Writing and the Hermeneutics of Posthumous Publication

This chapter examines Greville’s understanding of the afterlife of a man and his writings, and attempts to look at Greville’s afterlife in terms of that understanding. Greville was an author deeply interested in the past who aimed his writings determinedly at a posthumous readership: what is the relation between these two guiding perspectives, and what was the impact on Greville’s hermeneutics of his experience of Sidney’s posthumous publication and reception? The chapter first looks at what sort of hermeneutic activity seems to be expected and prepared for by Greville (how does the past have meaning for the present? how may the present have meaning for the future?). It then examines the broad outlines, and some particular details, of the posthumous dissemination of his works in the seventeenth century.

Ottoman Kingship and Resistance Against Tyranny in Fulke Greville’s Mustapha

This chapter investigates Greville’s use and adaptation of historical source material for his tragedy Mustapha, especially of Nicholas de Moffan’s Soltani Solymanni, Turcarum Imperatoris, horrendum facinus […] or its many translations and adaptations as well as of Johannes Leunclavius’s Annales Sultanorum Othmanidarum […]. It demonstrates that this choice of historical material and its creative appropriation enabled a representation of the political structure of the Ottoman Empire which contradicts pervasive contemporary portrayals of the sovereign, virtually unlimited power of Ottoman sultans and of their subjects’ unconditional obedience. Greville’s tragedy does not provide an unbiased picture of the Ottoman Empire, but it avoids easy strategies of Othering by emphasizing similarities between Christian (especially English) and Ottoman forms of kingship, power abuse, and resistance to tyranny.

‘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.

‘Aire that once was breath’

In his Defence of Poesie (c.1579) Sidney discusses the caesura or ‘breathing place’ as one of the structures of English poetry, a moment of poetic control over form that contributes to the composition as an imitation of life. However, the nature of breath is inherently ephemeral and thus makes the ‘breathing place’ a site of instability and the caesura a mark that can expand beyond its limits and embody the reader. For Greville, the caesura becomes more than a poetic device but a space in which to explore grief. There is a tangible difference in the way Greville uses caesurae and breathing places in Caelica (pub. 1633) after Sidney’s death, and in ‘Silence augmenteth grief’ (pub. 1593) as the breathing place becomes a space in which to express grief.

Parody and the Perversion of Grace at the Crux of Caelica

Poems LXXVI–LXXXII in Greville’s sonnet sequence, Caelica, are among the most heavily revised writings in all of the Warwick manuscripts. The poems struggle to reveal in the lexicon of courtly love the workings of positive law and temporal power, implicitly understood in opposition to natural law and grace. In these poems, grace signifies its very opposite, not just a parody of itself but a perversion of itself, which subjects such as the ‘dull spirits’ of poem LXXX experience as temporal power. But Greville also places in the midst of these analytical poems one gem of clarity, poem LXXXII, shining there like a good deed in a bad world, exhorting the reader to ‘make time, while you be/ but steppes to your eternitie’.

Introduction

This chapter describes the afterlife and reception of Greville’s poetry from Coleridge and Charles Lamb to the American school of literary criticism around Yvor Winters, arguing how Greville’s reputation for obscurity has tended to circumscribe and limit his appreciation as a poet. In discussing the various genres that comprise Greville’s oeuvre; lyric sequence; political biography; letter of consolation; closet drama and philosophical poem, the editors propose to view Greville’s obscurity as an intellectual resource that arises from the close intersection between political and religious thought and poetic form, which enables a form of philosophical exploration that works through the examination of doubt, contradiction, and paradox, as much as assertion, and which involves the reader in an exercise in critical interpretation.

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’.