Sir Fulke Greville (1554 - September 30, 1628) was a minor Elizabethanpoet and dramatist, a friend and contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney at Royal Shrewsbury School, enrolling on the same day. After a distinguished administrative career under Elizabeth I and James I (in the course of which he served successively as secretary to the Principality of Wales, Treasurer of the Navy, and Chancellor of the Exchequer), he was created Baron Brooke in 1621.
Works
Towards the end of his life, his varied literary output was gathered together and published:
in 1633: two tragedies (Alaham and Mustapha); a sonnet cycle (Caelia); and a philosophical treatise in verse (A Treatie of Humane Learning)
in 1652: The Life of the Rennowned Sir Philip Sidney, a biography of his schoolfellow
English diarist, a great-grandson by his father of the 5th earl of Warwick, and son of Lady Charlotte Bentinck, daughter of the duke of Portland, formerly a leader of the Whig party, and first minister of the crown, was born on the 2nd of April 1794.
Greville entered upon the discharge of the duties of clerk of the council in ordinary in 1821, and continued to perform them for nearly forty years.
Greville published anonymously, ir 1845, a volume on the Past and Present Policy of England i~ Ireland, in which he advocated the payment of the Romar Catholic clergy; and he was also the author of several pamphleb on the events of his day.
While Greville might have found offence in explicit religious icons, his notions of what was acceptable in terms of the rendering of complex iconographies in art must have been formed amidst the intense (and often spiritual) symbolism of Elizabeth's court portraiture, and the flamboyance of masques and tournaments in which he participated willingly.
If Greville's idea of the form was preconceived and constant, but his approach to its realisation was progressively refined, then these three poems may have been an important unit in an earlier stage of the construction of the sequence: their combined line total is 364, equal to stanza total of the manuscript as it stands.
Greville's adoption of the scheme of his friend and hero--the man in whose tomb he had wanted to be buried displays his intimate knowledge of Sidney's creative intent and confirms the spiritual import of the proportional form.
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