[In the following essay, originally published in 1950, Ure analyzes Greville's use of characterization in Alaham and The Tragedy of Mustapha.]

Their conscience fir'd, who doe from God rebell,
Hell first is plac'd in them, then they in Hell.

Sir William Alexander, Doomes-Day: the first Houre

I

The work of the Elizabethan French Senecans is ‘coterie literature’, and Fulke Greville may well be a bat flying in the twilight between The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet. But coterie literature may explore very thoroughly the minutiae of human conflict, while its closely woven texture sometimes demands painfully precise analysis. Since Professor Croll remarked, ‘There is probably no play in the language in which it is harder to understand continuously what happens than Alaham’,¹ it cannot be said that either Alaham or Mustapha have been subjected to the continuous understanding that they deserve. A recent judgement that Greville's plays are ‘really rhymed political treatises’² may take its origin from Greville's own remark in the Life of Sidney that his purpose in his tragedies was to ‘trace out the high waies of ambitious Governors, and to shew in the practice that the more audacity, advantage, and good successe such Soveraignties have, the more they hasten to their owne desolation and ruine’.³ But Greville has done himself an injustice if this well-known passage has led some critics to take too simple a view of his dramatic methods—although Greville did go on to declare that the arguments of his tragedies were not ‘naked, and casuall’ but ‘nearer / Level'd to … humours, councels, and practices’. The subtlety and skill with which Greville levels to humours require, to be fully valued, a closer examination of the plays' textures than can be given here. For his own action in separating his overgrown choruses from the plays for which they were originally intended shows that he was aware of the differences between a play and a rhymed political treatise. Although Greville rejected the ‘strangeness or perplexedness of witty Fictions’, he did not reject προαίρεsιs. His business is to explore the ‘unbound, raging, infinite Thought-fire’⁴ of his personae. He is preeminently the dramatist of the ‘inward man’ and the correlator of the ‘inward discord’ with the ‘outward wayes’.

The emphasis on the inward man was a modification of what Schücking has named the ‘baroque character’ of the Elizabethan tragic hero. It is the difference between Marston's Antonio and Kyd's Hieronimo on the one hand, unpacking their hearts with words and frantic gesture, and Chapman's Senecal man on the other. Marston's own Gelosso in Sophonisba, who eschews what he calls ‘a stage-like passion and weake heat’, and the conduct of the other characters in the same play, illustrate in the work of a single dramatist the contemporary change in method from the baroque to the Senecal.⁵ In Chapman and Marston one of the agents that helps to effect the change is neo-Stoicism: both evil and good have become inward matters—‘our euill is not extrinsecall, it is within vs, and is setled in our intrailes’⁶ and (in Lodge's significant mistranslation of Seneca's ‘Bonus vero sine deo nemo est’) ‘There is no good man but hath a God within him’. It is not surprising that the neo-Stoic man weeps, like Marston's Massinissa, ‘private deep inward drops of blood’ in silence and secret anguish.⁷ It is part of Chapman's purpose in some of his tragedies to describe what happens when man, so conceived, comes into contact with the outward world and corrupt society. This is the theme of The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois; it is Byron's tragedy, too, that he has made the error of ‘building himself outward’, and has trusted his blood in others' veins.⁸ As presented by Chapman, Pompey's story in his Caesar and Pompey is also that of a man who forsakes his own ‘God-inspir'd insight’ and disregards Cato's warning that greatness which is not the product of an inward order is doomed to fall, but who later recovers his neo-Stoic balance with the resolution that he will ‘build all inward’.⁹ The philosophy of Chapman's poems frequently exploits the contrast between the inward order and the outward ways.¹⁰

Chapman's awareness of the inward man is analogous to Fulke Greville's; but where Chapman tends to grasp the harsh dichotomy in its simpler forms, Greville is more alive to the disconcerting antinomies that arise from it. Chapman's attitude is inspired by his neo-Stoicism. Croll writes:

The kind of truth that the Stoics chiefly had in mind was moral and inward. It was a reality not visible to the eye, but veiled from common observation; hidden in a shrine toward which one might win his way, through a jostling, noisy mob of illusory appearances … It is … possible to depict the effort of the athletic and disciplined mind in its progress toward the unattainable goal. And this effort of the mind was the characteristic theme of the Stoics, and the object of their rhetorical art.¹¹

Greville, too, turns inward in a way that is characteristic of the contemporary mood, and serves to show his affinities with Chapman. But while the inspiration of neo-Stoicism is central to Chapman, Greville tends, at least in the works in which he overtly speculates on the nature of man, towards a repudiation of the theory of human nature which lay at the basis of Chapman's ethic. Chapman's Eugenia, which is almost a treatise on the life of sound religion in the guise of an epicede on the death of Lord Russell, exhibits a temper different from that of Greville's Treatise of Religion.¹² Although Greville's description of the true religious life (stanzas 64-67) resembles Chapman's (ll. 471-84), Greville's writing is filled with precise theological implications (and terminology) that are quite foreign to Chapman's; and while Chapman emphasizes the correspondence between God and man's soul (ll. 423-30) and the ‘Analogia Mundi & Corporis Principum partium’ (ll. 721-45), Greville declares that any hope, such as is implied in Chapman's lines, that man might ‘in flesh and blood / Grow happily adorers of the Good’ is checked by ‘natural corruption’ (stanzas 12-13). In phrases which he borrowed from Plutarch's Moralia,¹³ Chapman celebrates the stabilis animi sedes (ll. 678 ff.). It is this very doctrine of εὐθυμία that Greville chooses to attack, the ‘heathen vertue’, as he names it,

Where sublime Religion seems to refine
Affection, perturbation, every thought
Unto a Mens Adepta.

The powerful stanzas that follow set out Greville's case against the ethic of neo-Stoicism and use the characteristic antithesis:

For in this work, man still rests slave to Fame,
To inward caution, outward form and pride,
With curious watch to guard a rotten frame
Safe undiscover'd from the piercing ey'd,
          Assidious Caution tyrannizing there,
          To make frail thoughts seem other then they are.
Under this mask, besides, no vice is dead,
But Passion with her counter-passion peaz'd;
The evil with it self both starv'd and fed,
And in her woes with her vain glories eas'd;
          The work and tools alike, vain flesh and blood,
          The labour great, the harvest never good.(14)

Greville and Alexander were perhaps the only French Senecans so conscious of the rubble in the Stoic bastion; the awareness accounts for the difference in Greville's plays of his treatment of the ‘unbound, raging, infinite Thought-fire’ from that of Chapman or Daniel. For Calvinism was much more than a variant on Stoicism, although the De Clementia may have shown Calvin the way. Calvin could restate the Lutheran imperium spirituale, the ‘striving for inward freedom and independence of the world’ which has been claimed as characteristic of Christianity in all ages,¹⁵ in terms which made for a rapprochement of the Christian to the Stoic ethic; for the Stoics, too, had declared that virtue was a state of mind in their attempt to supersede an antique system of taboo,¹⁶ just as the Lutherans attempted to replace χαρίsματα and ‘outward holiness’¹⁷ with ‘outward decency … [and] … inward spiritual righteousness’.¹⁸ But the Institutio stresses other aspects of the system which make any easy synthesis that may—by the author of Eugenia or by others—be effected between Reformation thought and Stoic ethics not applicable to Calvin's share in the rediscovery of the inward man. It is these aspects that compel Greville's poetic imagination, throughout Of Religion and the later Caelica sonnets especially. If redressing the balance of Aquinas with Augustine meant to some Reformation neo-Stoics discovery of the God within, deum in corpore humano hospitantem of Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, it was another God whom Calvin found dwelling within us on the evidence of the continual working of his power.¹⁹ Calvin and Montaigne might both help to diffuse the psychological method,²⁰ but while Montaigne emphasizes that ‘study of his own inner strength and weakness’ through which man can learn to discover himself,²¹ for Calvin the rediscovery of the ‘labyrinthine’ inward man is itself the immediate source of that ‘variety of fictions’, the ‘immense crowd of [false] gods [that] have issued from the human mind’.²² Realization of how excellent is the human person, ‘a magazine stored with treasures of inestimable value’ (which is not, however, the same phrase as ‘a God within’), concludes in sinful pride,²³ whenever human pollution is not measured against the refulgence of God.²⁴ In Greville and Calvin another kind of false religion is born of superstitious fear (which must be distinguished from voluntary reverence), issue of that inward weakness which cannot bear the contemplation of the divine majesty:

                                                                      when Fear's dim eyes look in,
They guilt discern; when upwards, Justice there
Reflects self-horror back upon the sin …

For fear

Fashions God unto man, not man to God:
                    And to that deity, gives all without
                    Of which within it lives and dies in doubt.(25)

Fear and self-horror are consistently revealed in Greville's explorations of the inward man in Mustapha and Alaham; Chapman's confidence that ‘As we are men, we death and hell controule’ is in Greville negatived by an awareness that ‘flesh and blood’ may itself become ‘hell’.²⁶ In Caelica and in the treatises on Fame and Learning this awareness gives the lie to the whole Stoic-Christian rapprochement, trailing after it a scepticism which in the dramas, since they are set in no Christian milieu, directs itself not towards fideism, but towards an investigation, at once savage and melancholy, into the ‘diverse world’, seen as ‘a stage for blood-enammeld showes’.²⁷

Greville in his plays, therefore, shares the contemporary tendency to look inward, but the entrails of his beings, when they are examined only in the strong light of his own faith, contain not a God but corruption, and are ‘the ugly center of infernall spirits’.²⁸ Such examination is not always vouchsafed to them. For Greville the dramatist is too steeped in the affinities of his French Senecan form to the Senecal philosophy to be able to present a dramatic picture darkened by Calvinism to the degree that Chapman's is illuminated by Stoicism. We are conscious of a willingness to conform to certain dramatic methods which is irreconcilable with the rigorism displayed in Of Religion. To these dramatic methods the looking inward and the correspondence between inward state and outward action are important. This fact suggests that current emphasis on the ‘monarchall’ aspects of his tragedies has sacrified, for the sake of what is typical and documentary in his plays, that which is personal and valuable in them as a contribution to literature.²⁹

II

Greville's dramaturgical exploitation of the rediscovery of the inward man may be stated as follows: his plays, and especially Alaham, contain together, and in unresolved conflict, both the neo-Stoic and the Calvinist idea of man's inward nature and its relationship to the outward world and God. Neo-Stoic and Calvinist views, when put in conjunction, may be represented thus: inward, the neo-Stoic finds nihil aliud quam deum hospitantem, potential εὐθυμία (Chapman's ‘inward peace’); the Calvinist finds corruption, the hell of flesh and blood, the ‘ugly center’ (Greville's ‘inward discord’, Calvin's shadow-producing ‘labyrinth’). This corruption is qualified—and the qualification is responsible for blurring the distinction between the two systems—by man's own awareness of an apparent excellence (when that is not compared to God's) and by the natural conviction of God's existence which man finds on examining his heart.³⁰ Outward, the neo-Stoic sees the corrupt, fortune-dominated world (Chapman's ‘gaudy light’, Greville's, Chapman's, and Daniel's ‘Opinion’);³¹ for the Calvinist, too, the world is corrupt, but the aetiology of this corruption is not Stoic, for the world contains the false outward Church and the other shadows which man's inward corruption spins out of itself:

A play of Sunne-motes, from mans small World come,
Vpon the great World to worke heauy doome.

(Mustapha, cho. 2.175-6)

The Stoic τύχη is superseded by the idea of the Fall.

This is a diagrammatic statement of the antitheses, and consequently an oversimplified one. But it is the business of literature, and especially of drama, to be more complex than the most complicated diagrams. Greville's plays are built up from interactions between neo-Stoicism and Calvinism as complex as are the affinities of Calvin with Seneca and of the Reformation with the Renaissance of classicism. A Treatie of Humane Learning and A Treatie of Warres are created with the resultant paradoxes as their sustaining basis, so that it is always hard to say, in examining Greville's writings, where Calvinism retreats or compromises before a neo-Stoicism that is often itself but a mirror image of the Institutio. In the plays, Greville's creation of character and situation is affected by this ambivalence, although, since his scenes are Turkish, the elimination of specifically Reformation ideas is compensated for by a tendency to weight the scales in favour of the view that fallen man (and Mohammedan man at that) can hardly escape from his ugly centre. By stressing the antinomies Greville compels his characters to live to themselves and to one another. Three kinds of approach to the plays may lend support to this view—a demonstration of how vital to the life of the characters is their consciousness of their inward potentialities and discords, some examples of the way the antitheses are made vivid in passages of dialogue (which may also show that such interchanges have vitality, although not of a kind acceptable on the stage), and an evaluation of Greville's treatment of the supernatural world. For Greville's interpretation of the powers of the supernatural is relevant to the distorted beings whom he portrays.

It is convenient to discuss Alaham first, although it may be substantially the later play,³² because in it Greville's idiosyncratic method is more identifiable. In Alaham it is not the outward action³³ which is of interest but the self-analyses of the characters and the manoeuvring of Alaham and Hala in relation to each other's corrupted ambition. Greville's method is to inform their colloquies, which seem largely composed of lofty sententiae, with all the skill and passion resident in Alaham's and Hala's inward natures.

These are unfolded chiefly in soliloquies or in interchanges with persons indifferent to the main conflict. A continual tortured life goes on beneath the surface; ‘all things are corrupt with doublenesse’ (Prologus, 149). When the play opens, Alaham is in despair because his plans have so far failed; but rather than ‘watch for change of times or Gods revenge’ (i.i.179) he resolves to strike all into hazard, since his ‘State’ is not bound to what Ford calls ‘the laws of conscience and of civil use’ but rests in his own well-being (214). Thus far we have been peering into the mind of an ambitious favourite. Alaham now switches to the outward policy with which ‘ambition of revenge’ (187) has inspired him by changing his tone from one of brooding introspection to a series of hypocritically uttered slogans: we must read i.i.221-6 and i.i.233-51 as private rehearsals of public ‘policy’. But policy is on two levels, the slogans in which it is dressed, and the real intention behind it. It is this real intention, displayed in one aspect—the future conduct of the state church—that animates the instructions which Alaham now gives to the priest (258-84). Lastly (315-25), Alaham invokes the Evil Spirits to work the ruin and change which he desires. Throughout the scene Alaham's conduct is delineated on four levels, which succeed one another: internal confusion and introspection, a display of outward hypocrisy, a controlled interpretation of the purpose of the hypocrisy, and an invocation to demons. The change from confusion to resolution is suddenly worked by ‘visions’ (185): it is one of those irruptions of supernatural evil which bring the action of the play throughout into contact with the Evil Spirits of the Chorus and the prologuizing Ghost. Alaham's ‘character’ is thus a complex four-dimensional world, ranging from ‘inwardness’ to supernatural visitings.

Hala's character has the same proportions. She, too, labours with an inward war, a struggle between her hatred for Alaham and her love for Caine (ii.i.2 et passim); her motives include lust as well as ambition and express themselves in an outward policy which is urged upon her by Alaham—and which she hypocritically embraces (ii.ii, iii)—but her real intention is the destruction of Alaham and the exaltation of Caine. Later, after Caine has perished, the inward war is between her hatred of Alaham and her love for her children (iii.iv.23 ff.); her outward policy is acceptance of Alaham's fait accompli, but her real intention is revenge, to which her whole being becomes narrowed down, thus superseding the inner conflict (iii.iv). She appeals to the supernatural spirits, including Caine's ghost (iii.iv.97-104; cf. v.iii.130-6).

Since none of the other characters in the play is the mainspring of the action, but merely instrument, confidant, or victim, they are less complex. In them the level of outward action is precluded. We observe only their inward struggles, which are not, generally, struggles to perform any outward deed but to master the ‘images of self-confusednesse’ with which their human nature charges them. Thus the old King's misfortune is simply that he cannot do anything: he is ‘one that hath lost / Himselfe within; and so the world without’ (v.ii.54-55);³⁴ by his confusion all laws have lost authority (iv.i.113). Act iv, scene is shows the continual inward movement by which he hopes to escape from the exercise of his legitimate authority and from life itself. Zophi the half-wit is in a similar condition (iv.ii.20). Mahomet, unlike these victims, has achieved an inward control which allows him to consult his own heart before taking action (i.ii.184); while he, too, is racked with an intestine war (ii.iv.63-66), he has a special power of insight which enables him to see into the hearts of Alaham (i.ii.102-10) and Caine (ii.iv.120 ff.).³⁵ Caine himself shifts from the absorption of his whole being in his love for Hala, so that ‘It is not I that liue in me, but you’ (ii.iii.100), to the ‘inward discords’ of remorse (ii.iv.99-104) and back again through an inability to sustain the mood of repentance (ii.iv.158-72). Caelica alone is exempted from these wearisome conditions.³⁶

Greville's confrontation of Hala and Alaham has, beneath its sombre trapping of sententiae, an unexpected subtlety, not least because the sententiae themselves are dragooned into working their passage. The difficulty of applying a continuous understanding to ii.ii, for example, may well be due to the unlooked-for convolutions of its texture.³⁷ Alaham, in the first lines of the scene, uses his state of inner confusion for dialectic's sake: his cry that Chance must be his guide, since his heart has run away from itself (ii.ii.8-9), shifts, in response to Hala's hypocritical offer of advice in the form of three sententiae (10-14), to the observation that advice offered from without is likely to be of less use than reliance purely upon a man's inner counsel. Hala's reply—

Who trusts his passion multiplies his care;
All paines within, all cures without vs are

shows that the two enemies are manoeuvring within the limits of the characteristic antithesis (Inward, corruption or εύθυμία; Outward, the help of others or of God, or ‘Opinion’, the ‘casting of one's blood in others' veins’.) In reply, Alaham warns Hala that if she herself is ‘captiued’ by inner passions, then, by taking her advice, he will merely be exchanging his confusion for hers (19-20). This is indeed true, and we, as witnesses of Hala's resolution to deceive in the preceding scene, know it; but Hala assures Alaham that her whole state of mind is directed towards subserving his ends, and that her ‘selfe-loue’, the quidditas of her being, ‘payes tribute’ to his will (21-23). By changing the meaning of ‘love’ in his reply Alaham pierces through the mask of hypocrisy:

If loue haue power to leaue, and breake her vow;
How can I trust to that you promise now?
If loue change not; how can I trust, and know,
That you loue Mahomet, my ouerthrow?

This sudden thrust, an index of Greville's skill in using sententiae for toppling down as well as building up, leads to a further stage in the dialectic. To Hala's plea that Alaham had not forbidden free and ‘indifferent’ association with Mahomet, Alaham replies with a sententia to the effect that forbidding merely prevents a thought from manifesting itself in outward action and does not destroy it; further, forbidding is that which must be imposed by ‘violence’ on those who have no inward powers of inhibition (a hint here that such is Hala's case—Alaham sees into her heart). He adds a lie—that Mahomet had traduced her character, proclaiming ‘deceipt to be thy state of mind’. To this Hala answers lightly that in that case she may ‘freely hate all men, but thee’ (28-45). She is far from meaning this, for we know that Hala really loves Caine, hates Alaham himself, and is indifferent to Mahomet except as he blocks her way to power. But Alaham exploits the remark: Hate, he declares (46-47), is merely resident in the heart, nothing if not bodied forth in the outward form of revenge. He relentlessly leads Hala to agree that she must be revenged on Mahomet; he urges on her that she cannot execute the act of revenge herself but must entrust it to Caine. This is the very impasse that Hala wishes to avoid, for she fears that Caine, as executant of the revenge, may be trapped by Alaham; she is therefore forced to make an unequivocal declaration of her intention to kill Mahomet (74-76). This declaration convinces Alaham himself that Hala is really his ally. (He has overreached himself—for, although he has himself forced Hala to make the promise—which she does only to save Caine from a suspected trap—he none the less becomes convinced of Hala's love. This trust in Hala brings about his death.) In his moment of triumph he invokes, in an aside (77-82), the abstracts of evil to prosper the work now set on foot. In the succeeding lines (which must all be given to Alaham)³⁸ he promises Hala future glory, while she listens in an attitude of silent hatred or hypocritical gratification (83-104).³⁹ None the less he will send Caine to her. Hala's inward war in the final soliloquy enables her to reach a decision; it is a decision conforming to her literary ancestry—she ends the scene as a Medea.⁴⁰

It is a text which, in Hoskins's phrase, has as many hands as a Briareus: ‘It is very true that a sentence is a pearl in a discourse; but is it a good discourse that is all pearl? It is like an eye in the body; but is it not monstrous to be all eyes?’⁴¹ The criticism may be modified, in Greville's case, if we recollect how the sententiae in this and other scenes are made to subserve the movement of minds, the duckings and twists of the corrupt hearts.⁴²

With this sample of Greville's method in Alaham before us, Mustapha must be treated more briefly. In Mustapha, the alignment of man seen through neo-Stoic eyes with man seen through Calvinist eyes is clear. ‘Inwardness’, too, is everywhere to be perceived: man may be a bee sucking honey or a spider drawing poison from the selfsame flower—which, depends on his heart (ii.ii.160-1). Solyman experiences an inward war on a more extended scale than that of any of the characters in Alaham: it is waged between his duty of preserving his power as degenerate king and his love for his son Mustapha:

Two States I beare; his Father, and his King;
These two, being Relatiues, haue mutuall bonds;
Neglect in either, all in question brings

(ii.ii.15-17)

Fear for his power and his Love for his son are the fighting abstracts which the sententiae overlay. (These are also the motives which the charitable Camena (ii.iii.135-52) sees influencing Rossa.) But Solyman is also blinded and ‘captiued’ by his love for Rossa, and has delivered over the kingdom of his mind to her (i.i.73); as he is man, his humours are delicately balanced (i.ii.18, and cf. Chorus Primus 1-22), but as he is King and the axis of the State they are even more sensitive and intricate (i.ii.21-35, and cf. Chorus Quartus, 85-110). He cannot reconcile his powers and passions as King, man, and father (ii.ii.82-83). Solyman is finally being trapped, as Achmat explains, because he cannot perceive that his belief in his son's imaginary treason has been purposely made dependent upon, and the direct issue of, his love for Rossa (ii.ii.136-7). By murdering his son, he will really be murdering himself—all such unnatural acts are the product of Fear (ii.ii.147-8). The causes of Solyman's ruin are as complex as the relationship of his various inner debilities to the strong forces pressing from outside. Rossa's task would have been easier if he had been, like Rossa herself, a creature of extremes, willing to ‘plant confusion in the powers above’ by forsaking the laws of nature. Solyman's whole difficulty is in moulding the inward motions of his mind into an outward policy which will be congruent with kingship, manhood, and fatherhood. Like Alaham, he experiences supernatural visitings (iv.i).

Rossa is already a ‘Monster growne within’, and her outward actions are, unlike Solyman's, entirely congruent with her inward wickedness (‘My selfe! What is it but my desire?’ iii.ii.24). After she has twice tried and twice failed to persuade Solyman to execute Mustapha, she realizes that she is building her hopes on the quicksand (iii.i.54; cf. i.ii.84-86) of the King's temperament. In an important scene (iii.i), she rejects Rosten's advice to continue her previous policy of teaching ‘Power to doubt’ (iii.i.112). Instead of trying to work from within upon the King, she must commit some outward act of violence and cruelty whose pressure of proof and horror will arm the King with a resolution he does not normally possess. This act is the murder of her own daughter Camena, after whose death she produces a tapestry supposed to be evidence that Camena has been conspiring with Mustapha. The King is convinced and Mustapha is slain. But both Solyman and Rossa have forgotten (as Rosten in iii.i had not, and as we are continually being reminded by the Chorus) that the people, who favour Mustapha, are also an order in the State of which the tyrant's temperamental humours must take account; they revolt, and ruin threatens the kingdom.

Another element in the final ruin is Zanger's suicide. Zanger, Mustapha, Camena, and Achmat are built on neo-Stoic lines, although all their εύθυμία is powerless to prevent the Rossa-Solyman relationship of inner weakness and determined evil from issuing in disaster; only Achmat, a ‘soule loving Nature, Dutie, Order’ (v.iii.109), survives to draw the moral and attempt by manoeuvring with τύχη (v.iii.120), to save the state. For Achmat is a Stoic (‘I first am Natures subiect, then my Princes’, ii.i.75) who is prepared, unlike Chapman's Cato, to ‘wrestle his faith vpon the stage of Chance’ (ii.i.62) and contend with the ‘heap of digested villainy’ that is Cato's world, although he does not attain the resolution to pursue this virtuous course without an inward struggle. Virtue is in labour with chaos in Camena, whose soliloquy (ii.iii.1-66) manipulates the antithesis of ἀρετέ and τύχη, and aligns her, as Stoic heroine, with Marston's Sophonisba. Mustapha himself is a Stoic of single-minded virtue (iv.iv.123-39).

The fact that these contrasts form the life-blood of the play means that it is irrelevant (and probably wrong) to identify Achmat or any other character as the ‘projection of the author's own moral philosophy’.⁴³ Nor, perhaps, is it useful to say with Orsini: ‘Tutti i personaggi sono … condannati dal severo giudizio dell' autore.’⁴⁴ The overweighting is there and must be recognized (most notably in the choruses) in both Alaham and Mustapha, but the peculiar interest of Greville's plays lies in the strength and sincerity with which, beneath the crust of sententiae and the often rather jejune political speculation, the characters beat with their inward life and their effort to correlate action with desire.

In both Alaham and Mustapha the supernatural plays some part in the waging of the inward war. We are undoubtedly meant, in Mustapha, to look upon Rossa as a woman in some sort possessed by the vicious abstractions which are continually in her mouth: Rage, Envie, Desire, these passions are also Furies, half-way between the Eumenides and the Calvinistic Tartari of Alaham. Rossa ends the play completely possessed by them—let the religious and the humble-minded rejoice, since, like the scapegoat, she will rid the land of them by bearing them all away with her (v.iv.116-24), but let them also beware for she has become a vessel charged with their power to harm (v.iv.125-6). Rossa's hatred of ‘Mediocrity’ in passions (iii.i.75), which leads to her being ultimately possessed by ‘Furies of choyce’, which override the inward war and the outward sanction (v.iv.48),⁴⁵ is combined with deliberate invocation of the ‘ugly Angells of th'infernall Kingdomes’ (iii.ii.10-14). She offers her daughter up to Avernus (iii.ii.39-41) and describes herself to Solyman as a microcosm of Hell (iv.iii.30-34).

The tendency in Mustapha for the wicked passions either to become objective infernal spirits or to be directly attributed to the activity of such spirits is accelerated in Alaham. In this play Greville is interested in the objective manifestation of supernatural evil, the ‘metaphysical aid’ with which Lady Macbeth was infatuated. For neither are the angels ‘nothing but good motions or inspirations which God excites in the minds of men’ nor the devils ‘nothing but bad affections or perturbations suggested by our carnal nature’.⁴⁶ The ‘Furies’, too, the passions seen in their objective aspect as tormenting man from without, are still further objectified in the ‘Chorus Secundus of Furies: Malice. Crafte. Pride. Corrupt Reason. Evil Spirits’. Here the Evil Spirits are the Furies. In another Chorus the Evil Spirits are identified with the fallen angels, ‘exiles out of heauen’ (Chorus Tertius, 176), just as the abstract ‘Fury’, Corrupt Reason, has herself fallen (Chorus Secundus, 18). The Evil Spirits, including the prologuizing Ghost, perform the Calvinistic function of ‘exercising believers’ by warring against them, but can never overcome them (Chorus Tertius, 101-8);⁴⁷ created though they were by God, their sinful nature, like that of Calvin's Devil,⁴⁸ comes not from creation, but from ‘depreavation’ and privation (Prologus, 21-33). ‘They hold the wicked in thraldom, exercise dominion over their minds and bodies, and employ them as bond-slaves in all kinds of iniquity.’⁴⁹ Hence Hala's and Alaham's invocations and possessions. In all this the inactivity of the Good Spirits is noticeable. The dramaturgical problem is here mixed with the theological. As a Calvinist, Greville holds to the doctrine of predestination,⁵⁰ but it is difficult to write a drama of the inward war in which the nature of the personae is already so irrevocably determined. (The defects of The Atheist's Tragedy as a drama of spiritual struggle illustrate this contention.) It was perhaps because Greville wished to avoid too neat a division of his characters into the elect and the unregenerate that he chose a non-Christian milieu, since he is thereby freed from the obligations imposed by his theological convictions. This choice faced Greville with another difficulty, one which he has by no means completely solved: for all ‘Mohammedans’ are likely to be synonymous with the ‘unregenerate’ and the possibility of inward conflict is again destroyed. Greville partly solves this problem by discovering neo-Stoicism amongst the Pashas, and partly the solution was ready-made in the French Senecan form, the approximation of Hala and Rossa to the Medea type. But more importantly, and despite the affinities of his supernatural spirits with the Calvinistic devils and angels, Greville avoids too rigoristic and undramatic a milieu by a blurring of the distinction between the objective evil Spirits and the ‘Furies’ of the human heart. The wickedness of Alaham and the rest thus becomes not merely a question of their not enjoying Grace, with the Devil and his angels free, in Calvin's phrase to ‘exercise dominion’ over them: the ‘Furies’ are as much a subjective product of the characters' inward evil as they are participators in, and allies of, the objective evil activity of the Devil and his spirits. For to be possessed by and to invoke the evil spirits with the confidence of an Alaham implies more than a simple objectification of their mode of being. In A Letter to an Honourable Lady Greville writes:

These extremities of good or euill will not easily be beleeued to raigne in these middle natures of flesh and blood: in respect that God hath decreed the angels to heauen, the diuels to hell; and left the Earth to man, as a meane creation between these two extremes. So that he must be a kind of diuell himselfe, that can easily beleeue there should be diuels raigning within or amongst vs.

Greville managed to avoid, for the sake of depicting the inward war, a Manicheism which would have been objectionable to him as a Calvinist, and a Calvinism which might have been frustrating to him as a dramatist. That Greville does not, in spite of this compromise, succeed in convincing us that he has not rigged the balance in favour of scepticism and pessimism is as much due to his choice of the Senecan form, with all its monstrosities of parricide and infanticide, as to the fact that his mind was coloured and his imagination fired by a contemporary belief in human corruption.

The compromise accounts for the ambiguity with which we view Hala's end (Alaham, v.iii.128-46). This terrible passage, so powerfully written that it almost justifies French Senecanism, is very difficult to understand. Perhaps it is a prelude to a physical descent into Hell, or perhaps Hala's wits have gone. What is certain is that Hala is here accorded no sort of triumph in Medean fashion, and that behind Greville's variation on the Senecan finale lies the whole weight of a new period's discovery of the potentialities for good or evil of the inward man. In this case, for evil; for it is Hell itself that, in Alexander's phrase, has been placed within Hala.

Greville is more vividly aware than most of his contemporaries that those things which we identify as outward evils, abstract or Furious, and their formulation in institutions, wars, false Churches, and great crimes, are manufactured out of the evil within, motes from the heap of dust and corruption that the ‘Paradise’ of the unregenerate human heart has become; the Devil, however objectified, can never absolve man from punishment for his own ‘uncreated’ sin. Neither the theory of ‘Fortune's shoures’, nor the mens adepta, nor ‘outward holiness’ can avail to cancel that dreadful bond. The emphasis on the correlation between outward weakness and crime and their origin within the creature is the essential psychological principle upon which Greville's personae are constructed. Greville, therefore, could not trust his steps to the clew which guided Chapman and Daniel through the human labyrinth. For Greville, it cannot be the confusion between old decrees and later institutions, of which Drayton wrote in The Owle, that accounts for the foundering of the Elizabethan achievement; man's iniquity runs deeper in his blood, inaccessible to the lancing of any satirist: ‘an infinite justice is offended’, said Hall. But Greville did find that the Stoic emphasis on the inward order and the kinds of outward iniquity made popular by Seneca were materials which he could charge with fears and hatreds discovered by quite another tradition. In Mustapha and Alaham the outward ways by which such evils proceed are merely paths leading back and back to the new Avernus in the human heart:

All what the world admires comes from within;
A doome, whereby the sinne, condemnes the sinne.

Notes

1. M. W. Croll, The Works of Fulke Greville (Philadelphia, 1903), p. 40.

2. Laurence Michel, The Tragedy of Philotas (New Haven, 1949), p. 10.

3. The Works of Fulke Greville (ed. Grosart, printed for private circulation, np, 1870), vol. iv, p. 220.

4. Alaham, v.iv.26. All references to Greville's plays are to Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, First Lord Brooke (ed. Geoffrey Bullough, Edinburgh and London, 1939), vol. ii.

5. See Chapter 5.

6. Seneca, Workes … (trans. T. Lodge, London, 1614), p. 242. ‘Non est extrinsecus malum nostrum: intra nos est, in visceribus ipsis sedet’, Seneca, Epistolae Morales, 50.4.

7. Sophonisba, iii.ii (Plays of John Marston, ed. H. Harvey Wood, Edinburgh and London, 1938, vol. ii, p. 40).

8. The Conspiracy of Byron, i.ii.140.

9. Caesar and Pompey, v.i.203.

10. See, for example, in The Poems of George Chapman (ed. Bartlett, New York, 1941); ‘To the High Borne Prince of Men Henrie …’, ll. 4-5; ‘To … Robert, Earle of Somerset’, first prose passage, 1-9; Euthymiae Raptus, ll. 8-14, 36-37; Eugenia, ll. 638-43, 810-11; ‘A Hymne to our Saviour’, ll. 41-43, 265-7; ‘To the Viscount … Rochester’, ll. 2-4; ‘To young imaginaries in knowledge’, ll. 5-9; ‘To live with little’, ll. 47-48; ‘Virgils Epigram of a good man’, ll. 9-10; ‘A great man’, ll. 38-46.

11. M. W. Croll, ‘“Attic Prose” in the seventeenth century’, Studies in Philology, xviii, 1921, 112-13.

12. References are to the texts in Bartlett, and in The Works of Fulke Greville (ed. Grosart), vol. i.

13. See F. L. Schoell, Études sur l'humanisme continental (Paris, 1926), p. 241.

14. Grosart, vol. i, p. 251.

15. Heinrich Boehmer, Luther (London, 1930), p. 277.

16. E. V. Arnold, Roman Stoicism (Cambridge, 1911), p. 287. Cf. R. D. Hicks, Stoic and Epicurean (London, 1910), p. 92. ‘The deepest thought of Stoic ethics is that virtuous or vicious life is not to be regarded as a sum of isolated virtuous or vicious actions, but as an inward unity governed by a single principle.’

17. The phrase is Boehmer's, p. 284.

18. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. Henry Beveridge, Edinburgh, 1845), vol. i, p. 434.

19. Ibid., p. 75.

20. P. Villey, Les Sources et l'évolution des Essais de Montaigne (Paris, 1933), vol. i, p. 9.

21. Douglas Bush, The Renaissance and English Humanism (New York, 1939), p. 93.

22. Calvin, vol. i, p. 77. Cf. Greville, Of Religion, stanzas 16 ff. Greville here differs from Duplessis-Mornay (Trewenes of the Christian Religion, chap. iii) who calls upon antiquity to testify that, notwithstanding appearances, men have always been monotheists at heart (Complete Works of Sir P. Sidney, ed. Feuillerat, Cambridge, 1923, vol. iii, pp. 292-311). Greville's religious temper seems generally different from that of Duplessis-Mornay: one suspects that the tendency to associate Greville with the Huguenot humanist is a matter of biography rather than of much intellectual kinship.

23. Calvin, vol. i, p. 68.

24. Ibid., p. 49.

25. Of Religion, stanzas 22-23. Cf. Calvin, vol. i, pp. 59-63. For other reactions by Greville against classical humanism see ‘An inquisition upon fame and honour’ (stanza 23: ‘Within our selues, they seat Felicities’) and also the passages cited by Professor Ellis-Fermor in her chapter on Greville in Jacobean Drama (London, 1936).

26. Compare Chapman, ‘A Hymne to Christ’, l. 200, and the Epictetan confidence of Clermont d'Ambois (Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois, iii.iv.66 ff.) with Greville, Caelica, cii (Bullough, vol. i, p. 146).

27. Alaham, cho. 3.82.

28. Caelica, “xcix.” It is in Caelica, “lxxxvi,” “c,” “ci,” “cii,” “cvi” that we are most conscious of Greville's case against the heathen virtue in his handling of the inward-outward antithesis. A pleasant kind of Stoicism, but hardly one felt in the blood, is observable in parts of the monarchy treatise and in the rather worldly treatment of the antithesis in ‘A Letter to an Honourable Lady’ (Certain Learned and Elegant Workes, London, 1633): ‘My counsell is therefore Madame! that you enrich yourselfe upon your owne stocke, not looking outwardly, but inwardly for the fruit of true Peace, whose rootes are there’ (p. 273, et passim). The tone of parts of the ‘Letter’ is that of Daniel's ‘Epistle to the Countesse of Bedford’, and even involves praise of the mens adepta. For a ‘normal’ Stoic-Christian handling of the antithesis see also Joseph Hall, Heaven upon Earth (ed. Rudolf Kirk, New Brunswick, 1948), sect. iii (a definition of Christian εύθνμία), with an interesting introduction on Hall's Christian neo-Stoicism.

29. In any case, Greville's political views (which are unexciting) are best seen in the monarchy treatise, and have been set out by M. Kuppfer, Fulke Greville's Poems of Monarchy als Spiegel seiner politischen Ansichten (Riga, 1929). Miss Kuppfer gives no explanation of Greville's obsession with the ‘weak tyrant’, as distinct from the danger of monarchy degenerating into tyranny—a commonplace of the Politics sharpened by Machiavellian Angst—and it does not seem to be reflected in writers like LeRoy, Hurault, or Grimaldus.

30. Duplessis-Mornay makes much of this conviction in his first chapter, pp. 263 ff.

31. The frequent use of this word with a special pejorative meaning in these writers derives from the Stoic belief that ‘opinion’ (δόξα or, in Epictetus, Discourses, ii.ix.14, ὑπόληpιs) is ‘unworthy of the sage’ (Hicks, p. 69). Cf. also the signification of the word as used by Jonson in Hymenaei and Discoveries, Ben Jonson, vol. viii, p. 564; by Charron, De la Sagesse (Paris, 1836), p. 80; by Guilpin, Skialetheia, satire vi; by Selden, Table-Talk, xcvi; by Cornwallis, Essayes (‘Of Opinion’); by Drayton, The Owle, Works (ed. Hebel, Oxford, 1932), vol. ii, p. 492.

32. Bullough, pp. 57-58.

33. The action of Alaham falls into two divisions which may be entitled: (1) A palace intrigue: i.i-iii.iii. The ambitious Alaham succeeds in disposing of two Pashas, Mahomet and Caine, who stand between him and the throne occupied by his weak father. But Caine had been the lover of Alaham's wife Hala, a fact of which Alaham was aware, and Hala herself, who hoped to advance to power with Caine at her side, his deadliest rival; (2) Hala's revenge: iii.iv-end. Alaham seizes the throne and destroys the King, his daughter Caelica, and his eldest son Zophi, a half-wit. But Hala's revenge has kept pace with Alaham's ambition: this woman has two children, one Alaham's and one Caine's. Alaham, dying of a poisoned robe, Hala's gift, is forced to witness the slaughter of his son; but when Alaham is dead, Hala finds she has killed the wrong child.

34. The dying Alaham's condition is the same (v.iii.54-55).

35. That Greville let this promising character disappear after ii.iv shows his determination to rig the balance in favour of the infernal spirits.

36. We need not accept the Ghost's gloss upon her conduct (Prologus, 119-25), but her unanswered prayer (iv.ii.66-73) and her death by torture make her, like another Servetus and like Mahomet, a sacrifice to rigorism.

37. Unlooked for, because the plays of Garnier, Daniel, Brandon, or Alexander are innocent of such sophistication. Since I am here concerned to trace only the dominant antithesis, I do not carry my commentary beyond a few scenes.

38. In Bullough's printing of l. 83 ‘Hala.’ (as speech prefix) is a misprint for ‘Hala!’

39. The line ‘Ruine, the power (not art) of Princes is’ (72) is a good example of Greville's aculeate style and his habit of squeezing the meanings of words.

40. Bullough, l. 135, misprints ‘Oh’ (for ‘Of’).

41. J. Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style (ed. Hudson, Princeton, 1935), p. 39.

42. With ii. ii can be compared iii.iii.39-96, where Hala accepts the outward situation (Alaham is seated on the throne by iii.ii.1) and uses sententiae as slogans to conceal her inmost mind. The scene proceeds on the level of outward action and only one glimpse of the involutions (Hala's aside, 32-37) is given.

43. Croll, The Works of Fulke Greville, p. 42.

44. N. Orsini, Fulke Greville tra il Mondo e Dio (Milan, 1941), p. 61.

45. v.iv.48 reads: ‘Furies of choyce, what arguments can moue?’ The difficulty of interpretation presented by this line is so typical of Greville that I have preferred, in this and similar instances, to let the interpretation I have chosen stand in my text without unfolding possible alternatives.

46. Calvin, vol. i, p. 209.

47. Cf. ibid., pp. 203, 207.

48. Ibid. 205. Cf. Greville's lines on the Fall, Mustapha, cho. 4.1-16.

49. Calvin, p. 207.

50. ‘Of Religion’, stanzas 95 ff.