individual groupings of poems, recurrent preoccupa-
tions, and favored addressees are certainly perceptible,
it might best be considered as an anthology of private
responses to the brittle world of Elizabethan and Jaco-
bean COURT CULTURE, to contemporaneous love poetry,
and to more theological and philosophical issues and
anxieties. Caelica comprises 109 poems, only 41 of
which are 14-line SONNETs. Where he does employ the
QUATORZAIN form, SIR FULKE GREVILLE adopts the
EN GLISH SONNET style consisting of three QUATRAINs and
a concluding COUPLET, though he increasingly develops
the sonnet SESTET into the six-line STANZA form favored
throughout his later verse treatises. Caelica was pub-
lished posthumously in 1633.
The fi rst 75 poems have been dated to between
1576 and 1587, and on several occasions they imitate
or respond to SIR PHILIP SIDNEY’s ASTROPHIL AND STELLA,
though Greville is more explicitly skeptical toward the
commonplaces of amorous verse. For instance, Caeli-
ca’s conventional golden tresses are revealed to be a
wig (Sonnet 58), and the agent of love, Cupid, is
repeatedly scorned as being deceitful, inconstant, and
a mere idol (Sonnet 62). Caelica’s fi rst movement fea-
tures many poems addressed to beloved fi gures named
Myra, Cynthia, and Caelica, though there is little con-
sistent characterization or biographical allusion. Each
seems to be representative more of individual instances
of worldly love and physical desire.
Caelica contains two other sets of sonnets in addi-
tion to the amorous ones. Greville’s political sonnets
(Sonnets 76–81, ca. 1587–1603) offer personal medi-
tations on ambition, court favoritism, and the nature of
tyranny, issues he interrogates further in his contem-
poraneous closet dramas Mustapha and Alaham. Gre-
ville’s religious and philosophical meditations (Sonnets
82 and 85–109, ca. 1604–28) revisit such preoccupa-
tions as idolatry and worldly inconstancy but, more
importantly, explore the implications of humanity’s
fallen nature, progressively realizing the soul’s state of
desolation and recasting absence in cosmic terms as a
separation from divine grace, and demonstrating how
faculty of reason makes sense of evil and sin.
Often admired for its suggestion of unmediated inti-
macy, verbal clarity, and directness of expression, Gre-
ville’s poetry is held up as an exemplar of the “plain”
style of early modern English verse. Relatively few
poems self-consciously address the writing process
itself (see, however, Sonnets 22 and 24), and Greville’s
wariness of duplicitous Petrarchan love games is
refl ected in his own writing and increasing unwilling-
ness to allow language and metaphor to obscure the
process of self-examination enacted and exhibited in
his poetry.
In addition to addressing links between Caelica and
individual lyrics of Greville’s contemporaries, critics
have attempted to explain the shift between the more
worldly interests of the earlier poetry and the serious
tone of the later, often suggesting that the change
occurred following Sidney’s death in 1586, when Gre-
ville experienced a deepening religious conviction or
“conversion.” Others trace the switch to the death of
Queen ELIZABETH I. The Elizabethan court valued amo-
rous verse as an expression of social, economic, and
political ambition, whereas the Jacobean court favored
philosophy. Recent critics are increasingly wary of
characterizing “early” or “late” Greville, their work
revealing that rigid divisions between secular and reli-
gious issues and language fail to adequately describe
Greville’s complex conception of the role of earthly
faculties and institutions in God’s divine scheme.
FURTHER READING
Rees, Joan. Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. London: Routledge,
1971.
Vincent, Helen. “ ‘Syon Lies Waste’: Secularity, Skepticism
and Religion in Caelica.” Sidney Journal 19 (2001): 63–84.
Waswo, Richard. The Fatal Mirror: Themes and Techniques in
the Poetry of Fulke Greville. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 1972.
Matthew WoodcockCAESURA From the Latin, meaning “cut,” a cae-
sura is a stop or pause in the line of verse. When a cae-
sura splits a line into HALF LINEs, such as those prevalent
in ANGLO-SAXON POETRY, it is called a medial caesura.CAMPION, THOMAS (1567–1620) Born and
raised in London, Thomas Campion was educated at
Peterhouse, Cambridge University, before returning to
London to study law at Gray’s Inn in 1586. Shortly
thereafter, he accompanied the earl of Essex in a cam-98 CAESURA