Greville,Fulke

Fulke Greville, first Lord Brooke (1554–1628), was a courtier, member of parliament, and privy councillor whose sonnet sequence, Senecan closet dramas, prose biography of Sir Philip Sidney, and philosophical verse treatises powerfully express the ideals, disappointments, and (for some readers) contradictions of radical Protestantism during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I. Once studied chiefly as a poetic stylist, Greville has recently drawn attention more for his political and religious views. The terms of praise have shifted accordingly: while Yvor Winters (1967) wrote that ‘there is a greater density of intellectual content in his work than in the work of any other poet of the Renaissance’, David Norbrook (1984) pronounces Greville ‘one of the most radical Elizabethan poets in his constant denunciations of tyranny and inequality’. In all accounts, Greville was a complicated if not a conflicted man. Famous for his Christian dualism, he also saw religion, politics, and individual bodies and minds as presenting analogous problems centred upon the government of sin in a world where grace is limited; committed as a matter of religious and humanist principle to the uncloistered virtue of public service, he was also a penetrating critic of the political order he served; sensitive to the claims of lawful liberty, he was also a reluctant monarchist whose praise of kings was sometimes simply that monarchy was less bad than other forms of government; devoted to God and the Protestant cause, he also delivered a searing indictment of the visible church; and skilful in the conventions of Petrarchan poetry, he also rejected those conventions and sought a new language to express a new kind of love.