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.