‘Let no man aske my name, | nor what else I should be; | For Griev-ill, pain, forlorne | estate doe best decipher me’ (Caelica)
GREVILLE, Fulke, 1st Baron Brooke. Certaine learned and elegant Workes of the Right Honorable Fulke Lord Brooke written in his Youth, and familiar Exercise with Sir Philip Sidney. London: Printed by E[lizabeth] P[urslowe] for Henry Seyle, and are to be sold at his shop at the signe of the Tygers head in St. Paules Church-yard. 1633.
Small folio in 4s. Later full calf, rebacked with the original spine relaid; boards with gilt triple fillet borders , gilt floral cornerpieces, raised bands, spine gilt in compartments and lettered directly in gilt, turn-ins roll-tooled in gilt, edges gilt, marbled endpapers; ; pp. [ii], 23–82; 1–298, [2 (blank)]; π1 d–k4 l2 D–2Q4 2R6, bound without initial blank, quires a–c suppressed as usual (see below); woodcut and typographic headpieces, woodcut initials and tailpieces; corners and edges rubbed, a few small scuffs to boards, small abrasion to rear board at head; upper corner of Z2 repaired with pagination to verso in manuscript, sporadic light toning (heavier to quires L and V), ff. L2, L3, 2G2, and 2G3 with some marginal dampstaining and spotting, f. L3 with marginal short closed tear at head, marginal paperflaw to upper corner of f. T4; armorial bookplate of the Earl of Mexborough to front pastedown.
A particularly well-preserved example of the scarce 1633 folio of Fulke Greville’s (1554-1628) enigmatic and labyrinthine writings, published five years after his death, printed by Elizabeth Purslowe, widow of the printer George Purslowe (d. 1632), one of the first women to be recognised as a ‘master printer’.
Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes was seen through the press with evident care by Greville’s friend, secretary, and executor John Coke (probably with the assistance of Kenelm Digby). The volume collects the majority of Greville’s writings, the remainder following in the Remains (1670) and The Life of the renowned Sr Philip Sidney (1652, [1651]), the latter a dedicatory introduction to an edition of Greville’s poems and plays which never materialised, the title editorial. The printer, Elizabeth Purslowe, lost her title of ‘master printer’ in 1637 after becoming involved in unlicensed, anti-Laudian printing and material critical of the King.
Born to a prominent Warwickshire family, Greville was educated with Sidney, the two entering Shrewsbury School on the same day. Following studies at Jesus College, Cambridge (Greville) and Christ Church, Oxford (Sidney), the pair entered court in 1575. Greville’s account of his and Sidney’s life at this time records their attempts to lead more active lives in the cause of the radical (and international) Protestantism they both espoused and wished to promote – attempts consistently stymied by the Queen. In 1586 – during a mission Greville was prevented from joining – Sidney was killed on the battlefield at Zutphen, ‘that fatall Low Country action […] in which this worthy Gentleman lost his life’ (Life). It was a loss from which Greville probably never recovered, Sidney the exception proving the rule of Greville’s native pessimism, a brief glimpse ‘in this decrepit age of the world’ (ibid.) of a lost golden age.
What followed was a long, slightly melancholy life of service, including a decade of forced retirement (Cecil’s belated reprisal for Greville’s loyalty to the disgraced and executed Earl of Essex) during which he wrote many of the works for which he is now remembered. After Cecil’s death, he returned to public life, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer and Privy Councillor under James I – even serving briefly under Charles I. He died in 1628 at the hands of a disgruntled servant angered by the meagre provision made for him in his master’s will.
The writings exhibit an austere intelligence and sensibility all their own, their famous difficulty – appreciated by Coleridge and Hazlitt among others – expressive of a mind riven by conflicting forces. ‘A monarchist who nonetheless perpetrates a devastating critique of monarchy; and an orthodox Christian who […] exposes the most disturbing energies of his religion’ (Cummings), Greville’s ‘dualism’ is rooted in ‘the essential division in man’s fallen nature’ (Bullough). It was not until the twentieth century, with the editorial work of Geoffrey Bullough and the poet Thom Gunn, that these strange and ‘difficult’ poems began to attract the attention they deserve.
This 1633 folio, never reprinted and uncommon in commerce, collects three of Greville’s five extended verse treatises (A Treatie of Humane Learning; An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour; A Treatie of Warres), his two closet dramas (The Tragedie of Alaham; The Tragedie of Mustapha), the lyric sequence Cælica, and the prose Letter to an Honorable Lady and Letter of Travell.
The one hundred and nine poems of Cælica – the basis of Gunn’s 1968 Faber Greville selection – were revised and reordered over decades (the manuscripts of Greville’s writings held at the British Library suggest an inveterate reviser). While the earlier lyrics were written in dialogue with Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, the later poems speak eloquently of the disillusionments of experience and age, the concluding dozen or so labyrinthine, gravely confessional, religious poems belonging with the finest writing of the period. Drawing on contemporary Middle Eastern history for their settings, the closet dramas pick up from the central political poems of Cælica and were composed, the author tells us, ‘to trace out the high waies of ambitious Governours, and to shew in the practice, that the more audacity, advantage, and good successe such Soveraignties have, the more they hasten to their owne desolation and ruine’ (Life). Intricate studies of factionalism, ambition, and tyranny, these are also coded commentaries on Greville’s own political context: he burned all copies of his version of Antony and Cleopatra, concerned (and ‘by the opinion of those few eyes, which saw it’) it might be ‘apt enough to be construed, or strained to a personating of vices in the present Governors, and government’.
The two ‘missing’ treatises – of Religion and of Monarchy – remained unpublished until 1670, but their absence from the 1633 folio explains the volume’s curious composition and pagination. After the title, all known copies begin at p. 23 (f. d1), quires a–c having been suppressed. The dramas were licenced by Sir Henry Herbert on 23 June 1632, the treatises, including Religion, following on 17 October. ‘When the volume was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 10 November 1632, with its title and order of contents exactly as in the printed volume, ‘Religion’ was not listed’ (Alexander). Herbert’s office book, now lost, but consulted and transcribed by Edmond Malone and George Chalmers at the end of the eighteenth century, states that Herbert ‘received a fee, for a book of verses of my Lord Brook’s, called Coelia [sic]; [...] after this entry is another, which accounts for the defect of several leaves in the edition of Lord Brooke’s Poems, 1633: […] In all […] copies twenty leaves on the subject of Religion, are wanting, having been cancelled, probably, by the order of Archbishop Laud.’ The anti-episcopalian views in the Treatise of Religion, its eloquent disdain for the ‘outward church’, represented a clear rebuke to Laud and his followers.
Following quire l, pagination restarts at p. 1 for the first of the plays. Gavin Alexander has suggested that the other ‘missing’ treatise, of Monarchy, would fit nicely into the ‘absent’ 124 pages (l3rr–C4v) following A Treatie of Warres. With its pointed criticism of absolute power and credulous obedience, it was another likely victim of state censorship.
Provenance: Nineteenth-century armorial bookplate of the Earls of Mexborough. Lady Sarah Elizabeth Savile (b. 1786), daughter of John Savile, 2nd Earl of Mexborough, married Henry Greville, 3rd Earl of Warwick, in 1816 (having previously been married to John Monson, 4th Baron Monson, who died in 1809). Henry Greville occupied Warwick Castle – granted to Fulke Greville by James I in 1604 – between 1816 and 1853.
See Adams ed., The Dramatic Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, 1623-1673 (1947); Alexander, ‘Fulke Greville and the Afterlife’, in Huntington Library Quarterly, 62.3/4 (1999); Bullough ed., Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (1939), I, 25-7; Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Renaissance: Grammar and Grace (2002); Cummings, ‘Monarchy and patriarchy in Fulke Greville’s Mustapha’, in Markidou and Panaghis eds, Precarious Identities: Studies in the Work of Fulke Greville and Robert Southwell (2020); Rebholz, The Life of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (1971).
ESTC S120837; STC 12361.
SKU: 2124575