By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Unlike his friend and contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville did not have a noble or heroic death. Sidney died aged 31 while on a military campaign in the Netherlands, and as he lay wounded, he reportedly let another more gravely injured soldier drink his water, saying that ‘thy necessity is yet greater than mine’. He died a hero, and when his body was returned to London he was interred in Old St Paul’s Cathedral.
By contrast, Fulke Greville – who had been born in 1554, the same year as Sidney – lived to be an old man. And according to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, he was killed at his London home, when his servant, Ralph Haywood, stabbed him with a sword after discovering he was largely left out of Greville’s will. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Greville had just come out of the toilet where he’d been ‘at stool’ when the surprise attack happened.
Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (sometimes known simply as ‘Lord Brooke’) was Sidney’s first biographer, and helped to cement the idea of Sidney as the noble and virtuous Elizabethan soldier, statesman, courtier, and poet: a true ‘Renaissance man’. But Greville’s own place in history, and literary history, is a minor one by comparison with his former schoolfriend. Sidney is still read and enjoyed today, but who reads Lord Brooke?
The publication of Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella in 1591, five years after his death, led to a craze for sonnet cycles: Shakespeare, Spenser, Drayton, Daniel, and countless other poets both great and minor turned their hands to the form. But Fulke Greville beat them all to it; he appears to have been following his great friend’s lead in the 1580s, after he read Sidney’s sonnets while they were still circulating in manuscript.
The result was Caelica, Greville’s own contribution to the sonnet sequence tradition, before it became a phenomenon in late Elizabethan England.
Caelica or Cælica is a sequence of 110 poems (not all of them are sonnets), most of which appear to have been composed before 1586, although it is thought that some of the more serious poems were written later. The collection remained unpublished until five years after Greville’s death, when it was included in the posthumous collection Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633).
Greville’s poetry is something of a stumbling-block for critics of his work, not that they have been large in number. George Saintsbury, in his History of Elizabethan Literature, commented on the ‘strangely repellent character of Brooke’s thought’ which he defined as ‘intricate and obscure’, and on his unusual style, which is ‘harsh and eccentric’.
Even Mary A. Ward, writing in The English Poets (1880), having praised Greville’s poetry for its ‘real and permanent value’, concedes that his work is never likely to ‘appeal to any other than a limited and so to speak professional audience’, before acknowledging the ‘cumbrous and intricate’ way in which Greville frequently expresses his thoughts: ‘Words are taxed beyond what they can bear; all thoughts, whether great or trivial, are tortured into the same over-laboured dress; there is no ease, no flow, no joy.’
So, why bother reading Greville at all? For one, his vices are part of what makes him so appealing. Instead of the sugared phrases and honeyed refinement of many noble and university-educated men of his time, Greville has rough edges and refuses to compromise by smoothing them down for his readers.
Where many later sonneteers showed their learning and metrical facility by offering perfectly formed expressions of well-honed conceits presented in flowing iambs, Greville gives us his thought with all its harshness left in. Whether this means his work is more ‘authentic’ than many of his contemporaries is difficult to gauge, but it certainly marks him out as different from them. If his work is, in Ward’s terse judgment, ‘wholly lacking in the Elizabethan charm’, that needn’t be a criticism, or at least not wholly a criticism. We can read Sidney or Spenser if we want charm; we read Greville to find other things.
Here’s sonnet 37 from Caelica, which takes up the Genesis story of the fruit of forbidden knowledge and applies it to the unhappy relationship between poet and muse:
Caelica, I ouernight was finely vsed,
Lodg’d in the midst of paradise, your Heart:
Kind thoughts had charge I might not be refused,
Of euery fruit and flower I had part.
But curious Knowledge, blowne with busie flame,
The sweetest fruits had in downe shadowes hidden,
And for it found mine eyes had seene the same,
I from my paradise was straight forbidden.
Where that Curre, Rumor, runnes in euery place,
Barking with Care, begotten out of feare;
And glassy Honour, tender of Disgrace,
Stands Ceraphin to see I come not there;
While that fine soyle, which all these ioyes did yeeld,
By broken fence is prou’d a common field.
But that’s a tamer offering compared with the second sonnet in the sequence:
Faire Dog, which so my heart dost teare asunder,
That my liues-blood, my bowels ouerfloweth,
Alas, what wicked rage conceal’st thou vnder
These sweet enticing ioyes, thy forehead showeth?
Me, whom the light-wing’d God of long hath chased,
Thou hast attain’d, thou gau’st that fatall wound,
Which my soules peacefull innocence hath rased,
And reason to her seruant humour bound.
Kill therefore in the end, and end my anguish,
Give me my death, me thinks euen time vpbraideth
A fulnesse of the woes, wherein I languish:
Or if thou wilt I liue, then pittie pleadeth
Helpe out of thee, since Nature hath reuealed,
That with thy tongue thy bytings may be healed.
Where to start with this one? With the poet comparing his beloved to a dog, or to the reference to his ‘life’s blood’ flowing out of his bowels? Or perhaps to the nod to that ubiquitous early modern euphemism, ‘death’ for orgasm, in the request: ‘Give me my death’. Put me out of my misery, finish me off … or at least finish me (preferably ‘with thy tongue’).
Caelica, despite giving her name to the sequence as a whole, is not the addressee or subject of all of the poems: Cynthia, Cala, and Myra (of which more in a moment) also feature. But then Shakespeare’s sonnets were about two very different people (one of them not even female), and sonnet sequences were often a dramatising of a fictional (or semi-fictional) courtship or thwarted relationship rather than autobiography, of course.
Fulke Greville’s contribution to English literature may have been small in comparison with Sidney’s, but then Sidney towers above all other Elizabethan writers with the exceptions of Shakespeare and Spenser (and possibly Marlowe). But any woman named Myra owes a small debt to Greville, because he invented that girls’ name (possibly by anagrammatising the name Mary) in a poem with that title. Greville’s own name (Brooke) is itself memorialised in numerous street names in the Hatton Garden area of London, near where his own house stood.