Greville, Sir Fulke, first Baron Brooke (1554–1628), was from the mid-1560s at court, where he had a long career, culminating in his peerage in 1621, when he was granted Warwick Castle and Knowle Park by James I.
Greville began to write poetry during
Sidney's lifetime and was intimately concerned with the first plans for posthumous publication of his friend's works. Poems written after Sidney's death, in his sequence
Caelica, show him moving away from secular love towards broader political and religious themes. His neo-Stoic
Letter to an Honourable Lady belongs to 1589; his two Senecan tragedies
Mustapha (published 1609) and
Alaham, in the earliest versions, before the fall of
Essex in February 1601; the verse
Treatise of Monarchy about 1600. His major prose work, the
Life of Sir Philip Sidney, is as much about Greville's own political ideals and disappointments as about his friend's career, and in its published version (1652) it incorporates judgements of
Elizabeth I and her reign which he had originally hoped to include in a life of the monarch. C. S.
Lewis saw him as a writer of ‘genuinely didactic verse, verse utterly unadorned and dependent for interest almost exclusively on its intellectual content’.
