Born, at Beauchamp Court, Warwickshire, 1554. To Shrewsbury School, 17 Oct. 1564. Friendship with Philip Sidney begun. Matric. at Jesus Coll., Cambridge, 20 May 1568. Held post in Court of Marches, 1576–77. In favour at Elizabeth’s court. To Heidelberg with Sidney, Feb. 1577. Accompanied diplomatic mission to Flanders, 1578. To Germany again, 1579. Secretary for Principality of Wales, 20 April 1583; held office till death. Served in Normandy under Henry of Navarre, 1591. M.P. for Warwickshire, 1592–93, 1597, 1601, 1620. Estate of Wedgnock Park granted him by Queen, 1597. Knight of the Bath, Oct. 1597. Treasurer of the Wars, March 1598; Treasurer of the Navy, Sept. 1598. Castle of Warwick granted him, 1605. Chancellor of the Exchequer, Oct. 1614 to Jan. 1621. Created Baron Brooke, 29 Jan. 1621. Took seat in House of Lords, 15 Nov. 1621. On Council of War, 1624; on Council of Foreign Affairs, 1625. Died, from wound inflicted by a servant, 30 Sept. 1628. Buried in St. Mary’s Church, Warwick. Works: Contributions to “The Phœnix Nest,” 1593; to Bodenham’s “Belvedere,” 1600; to “Englands Helicon,” 1600; “The Tragedy of Mustapha” (anon.), 1609. Posthumous: “Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes of the Rt. Hon. Fulke, Lord Brooke,” 1633; “The Life of the renowned Sir Philip Sidney,” 1625; “The Remains of Sir Fulk Grevill,” 1670. Collected Works:—ed. by Grosart, with memoir—(4 vols.), 1870.
The English poems of sir Walter Raleigh, of John Donne, of Hugh Holland, but especially of sir Foulk Grevile in his matchless “Mustapha,” are not easily to be mended.
He had the longest lease, and the smoothest time without rub, of any of her Favorites…. He was a brave Gentleman, and honourably descended…. Neither illiterate; for … there are of his now extant, some fragments of his Poem, and of those times, which doe interest him in the Muses; and which shews, the Queen’s election had ever a noble conduct, and its motions more of virtue and judgment, than of fancy.
January 1st. Dined with my Lord Crew, with whom was Mr. Browne, Clerk of the House of Lords, and Mr. John Crew. Here was mighty good discourse, as there is always: and among other things my Lord Crew did turn to a place in the “Life of Sir Philip Sidney,” wrote by Sir Fulke Greville, which do fortell the present condition of this nation, in relation to the Dutch, to the very degree of a prophecy; and is so remarkable that I am resolved to buy one of them, it being, quite throughout, a good discourse…. Jan. 2d. To Westminister Hall, and there staid a little: and then home, and by the way did find with difficulty the “Life of Sir Philip Sydney.”… And the bookseller told me that he had sold four within this week or two, which is more than ever he sold in all his life of them; and he could not imagine what should be the reason of it: but I suppose it is from the same reason of people’s observing of this part therein, touching his prophesying our present condition here in England in relation to the Dutch, which is very remarkable.
Was a good witt, and had been a good poet in his youth. He wrote a poeme in folio which he printed not till he was old, and then, (as Sir W. said) with too much judgment and refining, spoyld it, which was at first a delicate thing.
Sir Fulke Grevill, Lord Brooke, a man of great note in his age, hath a poem lately printed (1670) for subject’s liberty, which I greatly wonder this age could bear.
Alabam, a Tragedy printed in Folio 1633. This Play Seems an Imitation of the Ancients. The Prologue is spoken by a Ghost, one of the Old Kings of Ormus, (an Island Scituate at the Entrance of the Persian Gulf) where the Scene of the Dramma lies. This Spectre gives an Account of each Character; which is possibly done in Imitation of Euripides, who usually introduced one of the chief Actors, as the Prologue: whose business was to explain all those Circumstances which preceded the opening of the Stage. The Author has been so careful in observing the Rules of Aristotle and Horace, that whereas Horace says
| … nec quarta loqui persona laboret |
I don’t know whether a Woman may be acquitted for endeavouring to sum up a Character so various, and important as his Lordship’s.—But, if the Attempt can be excus’d, I don’t desire to have it pass for a decisive Sentence.—Perhaps few Men that dealt in Poetry had more Learning, or real Wisdom than this Nobleman, and yet his Stile is sometimes so dark, and mysterious, I mean it appears so to me, that one would imagine he chose rather to conceal, than illustrate his Meaning.—At other Times again His Wit breaks out with an uncommon Brightness, and Shines, I had almost said, without an Equal.—’Tis the same Thing with his Poetry, sometimes so harsh, and uncouth, as if he had no Ear for Musick, at others so smooth and harmonious, as if He was Master of all its Powers.
A man of much note in his time, but one of those admired wits who have lost much of their reputation in the eyes of posterity. A thousand accidents of birth, court-favour, or popularity, concur sometimes to gild a slender proportion of merit.
The two tragedies of Lord Brooke, printed among his poems, might with more propriety have been termed political treatises than plays. Their author has strangely contrived to make passion, character, and interest, of the highest order, subservient to the expression of stage dogmas and mysteries. He is nine parts Machiavel and Tacitus, for one part Sophocles or Seneca. In this writer’s estimate of the powers of the mind, the understanding must have held a most tyrannical pre-eminence. Whether we look into his plays, or his most passionate love-poems, we shall find all frozen and made rigid with intellect. The finest movements of the human heart, the utmost grandeur of which the soul is capable, are essentially comprised in the actions and speeches of Cælica and Camena. Shakespeare, who seems to have had a peculiar delight in contemplating womanly perfection, whom for his many sweet images of female excellence all women are in an especial manner bound to love, has not raised the ideal of the female character higher than Lord Brooke, in these two women, has done. But it requires a study equivalent to the learning of a new language to understand their meaning when they speak.
As to Fulke Greville, he is like nothing but one of his own “Prologues spoken by the ghost of an old king of Ormus,” a truly formidable and inviting personage: his style is apocalyptical, cabalistical, a knot worthy of such an apparition to untie; and for the unravelling a passage or two, I would stand the brunt of an encounter with so portentious commentator.
Another philosophical poet, Sir Fulke Greville…. The titles of Lord Brooke’s poems, “A Treatise of Human Learning,” “A Treatise of Monarchy,” “A Treatise of Religion,” “An Inquisition upon Fame and Honor,” lead us to anticipate more of sense than fancy. In this we are not deceived: his mind was pregnant with deep reflection upon multifarious learning; but he struggles to give utterance to thoughts which he had not fully endowed with words, and amidst the shackles of rhyme and metre, which he had not learned to manage. Hence of all our poets he may be reckoned the most obscure; in aiming at condensation, he becomes elliptical beyond the bounds of the language; and his rhymes, being forced for the sake of sound, leave all meaning behind. Lord Brooke’s poetry is chiefly worth notice as an indication of that thinking spirit upon political science which was to produce the riper speculations of Hobbes and Harrington and Locke.
Had deep thoughts enough to accomplish ten poets of these degenerate days, though because of some obscurity in their expression you would find some twenty critics “full of oaths” by the pyramids, that they all meant nothing.
“A Treatise on Religion,” in which, if the reader do not find much of poetic form, he will find at least some grand spiritual philosophy, the stuff whereof all highest poetry is fashioned. It is one of the first poems in which the philosophy of religion, and not either its doctrine, feeling, or history, predominates. It is, as a whole, poor, chiefly from its being so loosely written. There are men, and men whose thoughts are of great worth, to whom it never seems to occur that they may utter very largely and convey very little; that what is clear to themselves is in their speech obscure as a late twilight. Their utterance is rarely articulate: their spiritual mouth talks with but half-movements of its lips; it does not model their thoughts into clear-cut shapes, such as the spiritual ear can distinguish as they enter it. Of such is Lord Brooke.
Even as the tragedies stand, they fail to do justice to the original design of the writer, who informs us that he had at first intended the “treatises,” now printed separately and extending to much the same length as the tragedies themselves, to serve as choruses to the several acts of the latter, in addition no doubt to the choruses proper, for the most part tolerably lengthy in themselves, already appended to them. On the difficult style and the profundity of meaning which characterise the treatises there is no need for descanting here; but even in the tragedies as they stand, in the dialogue as well as in the purely didactic—they cannot be called lyric—excursuses, the language is extremely obscure. This is the result, not of ambiguity or vagueness of diction, but of a closeness as well as abstruseness of thought to which to all intents and purposes no reader will prove equal unless he approaches these so-called dramas as a student addresses himself to a set of long series of problems. It is this peculiarity of style—a peculiarity extending to almost everything that he has left behind him in verse—which must continue to leave Lord Brooke’s tragedies unread except by a resolute few. Seneca and Euripides, whom he generally though not slavishly follows as his dramatic models, are not responsible for what is the reverse of a rhetorical, and only as it were incidentally a sententious, style. It should be added that there are to be found in these strange compositions not only characters as strongly conceived as they are subtly worked out, but situations full of awe and pathos; but everything, to recur to Lamb’s inimitable phraseology, is “frozen and made rigid with intellect.”
Even “Cœlica” is very unlikely to find readers as a whole, owing to the strangely repellent character of Brooke’s thought, which is intricate and obscure, and of his style, which is at any rate sometimes as harsh and eccentric as the theories of poetry which made him compose verse-treatises on politics. Nevertheless there is much nobility of thought and expression in him, and not unfrequent flashes of real poetry, while his very faults are characteristic…. He has but the ore of poetry, not the smelted metal.
Brooke writes in his discursive memoir of Sidney with reference to his tragedies: “For my own part I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life than the images of wit.” This is a just criticism of all Brooke’s literary work. To “elegancy of style” or “smoothness of verse” he rarely aspires. He is essentially a philosopher, cultivating “a close, mysterious, and sententious way of writing,” which is commonly more suitable to prose than poetry. His subjects are for the most part incapable of imaginative treatment. In his collection of love poems, which, though written in varied metres, he entitles sonnets, he seeks to express passionate love, and often with good lyrical effects; but the understanding seems as a rule to tyrannise over emotion, and all is “frozen and made rigid with intellect.” Sidney’s influence is very perceptible, and some of Brooke’s stanzas harshly echo passages from “Astrophel” and “Stella.”
Lord Brooke’s verse is unsympathetic and unattractive, yet far too original and well-sustained to be overlooked. He is like one of those lakes, which exist here and there on the world’s surface, which are connected with no other system of waters, and by no river contribute to the sea. Lord Brooke’s abstruse and acrid poetry proceeded from nowhere and influenced no one. It is a solitary phenomenon in our literature, and the author a kind of marsupial in our poetical zoology.
The lyrics of that most interesting and “difficult” of poets, Fulke Greville … are the more remarkable in their frequent grace of fancy, uncommon wit, originality, and real music of expression in that they are the sister products of the obscure and intricate musings and the often eccentric didacticism of “Mustapha” and “Alaham.”… It is not Donne, but Greville, that is the Elizabethan Browning. For substantiation of this I would recommend a comparative reading of “Alaham” and “Sordello.”
