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.