‘Left … to Play the Ill Poet in My Own Part’: The Literary Relationship of Sidney and Fulke Greville

Abstract

This article traces Greville's refashioning of Sidney's literary identity after his death, first in two well-known letters of 1586 and then in the Life ofSidney, written to preface a collection of his own work during 1604-1614. Unable to salvage the writings that would have secured the 'religious honours' Sidney deserved, Greville presents him as pre-eminently the author of The Arcadia, the supreme instance of the 'characteristical kind of poesy' upheld in the Defence. The lyric poet is excluded. This might be interpreted as Sidney's influence on Greville persisting beyond the love-sonnet phase or as Greville's reshaping of Sidney's literary example to introduce his own work as 'characteristical' poetry in a more austere mode. There are subsidiary arguments for an earlier dating of Greville's Senecan plays and for considering Caelica as an early work set aside, later resumed, but never brought beyond a workshop state.