a major influence on his life. This biography of Sidney’s sister, Mary Sidney Herbert, countess of Pembroke, comments upon Greville and his contributions to and participation in the literary interests of the Sidney circle.

4 

Klemp, P. J. Fulke Greville and Sir John Davies: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. Presents a chronological bibliography of works by and about Greville from 1581 to 1985. Each entry in the bibliography has been annotated. General studies of the political and literary contexts are also included in this useful bibliography.

5 

McCoy, Richard C. The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. This study of Greville and Sir Philip Sidney concentrates on the impact of chivalric codes and models of behavior on Elizabethan and Jacobean courtiers. McCoy offers insights into the philosophical issues that underlie courtly entertainments and pageants.

6 

Norbrook, David. Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. This work on the connection between politics and poetry during the Renaissance contains a chapter on Greville.

7 

Rebholz, Ronald A. The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1971. The standard biography, this scholarly volume is thorough and meticulous. Rebholz divides Greville’s life into four parts: “Friend to Sir Philip Sidney” (through Greville’s youth); “Servant to Queen Elizabeth” (middle life, through his loss of office); “Councillor to King James”; and “Trophaeum Peccati” (in which the death of hope, Christian humanism, and Greville’s own death are addressed). Appendixes treat the dating of Greville’s works, provide a foldout genealogical table, and reprint letters. The volume ends with a bibliography listing both primary and secondary sources, and an index.

8 

Waswo, Richard. The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in the Poetry of Fulke Greville. 1972. Reprint. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. This full-length study of Greville’s life and works contrasts the poetics of Greville and Sir Philip Sidney. Major emphasis is given to Caelica. Waswo comments upon the Platonic and Petrarchan elements in Greville’s sonnet sequence and analyzes the rhetorical texture of what is frequently described as his “plain style.”

9 

Wilkes, G. A. “’Left . . . to Play the Ill Poet in My Own Part’: The Literary Relationship of Sidney and Fulke Greville.” Review of English Studies 57, no. 230 (2006): 291-310. Greville scholar Wilkes examines how Greville refashioned Sir Philip Sidney’s literary identity after his death in two well-known letters and a biography.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Brink, Jeanie R. "Fulke Greville." Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPBIC_10810160000104.
APA 7th
Brink, J. R. (2011). Fulke Greville. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Brink, Jeanie R. "Fulke Greville." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: British, Irish, & Commonwealth Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed September 15, 2025. online.salempress.com.