Kairic Complexity in Fulke Greville’s A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney

Abstract

Fulke Greville’s major prose work has for many generations puzzled and misled its readers. In this essay I suggest how often-occluded rhetorical presuppositions may be used to clarify the nature of historically embedded textual conduct. In particular, I deploy the resources of rhetorical agency to trace the exigencies of ethos, occasion, and audience through Greville’s composition and revision of his Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney, and to suggest that a work composed for a select Jacobean readership resorted to the attitudes and language of Elizabeth’s last decade to represent selectively people and events in the earlier years of her reign. The work has come down to us as an amalgam of two projects—a dedication to Sidney and a summary history of Elizabeth—which was subjected to one major revision and many minor ones in the processes of preparing separate working copies. Greville changed his mind often, but did not revise systematically, and much of the puzzlement induced by the Dedication arises from his working habits. One further change of mind had far-reaching consequences: Greville’s decision to abandon composition and revision. It was not published with the bulk of his literary works in the posthumous Certain Learned and Elegant Workes of 1633, but had to wait almost two decades to be repurposed by another agent in 1652 as The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. Because agency is constitutive of holistic understanding, there are implications for how textual, including rhetorical, literary, critical, and editorial, conduct proceeds: we, as self-interpreting agents, are bound reciprocally to acknowledge and respect the self-disclosures and self-enactments manifested through conduct other than our own. [J.G.]