Uneasy Rhetoric

I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Fulke Greville, a poet who lived during the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. His biggest claim to fame? His friendship with Sir Philip Sidney. Generally speaking English poetry anthologies have very little Greville, and if they have any at all it is likely to be the Chorus Sacerdotum from Mustapha, a “closet drama” (short definition: meant to be read not acted). The particular anthology I link to has two more Greville poems following the Chorus.

Academicgame has a little variation on the chorus that seeks to describe life in the academy. Besides the relative appropriateness of the Chorus to academic life, Greville is an excellent choice because his poetry is so dense, rhetorical, and sometimes Latinate; in short, a poetry academic’s wet dream. It doesn’t hurt that both of his plays have “oriental” (Turkish) themes, lending themselves to analysis of the “other,” or that Greville was a bureaucrat par excellence, lending his entire oeuvre to historicism.

I still think that Greville has been underrated, but that’s probably because his poetry is not very accessible.