Review of Fulke Greville and the Culture of the English Renaissance, ed. Russ Leo, Katrin Röder, and Freya Sierhuis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
This exceptionally rich and capacious volume makes a major contribution to the current revival of interest in the life and works of Fulke Greville (1554-1628); it is the latest in a series of revivals during which this enigmatic figure briefly attracted the interest of poets and critics (the Romantics in the early nineteenth century, Yvor Winters and his followers in the mid-twentieth) before then fading away. Tracing the ups and downs of Greville’s reputational fortunes in their Introduction, the editors attribute the cause to the bafflement with which his writings seem so often to have been met: their impenetrability and knottiness being championed only by those for whom such difficulty is seen as a welcome challenge, a resistance if not a rebuke to modes of thinking and writing that, putting too great a confidence in the qualities of clarity and civility, may seem overly accessible and easy. The editors and contributors to this volume are just such champions, dedicated to affirming ‘the irreducible complexity of Greville’s language and style’ (7), seeing it not as ‘a problem to be overcome, but rather […] as an intrinsic feature of Greville’s poetic thinking’ (25).
As Nigel Smith writes in the volume’s closing chapter—which looks at the reception of Greville’s works during the Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration—‘[w]ith a thinker of such complexity and sometimes obscurity, it is beneficial to have a clear understanding of the historical context in which the works would have been first read and interpreted’ (295). As one would expect, Greville appears throughout the volume as a thoroughly historicised figure, firmly embedded within the political, religious and intellectual culture of the late English and European Renaissance which shaped him and which he helped to shape. Bradley Irish, for example, discusses Greville’s relation to Sidney and the Essex circle as intrinsic to his experience of the Elizabethan court, and his adoption of the Senecan/Tacitean cult associated with that group during the 1600s (especially during his long period of absence from court between 1604 and 1614) as a way of aligning himself with its forward Protestant agenda. Katrin Röder explores the depth of Greville’s interest in Muslim culture, from the practical knowledge he acquired in his role as Treasurer of the Navy when gathering information on the political and commercial conditions in Africa and the East Indies, to his extensive reading on contemporary Ottoman history and politics. As a result, his closet drama Mustapha was able to draw analogies between Ottoman and English political conflicts and so avoid the ‘easy strategies of Othering’ (259) which could otherwise characterise such representations.
After his death, Greville’s works found themselves taken up by both sides in the Civil War—his Life of Sidney, first published by a well-known royalist publisher in 1651, was also cited by a well-known republican apologist—for, as Smith notes, there was a manifest need ‘for each side of the national conflict to find heroes in the past’ (297). Gavin Alexander concurs—there was indeed ‘a willingness to find past texts applicable to present troubles’ (290)—adding that Greville’s posthumous appeal was largely shaped by that of the heroic Sidney (something he, in turn, was largely responsible for shaping). The Life—or ‘Dedication’ to Sidney as he called it himself—was originally intended to preface the posthumous publication of Greville’s own literary works.
For all the depth and breadth of the volume, with its multitude of themes and approaches, some key topics emerge, and it is on these that, for the purposes of this review, I will focus. They are: grace, idolatry, tragedy and form. Joel Davis, for example, looks at the ways Greville explores the problematic ‘polysemy of the word “grace”’ (122) in his typical/atypical sonnet sequence, Caelica. Developing now very well-established new-historicist readings of the English Renaissance sonnet sequence as intricately bound up with contemporary power relations, Davis draws out the religious (and specifically Calvinist) connotations of grace, showing that, while these clearly conflict with worldly models of courtly grace and favour, they might also suggest the possibility of political affiliations: specifically, the dream of a pan-European Protestant alliance against Counter-Reformation Catholic powers. Examining the revisions Greville made to Caelica in 1619-1625 or later, Davis focuses on the crux in the sequence (poems 77-84) which, in dramatising the rejection of courtly love, traces the poet’s ultimate disillusionment with this particular lost cause. Fabio Raimondi similarly situates Caelica within Greville’s early disappointments in this regard (his and Sidney’s frustration with Elizabeth’s non-interventionist foreign policy in the 1580s), and sees the poet’s increasing pessimism toward politics and religion in his rift with Giordano Bruno. Where the latter believed in the Neoplatonic possibility of an ascent toward the truth, ‘made accessible only by divine grace’, Greville was ‘increasingly aware of the abyss that separates man and God’ (163). Adrian Streete likewise looks at grace as it is complexly figured within Caelica. Discussing Greville’s tortured and tortuous meditations on evil as the privation of good, Streete notes in sonnet 99 what appears to be a Grevillian coinage—the word ‘unprivation’—‘a positive double negation’, the critic comments, that ‘allows for the turn where the speaker is potentially saved by divine grace’ (189).
Several of the essays in the collection circle round the topic of idolatry: ‘Greville’s great theme’, as Ethan Guagliardo describes it (227). The focus of his essay is ‘political idolatry’ (228), namely, Greville’s notion that ideas such as sovereignty or absolutism are artefacts, fictions, idols of the mind, specifically designed to be misrecognised as natural or divine in origin.[1] Yet while we can recognise that such political ideas are of our own making—‘An image […] which for ourselves we carve; / And, fools, adore in temple of our heart’ as Sidney might have said (Astrophil and Stella, 5)—Greville nevertheless denies that such awareness can have any liberating or redemptive power. ‘To understand the artistic character of the idol’, Guagliardo writes, ‘is to understand that we can do nothing to overthrow its rule’ (241), a pessimistic conclusion that, as the critic brilliantly goes on to suggest, anticipates Adorno and Horkheimer’s no less pessimistic dialectic of Enlightenment: the denial that reason ‘can be used as an instrument, a technology, of salvation’ (243).
Kathryn Murphy looks at the way Greville appropriates Sidney’s idea of poetry as the ‘architectonic’ art—the ethical art par excellence since it seeks to bring about virtue in action, the good life as it is lived in the world, in politics—the ‘ending end’ of which art must necessarily be God or the Good, for ‘anything else is to worship means instead of ends, and results in idolatry’ (50). She suggests that, in his own work, Greville veered more toward the poetry that Sidney differentiated as ‘eikastikē’ (i.e. ‘figuring forth good things’) in order to avoid the potentially idolatrous connotations of that which is ‘phantastikē’: fanciful, imaginative, made-up. Freya Sierhuis similarly explores Greville’s distrust of the imagination as a mental faculty that is necessarily idolatrous: he ‘sees idolatry as inextricably bound up with our thought processes’, she writes, so that even the idea that art might save us ‘turns out to be yet another idolatrous fiction’ (117).
Unsurprisingly, Greville’s variously pessimistic views towards art, politics and religion find a natural expression in tragedy. A number of contributors examine this theme. For Russ Leo, Greville specifically chooses the tragic form in Mustapha to dramatize the ‘irreconcilable contradictions inherent in sovereignty’ (75), making him ‘among the earliest architects of tragic insolubility’ (76). Greville’s natural tendency toward the tragic is perhaps the most eloquent testimony to the necessarily conflicted power relations between individual and state that his deep and life-long cogitations on the subject did nothing to solve. Sarah Knight establishes the extent to which Greville’s engagement with tragedy went back to his grammar-school and university days, and especially to his Cambridge tutor, Thomas Legge, whose Latin play about Richard III used ‘tragic form to make a political argument’ (199). She also hints that Greville’s self-declared ‘purpose’ in his dramas—namely, to provide lessons from the past in order to help others avoid such mistakes in the future—may have inclined him toward the de casibus tradition. Andrew Hadfield develops this idea, arguing that Greville’s sources lay as much in the native as in the classical or continental traditions: in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, the Mirror for Magistrates, and the humanist commonwealth literature epitomised by the Utopia, Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum and Sidney’s ‘Ister bank’ poem, as much as in Seneca, Tacitus or Machiavelli. To appreciate this, Hadfield argues, is to make sense of what might otherwise seem contradictory—both radical and reactionary—in Greville’s political thinking: ‘Greville’s writing deserves more serious attention’, he writes, ‘because he does not fit easily into received categories of royalist/monarchical or republican/parliamentarian/oppositional thinking but makes intelligent use of a variety of sources and traditions to forge an independent line of political analysis’ (261).
Finally, many of the essays in the volume pay attention to matters of form, indeed, nine of the sixteen essays come under section headings—‘Philosophy and Form’ and ‘Faith and Form’—which put this preoccupation front and centre. Greville’s use of the tragic form has already been mentioned. In the volume’s opening essay, Brian Cummings beautifully unfolds Greville’s use of feminine endings, declining the ‘trivializing’ sense (37) in which the adjective had been used from Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Ryme on, and offering instead his own alternative explanation for Greville’s repeated use of the device. His sensitive readings show how Greville’s feminine endings hold back from finality or closure, their final unstressed syllable giving a ‘dying fall’ that allowed him—like Shakespeare—to dramatise ‘the unclosed voice, the unfinished thought’ (38) and so ‘give ear to mental process, to what we could call language’s second thoughts’ (44). Citing Seamus Heaney’s meditation on the way poetry puts ‘feeling into words’, Cummings compellingly shows how the rhythm of speech here subtly moves against the rhythm of argument. ‘The voice interrupts itself, catching itself in the act of thinking’, he writes, making Greville’s poetry, effectively, ‘the measure of his mind’ (46).[2] Rachel White gives a similarly sensitive reading of Greville’s use of caesura, the breath marked by that momentary break in the line being a place ‘inhabited by both life and its antithesis, death’ (62). She demonstrates how the caesura opens up for Greville a space for grieving—specifically, for grieving Sidney—noting a change in the way the device functions in the poetry he wrote after Sidney’s death. That Greville is not often a byword for ‘extreme subtlety and awareness of poetic techniques’ (64-5) makes an essay like this all the more pertinent and poignant.
I conclude with Kenneth Graham’s wonderfully Auerbachian reading of ‘depth’ as it manifests in Caelica, a quality, he argues, that the sonnet sequence shares if not derives from the Psalms (for Sidney, the most exemplary poetry). It is extraordinary that this connection has hitherto been overlooked, even though it beautifully illuminates the relation between Greville’s poetics and his theology. Where Psalm studies have tended to prioritise theology over poetry, Graham analyses the Psalter’s ‘two-fold influence on the poetic form and theology’ of Greville’s sequence (140), especially the way its representations of time and space—each both infinite and bounded—impart the mysteries of a hidden truth that is beyond reason and thus the object of wonder. ‘Auerbach describes a type of narrative in which the particular historical unfolding of a universal but still hidden God creates an impression of depth’, he writes. ‘The same depth becomes a property of the poetic voice in the Psalms, where an apprehension of God’s partial revelation is articulated by the same speaker who expresses a sense of God’s mystery and distance. Filtered through Augustine, Luther, Calvin and others, this divided speaker is heard again in Caelica, where the voice of the Psalms speaks over the voice of the sonnet tradition’ (155).
Catherine Bates
University of Warwick
[1] This is a common theme within the volume: Raimondi similarly calls such courtship ‘idolatry’ (164); and for Smith, ‘the elevated status associated with or demanded by monarchs produced a pernicious idolatry’ (300).
[2] See also Hadfield: ‘Greville’s political thinking is in poetry’, he ‘likes neat chiasmic reversals and pointed parallels which often determine how he argues a case’ (275); ‘Greville thinks in terms of verse: at his best, poetry’ (276). His poetry, in other words, is where we hear Greville thinking.
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For all the depth and breadth of the volume, with its multitude of themes and approaches, some key topics emerge, and it is on these that, for the purposes of this review, I will focus.
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