The Works of Fulke Greville

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Excerpt from The Works of Fulke Greville: A ThesisHe had also the Opportunity to know all of the new Elizabethan literature, except that which was distinctly popular, at its sources. Both he and Sidney were in close communication with their univer sities and with the classical verse-writing and play-writing which were going on there.1 At Wilton, where the young Countess of Pembroke had her court, they found and gave stimulus to literary pursuit, for the most part apparently after classical models, and here Greville may have met, even in these early days, the poet Samuel Daniel, who most in¿uenced his later writing. He may have heard parts Of The Faerie Queene read in London or at court in 1589. But in his asso elation with Sidney himself Greville came most directly under the in¿uences which formed the new literature, its classicism, its Ital ianism, and the spirit of experimental imitation in which it began. All these contacts are interesting. They explain, for one thing, the fact of his writing in verse at all, at which some persons have won dered and the literary forms he adopted, the sonnet and the Senecan drama, are due to his associations. But he used these literary forms, not to rival the masters of them in their own kinds, but as means adaptable to certain peculiar ends of his own, and the points in which he diverges from his literary models are even more interesting than those in which he shows his indebtedness to them.The sonnets which we have distinguished as the first group are those written under the immediate in¿uence of Sidney, and in their thought, as well as in their literary character, they show this in¿uence. Sidney, and the circle of intellectual associates that gathered about him, found a great charm in the Platonic mode of thought. In Astrophel and Stella and the Arcadia the prevailing idea is the contrast between the abstract spiritual ideals which appeal to the soul alone and the concrete forms on which ordinary human desire is fixed. Sidney, however, held this perhaps rather as a literary or decorative convention than as a serious philosophy of life, and in Astrophel and Stella he rebels petulantly against the artificial restraint it lays upon nature?About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.