Fulke Greville Biography

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Broke (3 October 1554 – 30 September 1628), known before 1621 as Sir Fulke Greville, was an Elizabethan poet, dramatist, and statesman.

It is by his biography of Sidney that Fulke Greville is best known. The full title expresses the scope of the work. It runs: The Life of the Renowned Sr. Philip Sidney. With the true Interest of England as it then stood in relation to all Forrain Princes: And particularly for suppressing the power of Spain Stated by Him: His principall Actions, Counsels, Designes, and Death. Together with a short account of the Maximes and Policies used by Queen Elizabeth in her Government. He includes some autobiographical matter in what amounts to a treatise on government.

His poetry consist of closet tragedies, sonnets, and poems on political and moral subjects, and former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky has asserted that this work is comparable in force of imagination to John Donne. His style is grave and sententious. A rhyming elegy on Brooke, published in Huth's Inedited Poetical Miscellanies, brings charges of miserliness against him, but of his generous treatment of contemporary writers there is abundant testimony. Of Brooke Lamb says, "He is nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, for one of Sophocles and Seneca.... Whether we look into his plays or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid with intellect." He goes on to speak of the obscurity of expression that runs through all Brooke's poetry, an obscurity which is, however, due more to the intensity and subtlety of the thought than to any lack of mere verbal lucidity.

Greville's works include:

The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (1625)

Closet drama: Alaham, Mustapha

Verse Poems: Caelica in CX Sonnets Of Monarchy, A Treatise of Religion, A Treatie of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, A Treatie of Warres

Miscellaneous Prose: a letter to an "Honourable Lady," a letter to Grevill Varney in France, a short speech delivered on behalf of Francis Bacon

Later, his works were collected and reprinted by Dr Grosart, in 1870, in four volumes. Poetry and Drama of Fulke Greville, edited by Geoffery Bullough, was published in 1938. The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, edited by John Gouwn, were published in 1986. "The Selected Poems of Fulke Greville," edited by Thom Gunn, with an afterword by Bradin Cormack, was published in 2009 (University of Chicago Press, ISBN 9780226308463.)

Some believe that Greville is the true author of several plays attributed to William Shakespeare