[In the following essay, Litt analyzes Caelica, focusing on the structure of the work as a whole.]

The vogue of the Elizabethan sonnet sequence was short and, in terms of quality, if not quantity, relatively unproductive. Outside of the efforts of Shakespeare and Sidney there are no really impressive sequences, only impressive sonnets. The other sequences have been condemned to a literary limbo, and many deservedly so. In this respect we can accept Aikin's comment as axiomatic: “A bad sonnet is one of the dullest things in creation, and a series of them is absolutely intolerable.”¹ But not all sequences besides Sidney's and Shakespeare's are absolutely bad, and several are downright good. In particular, Fulke Greville's Caelica is a sequence which deserves far more praise and critical attention than it has had in the past.

What often seems to make sequences successful, besides the poetic achievement in each sonnet, is the poet's concept of structure. In this respect Sidney's Astrophil and Stella becomes the model for careful, meaningful sonnet organization. The poet who sees structure merely in terms of love-laments in a series, poetic exercises in convention, or even as an imitation of Petrarch or his French copiers, generally fails; for these attempts are seldom able to hold the reader's interest.

To look for the type of structure and strong narrative unity in Greville's Caelica which we find in his friend Sidney's Astrophil and Stella would be a mistake.²Caelica is not the progress of a single love affair with (as Nashe says of Astrophil and Stella) “the argument cruell chastitie, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire.”³ Rather the superficial structure of Caelica seems more to resemble the two-part division we find in Thomas Watson's Hekatompathia (1582), “whereof, the first expresseth the Authors sufferance in Love: the latter, his long farewell to Love and all his tyrannie,”⁴ except that Greville uses this division to attain a philosophical unity. Therein lies the essence of structure in Caelica. Thus “Sonnets 1” to “84” present an anatomy of love, of which Frost says:

perhaps no other Renaissance sonneteer examined so many and such various facets of the passion … courtly love, Anacreontic love, requited love, unrequited love, simple country love, Neo-Platonic love, complete rejection of earthly love, sexual love, and coarsely humourous indictments of wedded love.⁵

“Sonnet 84” is the famous love-rejection sonnet.

In sonnets “85” to “109” Greville not only gives Watson's “long farewell to Love and all his tyrannie” but turns completely from profane love to write exclusively on politics, philosophy, and religion. But this turnabout is not as drastic as it seems, for most of the thematic material which appears after “Sonnet 84” has already been included in the sequence. This complicates the problems of structure in the earlier “love” section of the sequence, but it helps give the cycle a tonal unity and makes one aware that Greville had a philosophical structure in mind.

Thus, for example, as early as “Sonnet 7” we have the philosophical seriousness which gives the sequence its peculiar tone and which again and again somberly characterizes Greville's love-making. In “Sonnet 7” he expounds for sixteen lines on the universality of change; and only in the final couplet does he make a gesture towards love and his mistress: “Onely like fate sweet Myra neuer varies, / Yet in her eyes the doome of all Change carries.”⁶ But this couplet can scarcely salvage the poem as Petrarchan compliment, particularly in view of the subtlety and potential ambiguity inherent in these two lines. The equating of Myra with “fate” only partially eclipses the snowballing sense of change in the poem and shifts the tone of the passage towards the sinister. This is re-echoed in the resounding “doome” of the next line, and these both pivot on “varies” and its ambiguity as to whether Myra never varies in her varying or is immutable.

This fine sonnet, with its devastating prelude of mutability (with all its philosophical weight) turning back upon the mistress, provides a slight sample of the tonal complexity of the sequence. Furthermore, its placement in the sequence exemplifies the difficulty of finding a structural organization. For surrounding this piece we can find pretty, anacreontic sonnets, highly rhetorical Petrarchan sonnets, musical compliments, intense anti-Petrarchan sonnets, extremely sensuous sonnets, risqué fabilaux sonnets, and deep (yet lyrical) political-philosophical “tracts,” to mention a few. Amidst such variety is there any possibility of an overall structure or, for that matter, is there any internal structure? Or must we finally agree with Bullough when he says, “It is not a true love sequence, but the repository of all those of his shorter pieces which he wished to survive”?⁷ I do not believe so.

Because of the various complexities of the sequence, the search for structure on any level (outside of the basic two-part division already discussed) has been discarded by the critics. Lacking any other alternative, they have come to almost unanimous agreement that Caelica is structured on a purely chronological basis. Both Croll and Bullough arrive at this conclusion through careful analysis of prosody, themes, and verse forms. Yet neither of these men will gamble on strict chronology. Croll sees several sonnets (“3,” “7,” “17”) as “probably not chronologically placed,”⁸ and Bullough hedges in similar fashion: “Evidence of style and thought also suggest (broadly) a chronological arrangement.”⁹

This hedging on chronology by these two major critics of Greville suggests the possibility of alternatives to their view of the structure of Caelica. I agree, in part, to this theory of chronological structure, but my own study of manuscript revisions, internal groupings, stylistic variations, and Greville's other works leads me to the conclusion that the structure of Caelica is that of a consciously manipulated record of intellectual experience and poetic growth. It is not just the “repository” of surviving “pieces.” Caelica is the “drama” of Greville's discovery of his intellectual role, his philosophical niche, and his poetic voice. And this involves the careful and considered placement and replacement of the sonnets.

As the revisions in the Warwick manuscript seem to show, it is a “drama” constructed by an older and wiser man who has now come to believe in the basic didactic function of literature. The man who revises this sequence for print is the Greville of the Life of Sidney who found his “creeping Genius more fixed upon the Images of Life, than the Images of Wit and therefore chose … to write to them … that are weather-beaten in the Sea of this World such as having lost the sight of their Gardens, and groves, study to sail on a right course among Rocks and quicksands.”¹⁰ Or it is the Greville who writes in A Treatie of Humane Learning “Since, if the matter be in Nature vile, / How can it be made precious by a stile” (“112”), and further:

And to conclude, whether we would erect
Our selves, or others by this choice of Arts;
Our chiefe endeauour must be to effect
A sound foundation, not on sandy parts
Of light Opinion, Selfenesse, Words of men,
But that sure rocke of truth; Gods Word, or Penne.

(145)

Lastly, we must not to the world erect
Theaters, nor plant our Paradise in dust,
Nor build up Babels for the Diuels elect;
Make temples of our hearts to God we must;
          And then, as Godlesse wisedomes follies be
          So are his lights our true Philosophie.

(147)

This Greville is not going to let the idle “exercises” of his youth become “Babels for the Diuels elect” and yet he wants to rescue what is clearly some fine early poetry. He thus begins the construction of his “drama” by reorganizing, rewriting, and adding to the early poems of the sequence. The key step, however, is the composition and placement of “Sonnet 84,” the love-rejection sonnet. Without this sonnet the back of the sequence would be broken. Or, if Greville had stopped at “Sonnet 84” we would possess merely another cycle of love-poses not too different from Drayton's final Idea and perhaps another philosophical sequence comparable to Chapman's A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy (1595) or Barnes' or Loc's religious sequence. But Greville definitely wants both parts of this sequence: “Sonnet 84” points back to sonnets 1-83, “For to thy Boyes play I gave all my youth,” and points forward to sonnets 84-109, “But Cupid now farewell, I will go play me, / With thoughts that please me lesse, & lesse betray me.” There is immense consciousness of the overall, unifying structure of Caelica in this sonnet. The continuation at “Sonnet 85” is what distinguishes this sequence from any other sequence structure (including that of Petrarch and of Dante). Far from breaking the back of the sequence, this move surely, for Greville, turned Caelica into a complete “Image of Life” as he saw life and as life “may be and should be.”¹¹ Finally, with a sequence structured in this manner Greville obtained the result—admittedly in a lower key—which he maintained was Sidney's goal in the Arcadia.

To be short, the like, and finer moralities offer themselves throughout that various, and dainty work of his, for sounder judgements to exercise their Spirits in; so that if the infancie of there Ideas, determining in the first generation, yield the ingenuous Reader such pleasant & profitable diversity, both of flowers, and fruits, let him conceive if this excellent Image-maker had liv'd to finish, and bring to perfection this extraordinary frame of his own Common-wealth … I say, what a large field an active able spirit should have had to walk in, let the advised Reader conceive with grief. Especially if he please to take knowledge, that in all there creatures of his making, his intent, and scope was, to turn the barren Philosophy precepts into pregnant Images of life.¹²

The initial problem of structure which greets the reader of Caelica is that the first named mistress we run across (in “Sonnet 7”) is Myra. The confusion multiplies when two sonnets later Caelica appears, and then Myra returns three sonnets later. This is not the end, for later still we get Cala and Cynthia and numerous nameless mistresses. The critics have posited various theories concerning the number of ladies. Cynthia is occasionally Queen Elizabeth; in “81” there is no question of this, nor perhaps in “55.” But unless Greville was courting the Queen (“Sonnet 56”), a direct equation of Cynthia and Elizabeth is impossible. Similarly it is difficult in most instances to say for sure whether Caelica (24 poems), Cynthia (5 poems), and Myra (17 poems) might not be the same person. It is true that in several poems two names are applied to what appears to be a single mistress (cf. “Sonnet 74,” where Caelica and Myra both appear), but textual problems as well as Greville's complex poetry and syntax make a definite identification difficult. Perhaps the best we can ever do is to repeat Bullough's perplexed judgment on the problem, “Here is a puzzle indeed!”¹³

To turn to the order of the sequence itself, we find that the first ten sonnets seem definitely to form a group. Thus D. L. Peterson comments on the early poems in Caelica: “The first six sonnets in Caelica introduce the higher and lower loves of the Italian neo-Platonists and as a group indicate what for Greville were, finally, the inadequacies of any attempt to define love as a religion of chaste devotion.”¹⁴ Greville in these first ten sonnets is carefully establishing the methodology of the sequence; that of a skeptical, though thorough, investigation of the possible varieties of love. He is also establishing the ideals of the end result of this investigation. In anticipation of the conclusion of the sequence, these ideals are shown in “Sonnet 10.” The reader is introduced to the only right kind of love, love of God, to which Greville will return in “Sonnet 85” after his long sojourn in the land of foolish, but humanly realistic, profane love. Such a process, with clear didactic premeditation, certainly disrupts a theory of pure chronology, and Croll helps support this possibility when he observes, “On the other hand it seems likely that among the first ten sonnets are some which were either added to the sequence at a later time or were substituted for earlier poems which originally held their places.”¹⁵

Let us look at some of these sonnets more closely, and particularly at “1” and “2,” which immediately start the sequence with a philosophical clash that echoes until “Sonnet 84.” “Sonnet 1” is a delightfully constructed neo-Platonic effort in eloquent Petrarchan style. It begins the sequence on what, in view of other English sequences, is a high plane. But by “Sonnet 10” Greville has thoroughly and realistically investigated this possibility of love and found that the human mind, corrupted by the Fall, is quite incapable of such idealization. In typical fashion, through Greville's use of the philosophical categories in the last stanza, this sonnet introduces the serious and philosophical tone (which usually colors even the lighter poems).

“Sonnet 2” presents a shocking contrast to this first sonnet, but clearly establishes Greville's skeptic-dialectic method:

Faire Dog, which so my heart dost teare asunder,
That my liues-blood, my bowels ouerfloweth,
Alas, what wicked rage conceal'st thou vnder
These sweet enticing ioyes, thy forehead showeth?
Me, whom the light-wing'd God of long hath chased,
Thou hast attain'd, thou gau'st that fatall wound,
Which my soules peacefull innocence hath rased,
And reason to her seruant humour bound.
Kill therefore in the end, and end my anguish,
Give me my death, me thinks euen time vpbraideth
A fulnesse of the woes, wherein I languish:
Or if thou wilt I liue, then pittie pleadeth
          Help out of thee, since Nature hath reuealed,
          That with thy tongue thy bytings may be healed.

The violence, passion, and sumberged sex of this sonnet immediately give the lie to the ideals posited in “Sonnet 1.” And though Greville plays further with these ideals in sonnets “3,” “4,” “6,” “9,” and “14,” it is clear from the contrast presented here that in Greville's world Lauras and Beatrices are not stepping stones to divine love but enticements which draw one into a sensual world of chaos, away from the only true love—love of God. Thus there should be no amazement when in “Sonnet 10,” perhaps the key sonnet before “84,” Greville rejects profane love of all calibers.

For those sweet glories, which you doe aspire,
Must, as Ideas only be embraced
Since excellence in other forme enioyed,
Is by descending to her Saints destroyed.

Nor in view of the methodology established in these first ten sonnets is it unusual for Greville to turn, after this renunciation, to a thorough “investigation” of non-neo-Platonic love. He has done his duty in firmly establishing what “may be and should be” and now he returns to investigate what very obviously is. For Greville's works are marked by his painful awareness of both the “golden” world and the “brazen,” “I know the world and believe in God.”¹⁶

Thus the movement from sonnets “1” and “2,” to “10” and finally to “85” provides the ethical backbone of the structure and demonstrates Greville's careful overall strategy. The subtle structural paralleling of first lines in sonnets “1,” “10,” and “85” is an additional tactic in this strategy: “Love the delight of all well-thinking minds” (“1”), “Love, of mans wandering thoughts the restless being” (“10”), “Love is the, Peace, whereto all thoughts doe strive” (“85”). Only one other sonnet has a similar beginning, “Sonnet 71:” “Love, I did send you forth enameled faire.” And here, in what is obviously only a prelude to “85,” Love himself asks of the lover in despair:

What shall I doe, Sir? doe me Prentice bind,
To Knowledge, Honour, Fame or Honestie;
Let me no longer follow Womenkinde,
Where change doth use all shapes of tyranny;
And I no more will stirre this earthly dust,
Wherein I lose my name, to take on lust.

After “Sonnet 10,” we have a potpourri of pieces until “Sonnet 85.” In view of the argument I have been presenting, this is not too strange. Greville has laid his moral ground-work and now he can exercise his wit. In some slight sense, therefore, we can look upon this section of the sequence as Bullough's chronological “respository.” But again Greville is slyly slipping in moral and political pieces (perhaps from a later period) to give the sequence additional thematic weight and to list it to a more philosophical inclination. Bullough's report of manuscript revisions of this section certainly shows that many of these sonnets were first omitted and only years later readmitted with considerable revision. Greville obviously had some structure in mind in these revisions—one does not move sonnets around in a sequence, or make massive revisions years after initial composition, just for a pure chronological arrangement.¹⁷

In this section of the sequence there are again groupings and linkages, but most important, there is a growing narrative structure. It is not nearly as extensive or as well defined as that in Astrophil and Stella; there is no easily definable beginning—only a clear middle and end. There are growing scraps of information and an increasing sense of the reality of a courtship or courtships only occasionally punctured by problematical narrative material. I do not want to force Caelica into a storybook pattern; I have already said that the strength and originality of this sequence is in its overall, philosophically oriented structure. Yet Greville does include a definite narrative grouping, a story, an “Image of Life,” at the end of this middle section of the sequence. I believe he includes it for a calculated purpose and that it shows how aware Greville really was of “order.” It also shows perhaps that he, unlike most of his fellow sequence writers, did profit from Sidney's fine example of structural maneuvering in Astrophil and Stella (as well as in the Arcadia).

This growing narrative structure begins to define itself after “Sonnet 50,” the ribald Scoggin's sonnet, which perhaps sets the tone of the later courtship, “Scoggin his wife by chance mistooke her bed; / Such chances oft befall poore Women-kind.” Immediately we have the problem of names for mistresses as “Sonnet 51” establishes one of the major motifs which identify this narrative grouping. This sonnet is addressed to Caelica and sets up a situation of parted lovers, “because we now in absence live,” or an exile motif which has occurred before (see sonnets “45” and “46”) and which reoccurs in these last sonnets. But, unfortunately, “Sonnet 52” is addressed to Cynthia; it represents a dramatic shift from “51,” where the poet parades his immutability: “I doe not change”; for in “52” the poet is flippant about his love: “If Cynthia crave her Ring of me, / I blot her name out of the Tree.” I think the four-sonnet Cynthia group, “52-56,” may represent a different episode and probably a different mistress. The first three could easily be combined with “51” in a tempting biographical relationship where Cynthia is Queen Elizabeth and Greville is suffering one of his various banishments from the court. This would work marvelously well provided “Sonnet 56” could be worked in. But even Spenser's “continued Allegory, or dark conceit” could not tactfully handle “Cynthia who did naked lye, / Runnes away like silver streames.” It seems also that this group would be a possible argument for Cynthia not being Caelica, for “Sonnet 57” returns to the episode established in “51.” Absence (exile) is again the motif and Caelica is tending towards promiscuity. “Sonnet 58” is Greville's magnificent way of striking back at Caelica and of reminding her of the advantages of a “secured” lover. Caelica's vanity receives a hellish beating through Greville's subtly vindictive manipulation of tenses and images.

The tree in youth proud of his leaues, and springs,
His body shadowed in his glorie layes;
For none doe flie with Art, or others wings,
But they in whom all, saue Desire, decayes;
          Againe in age, when no leaues on them grow,
          Then borrow they their greene of Misseltoe.
Where Caelica, when she was young and sweet,
Adorn'd her head with golden borrowed haire,
To hide her owne for cold; she thinkes it meet
The head should mourne, that all the rest was faire;
          And now in Age when outward things decay,
          In spite of age, she throwes that haire away.
Those golden haires she then vs'd but to tye
Poore captiu'd soules which she in triumph led,
Who not content the Sunnes faire light to eye,
Within his glory their sense dazeled:
          And now againe, her owne blacke haire puts on,
          To mourne for thoughts by her worths ouerthrowne.

“Sonnet 59” is a conventional complaint followed by Greville's autobiographical sonnet. “Sonnet 61” is the poet's half-hearted rejection of Caelica, but he still loves her and we cannot interpret this as a true separation. “Poems 62” and “63” are the poet's reaction to his temporary loss of love, but he is back with Caelica again in “64,” “65,” and “66.” In sonnets “64” and “65” there is a return to the exile motif, “Caelica, when I did see you every day” (“64”) and “Caelica, when I was from your presence bound” (“65”). Thus these sonnets are firmly linked to “51” and “57.” And since it was the “Rumour” resulting from the lover's forced separation in “51” which gave rise to the subsequent quarrels and the sonnets these quarrels fostered, we can see how this whole Caelica group is tied together. The remaining sonnets to “73” continue with Caelica's potential and real mutability or with the exile theme. Combined with this narrative structure, all the way from “Sonnet 51,” has been a sprinkling of Greville's typical “philosophy” sonnets.

If one has not paid close attention to these typical “philosophy” sonnets, the beauty of Greville's structure in this part of the poem is lost. For these sonnets have been edging towards the complete rejection of love in “Sonnet 84.” Greville is using parallel structures here. As Greville has the “real” affair of his narrative structure slowly burning itself out, his philosophical structure is increasing as it moves towards “Sonnet 84.” The two structures first meet in “Sonnet 61,” where we find the poet's half-hearted rejection of Caelica. Here is the potential philosophical rejection, but the reality of Caelica and the still-burning embers of love are yet too powerful. Greville's images do an exceptional job in capturing this sense of ambivalence. I quote stanzas 1-4:

Caelica, while you doe sweare you loue me best,
And euer loued onely me,
I feele that all powers are opprest
By Loue, and Loue by Destinie.
          For as the child in swadling-bands,
When it doth see the Nurse come nigh,
With smiles and crowes doth lift the hands,
Yet still must in the cradle lie:
          So in the boate of Fate I rowe,
          And looking to you, from you goe.
When I see in thy once-beloued browes,
The heauy marks of constant loue,
I call to minde my broken vowes,
And child-like to the Nurse would moue;
          But Loue is of the Phoenix-kind,
And burnes it selfe, in selfe-made fire,
To bread still new birds in the minde,
From ashes of the old desire:
          And hath his wings from constancy,
          As mountaines call'd of mouing be.

As Caelica's mutability becomes more obvious, as in “64” and “65,” the philosophical lyrics become more eloquent and powerful in their laments of change, as in “69” (stanza 1):

When all this All doth passe from age to age,
And reuolution in a circle turne,
Then heauenly Iustice doth appeare like rage,
The Caues doe roare, the very Seas doe burne,
          Glory growes darke, the Sunne becomes a night,
          And makes this great world feele a greater might.

Then we encounter a definite rejection in “Sonnet 71” (though qualified by its conventional framework), where Cupid says, “And I no more will stirre this earthy dust, / Wherein I lose my name, to take on lust.” I have already indicated how this poem looks back to “1” and “10” and forward to “84.”

“Sonnet 72” returns to Caelica's mutability, but really is just a breathing spot before the climax of this narrative structure—“Sonnet 73.” “Sonnet 73” first calls attention to itself by its peculiar rhymescheme, ababacacdedeff. Second, it is addressed by the lady to “Myraphill,” the lover of Myra, but it is clear by a repetition of the exile motif and the mutability motif that the lady is surely Caelica (and the next poem uses the two names interchangeably). The poem itself is a definite rejection of the poet by the lady, “You banish'd were, I griev'd, but languish'd not … Nature and Love, no vacuum can endure.” The stage is now technically set for complete rejection of love. The mistress, Caelica, has withdrawn from competition with philosophy and religion, but the poet has not quite given up. There follow two long poems, “Sonnet 74” (sixty-two lines long) and “Sonnet 75” (two hundred and twenty-eight lines long), where the poet looks nostalgically at sexual love but is being slowly convinced, by Caelica herself (in “Sonnet 75”), that:

Ashes o're Loves flames are cast,
All for one is there disgraced.
Make not then your owne mischaunce,
Wake yourself from passions-traunce
And let Reason guide affection,
From despaire to new election.

But the poet, failing to move Caelica with his sophistry, vows a weak and empty pledge to continue loving her. In many respects “Sonnet 75” sums up the narrative sequence. It picks up images and references from previous sonnets, and it summarizes the philosophical structure. Furthermore, combined with “Sonnet 83,” it does much more justice than “Sonnet 84” to the real beauties of the love that Greville ultimately renounces. Finally, between “75” and “83” are a handful of political poems, the famous “Sonnet 81” to Elizabeth, “Under a throne I saw a Virgin sit,” and a peculiar epitaph (“Sonnet 82”):

You that seeks what Life is in Death,
Now find it aire that once was breath.
New names vnknowne, old names gone:
Till time end bodies, but soules none.
          Reader! then make time, while you be,
          But steppes to your Eternitie.

These poems provide a slow transition from “75” to the rejection of love in “Sonnet 84” and to the final poems on religion. Greville has been pointing his reader towards this religious section of the sequence from the first few sonnets in Caelica. Once he has arrived, Greville would direct him towards introspection and meditation in hopes of making the best possible world through the efforts of corrupt and fallen creatures.

Notes

1. The Works of Edmund Spenser, eds. Edwin Greenlaw et al., II (Baltimore, 1947), 628.

2. See The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford, 1962), pp. 439-40. Caelica is obviously influenced in many ways by Sidney, which is to be expected in view of their close friendship. Yet we need not accept the printer's enterprising title for the 1633 edition of Greville's work: Certaine Learned and Elegant Works of the Right Honorable Fulke Lord Brooke, Written in his Youth, and familiar Exercises with Sir Philip Sidney. Nevertheless, in the first fifty sonnets Sidney often peeps from between the lines. The subject matter (Petrarchan and Anacreontic) and the tendency towards the eloquent style with its rhetoric and elegance seem to be Greville's debt to Sidney.

3. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II (Oxford, 1904), 223.

4. Thomas Watson, The Hekatompathia (Gainsville, 1964), p. 2.

5. William Frost, Fulke Greville's Caelica: An Evaluation (Brattleboro, Vt., 1942), p. 18.

6. All references are to Geoffrey Bullough's Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville (New York, 1945).

7. Bullough, p. 34.

8. Morris W. Croll, The Works of Fulke Greville (Philadelphia, 1903), pp. 20-2.

9. Bullough, p. 36. In his summary Bullough hedges in a similar way: “I confess that I began my inquiry with a prejudice against the practice of assuming chronological order in Elizabethan sonnet sequences which has led romantic editors into so many hazardous if ingenious theories. But the above considerations led me to the conclusion that in Caelica we have a collection not merely divided into two parts, the first of love-poems and the second of political and religious poems, but substantially presented in the order in which it was written” (p. 37).

10. Sir Fulke Greville, Life of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Nowell Smith (Oxford, 1907), p. 224.

11. Sir Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry or the Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Edinburgh, 1965), p. 102.

12. Greville, Life of Sidney, pp. 14-5.

13. Bullough, p. 43.

14. D. L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne (Princeton, 1967), p. 253. I am partially indebted here to Peterson's fine discussion of the first few sonnets in Caelica.

15. Croll, p. 21.

16. Bullough, p. 1.

17. There has been no careful study of the relationship of Greville's manuscript notation and his arrangements to the problem of structure. Without copies of the manuscript one cannot make a truly valid study, but even using Bullough's transcripts of manuscript notation it is difficult to understand how one can ignore the great attention Greville obviously gave to the problems of order and arrangement, exclusion and inclusion, and revision. My own charts of manuscript revisions of order convince me that Greville had several orders in mind at various periods; that he manipulates, most likely not for chronological, but for philosophical and theological reasons; and that aesthetics play no small part in his structure.