Fulke Greville and the Culture of the English Renaissance

This book intends to provide a comprehensive reappraisal of the work of the Renaissance poet and politician Sir Fulke Greville, whose political career stretched from the heyday of the Elizabethan age into the Stuart period. While Greville’s literary achievements have traditionally been overshadowed by those of his more famous friend Sir Philip Sidney, his oeuvre comprises a highly diverse range of works of striking force and originality, comprising a sonnet sequence, a biography of Sir Philip Sidney, a series of philosophical treatises, and two closet dramas set in the Ottoman Empire. The essays gathered in this volume investigate the intersections between poetics, poetic form, and political and religious thought in Greville’s work, arguing how they participate in all of the most important debates of the post-Reformation period, such as the nature of grace and the status of evil; the exercise of sovereignty and scope and limits of political power; and the nature of civil and religious idolatry. They examine Greville’s career as a courtier and patron, and foreground both his own concerns with the posthumous life of authors and their works, and his continuing importance during the Interregnum and Restoration periods.

‘These Ancient Forming Powers’

Fulke Greville has often been described as a Calvinist and even an ‘ultra-Calvinist’, but this pole of his work stands in tension with the neo-Stoical elements of his thought, in which nature is held out as an ideal against artificiality. This chapter reassesses Greville’s political and religious poetry in light of this tension to argue that Greville uses nature as a platform to critique sovereignty as a poetic artefact, which like the idol hides its artificiality in colours of divinity. Further, Greville implicates orthodox Christianity itself in the ideology of sovereign authority, insofar as its denigration of nature serves to obviate the ‘ancient forming powers’ of sovereignty’s human creators. Nevertheless, Greville’s critique, insofar as it is based on a suspicion of art, turns against itself, such that nature, while held out as an ideal, can never be acted upon without betraying and corrupting it.

Fulke Greville the Courtier

This chapter argues that Fulke Greville’s long career of royal service, and many of the literary texts that he created, were shaped by two Elizabethan court luminaries: Sir Philip Sidney and Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Through biographical and literary analysis, I trace the political and intellectual influence of both Sidney and Essex on Greville’s career at court, with special attention to how the Sidney/Essex circle’s famed interest in Senecan neostoicism and Tacitean historiography manifest in Greville’s life and works. Though Greville outlived his former patrons by decades, it is his experience with them in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign that moulded his courtly outlook in the seventeenth century.

Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke as Interregnum and Restoration Author

This chapter explores the significance of the appearance of Greville’s Life of Sidney in 1651 and his Remains, the poetic treatises on monarchy and religion in 1670. The Life of Sidney appeared as in favour of mixed monarchy held up by a virtuous aristocracy against the tyranny of the interregnum government, while the Remains offers virtuous, consultative monarchy, fully invested in ‘popularity’, against tyranny and in full favour of toleration. This complex picture stands against the dark machinations of the Cabal government in 1670, in which Charles II played off his Privy Council advisers one against another. Greville’s poems are a very Protestant poetic attack upon various kinds of idolatry, so that they line up well with the iconoclasm of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which had recently appeared, and not at all well with the indubitably royalist, conformist identity of their publisher.

The Political World of Fulke Greville

This chapter provides an overview of Greville’s political poetry, arguing that his work has to be understood as part of a tradition of writing which aimed to explore the relationship between the Crown and the people, expressing ideas in pithy, memorable maxims. Greville explores the rights and duties of rulers and ruled throughout his political works, most significantly, Mustapha and A Treatise of Monarchy, works which recall earlier political poetry such as A Mirror for Magistrates and the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney. Greville emerges as a figure always interested in imagining a truly balanced constitution in which the monarch and the people cooperate and respect each other: accordingly, his most forceful criticism was aimed at what he saw as the encroaching power of the state in the seventeenth century.

Privation, Deprivation, and Unprivation in Fulke Greville’s Caelica

Is sin something that exists materially? Or is it mere privation, a negative category that nonetheless moves the sinner away from the good? If so, then how does that movement occur, and to what end? If man is, as Fulke Greville often argues in his religious poetry, ‘a creature of vncreated sinne’, then how is it possible for something uncreated to have an operative effect? My argument is that Greville’s work is fully engaged with contemporary philosophical and grammatical debates on these questions. By examining his use of the terms ‘privation’, ‘deprivation’, and ‘unprivation’ in his sonnet cycle Caelica, we can see a sophisticated and intellectually daring response to the problem of ‘vncreated sinne’.