This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1971.

This volume contain's Greville's two prose works: 'The Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney', and the incomplete 'Letter to an Honourable Lady'.

Fulke Greville is one of the most enigmatic ofthe Elizabethans. He served three monarchs-Elizabeth, James and Charles-achieving high office in the state and amassing considerable wealth. The contrast between the worldliness of his career and the inwardness of his poetry has led to theories of 'the dualism of Fulke Greville', but the explanation lies rather in the development of his thought. Taking up verse as one of the accomplishments of the courtier, Greville ventured on the sonnet sequence Ca!lica (written concurrently with Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella), but came out on the other side. He turned next to the Senecan play, and in Mustapha and Alaham dramatized various subversive political viewpoints, and made the Senecan chorus an instrument of reflection and debate. An anonymous and unauthorized text of Mustapha was published in 1609.

Fulke Greville is one of the most enigmatic ofthe Elizabethans. He served three monarchs-Elizabeth, James and Charles-achieving high office in the state and amassing considerable wealth. The contrast between the worldliness of his career and the inwardness of his poetry has led to theories of 'the dualism of Fulke Greville', but the explanation lies rather in the development of his thought. Taking up verse as one of the accomplishments of the courtier, Greville ventured on the sonnet sequence Ca!lica (written concurrently with Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella), but came out on the other side. He turned next to the Senecan play, and in Mustapha and Alaham dramatized various subversive political viewpoints, and made the Senecan chorus an instrument of reflection and debate. An anonymous and unauthorized text of Mustapha was published in 1609. From the choruses of the plays developed the first of the verse treatises, A Treatise ofMonarchy, an exercise in Realpolitik. The issues encountered but not resolved in Monarchy led to a further set of treatises, showing Greville's deepening moral vision and his exploration of the treatise as an art fonn. His confidence that the state may be refonned, if the right policies are adopted (Monarchy), yields finally to a loss of faith in human institutions altogether.

Fulke Greville's reputation has always been overshadowed by that of his more famous friend, Philip Sidney, a legacy due in part to Greville's complex moulding of his authorial persona as Achates to Sidney's Aeneas, and in part to the formidable complexity of his poetry and prose. This volume seeks to vindicate Greville's 'obscurity' as an intrinsic feature of his poetic thinking, and as a privileged site of interpretation. The seventeen essays shed new light on Greville's poetry, philosophy, and dramatic work. They investigate his examination of monarchy and sovereignty; grace, salvation, and the nature of evil; the power of poetry and the vagaries of desire, and they offer a reconsideration of his reputation and afterlife in his own century, and beyond. The volume explores the connections between poetic form and philosophy, and argues that Greville's poetic experiments and meditations on form convey penetrating, and strikingly original contributions to poetics, political thought, and philosophy. Highlighting stylistic features of his poetic style, such as his mastery of the caesura and of the feminine ending; his love of paradox, ambiguity, and double meanings; his complex metaphoricity and dense, challenging syntax, these essays reveal how Greville's work invites us to revisit and rethink many of the orthodoxies about the culture of post-Reformation England, including the shape of political argument, and the forms and boundaries of religious belief and identity.

This volume contain's Greville's two prose works: 'The Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney', and the incomplete 'Letter to an Honourable Lady'.