Most readings of Greville's "A Dedication to the Life of Sir Philip Sidney" have primarily been interested in the relationship between Greville and Sidney, but the work may actually center on Greville's role as counselor to King James. To Greville, the fact that James misunderstood his own self-appointed role as "nourish father" made it impossible for Greville to continue in his role as counselor.

Copyright University of North Carolina Press Fall 2000

'IN 1652, Henry Seile published an encomiastic essay about Philip Sidney under the title The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. The title page identifies the author as Fulke Greville, "Servant to Queen Elizabeth, and . . . Companion & Friend" to Philip Sidney.' An elaboration on the stationer's registry entry to the volume, which had identified Greville simply as Sidney's "companion and friend," Seile's advertisement anticipates in abbreviated form the subsequent history of critical response to Greville's work. Focusing on the friendship between Sidney and Greville, many early readers understood Greville's work primarily as a memorial tribute to Sidney. More recently, however, critics have recognized what Greville's manuscript title for the work, A Dedication to the Life of Sir Phillip Sidney, implicitly suggested: what Greville wrote is not a biography in any conventional sense Mark Caldwell has demonstrated that while Greville may initially have begun writing a work that centered on Sidney in the manner of a traditional biography, he made substantial revisions by adding material on Elizabeth, Essex, and the map of Europe.' Such readings have shown how Greville's relationships to both Elizabeth and Sidney are necessary for understanding a text that, as John Gouws concludes, is centrally concerned "with the roles of subjects and sovereigns."4 Neither Seile's advertisement nor existing readings of the Dedication, however, fully do justice to Greville's own understanding of himself. In the epitaph inscribed on his tombstone, Greville had asked to be remembered more largely as "Servant to Qveene Elizabeth, Conceller to King James, and Frend to Sir Philip Sidney."5 Most readings of the Dedication have been primarily interested in the relationship between Sidney and Greville, while discussions of the relationship between Greville and James have concentrated on the plays. This essay integrates these previously disparate lines of Greville criticism in arguing that the Dedication is written as an act of counsel for James.6 In the Dedication, as on his tombstone, friendship to Sidney, service to Elizabeth, and counsel to James are integrally related to one another. If Mustapha and Alaham offer topical political warnings against the dangers of royal counsel, the Dedication prefaces those warnings with a counterargument for the radical necessity of counsel that demonstrates not so much how counsel can change what the king does, but how it can change who he is.

Seventeenth-century discussions about the nature of sovereignty and tyranny understood royal counsel to be problematic because bad advice could make once good kings into despotic tyrants. Indeed, when any counsel, even good counsel, could transform a prince into a tyrant, political writers had to recognize that "Bad kings are made, not born."' This anxiety with regard to the counselor's relationship with the king conflicted with James's own iconography of himself as father. Although Leeds Barroll has suggested that recent criticism has perhaps overemphasized the extent of patriarchalism in the Jacobean period,8 most other readers agree that the patriarchal family offered a "natural" model for James's political theory. Critical assessments of James nonetheless differ depending on their understanding of the ideology of the family during this period. Gordon Schochet credits James with the emergence of patriarchal political theory in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At a point when liberal political thinkers such as James's former tutor, George Buchanan, were increasingly arguing that political obligation developed out of early social contracts and was thus no more than historical convention, James promoted the image of the family to legitimate his rule on genealogical grounds. Images of James as a "naturall" father became "an intentional political ideology... [that] thus answered and corrected the erroneous non-naturalism of the contractualists."9 Jonathan Goldberg agrees that James -and early modern society generally-relied on biology to reproduce power but suggests that the kind of power being reproduced is primarily one of absolutist subordination. As figures to command deference and rule through coercion, fathers were appropriate models to support an absolutist understanding of sovereignty." Debora Shuger, by contrast, argues that fathers were generally depicted in terms that differed substantially from those used for kings. While kings were ordinarily represented as figures of power and mastery, fathers were understood to take on divine qualities in their unconditional love for their children. In loving their children precisely because they were "useless," fathers became like gods in the generosity and benevolence of their disinterested love. Thus, for Shuger, when James appropriates the image of the "nourish father," he does so not to naturalize a demand for subordination but to depict himself as having an unconditional love and generosity towards his subjects." Acknowledging that there was no single image of James, this essay demonstrates that the central component of Greville's reading of James is his recognition that James's different definitions of himself are all based on the claim that he is a maker. As a king, he exercises authority and benevolence over his subjects for the increase of the land and its people. As a royal father, he produces offspring who in turn ensure the succession not just of his family and line, but of all England. As a patron, he confers titles and honors creating new gentlemen of his court favorites. Finally, James becomes a "makar" when he authors his son by writing the Basilikon Doron." Greville appropriates the language of generativity prominent in Sidney's Defense of Poesie to attack what he sees as barren forms of political and literary paternity in James's life and works. For Greville, the biological metaphors of the Defense inform Sidney's claim that man becomes a maker when he is a poet 13 Thus, in the Dedication Greville critiques the failures of kings such as James by contrasting them with the good "making" outlined and exemplified by Sidney. While Sidney may refer to "our poet the monarch" to describe only the preeminence of poetry over other branches of knowledge (Defense, 116), Greville's Dedication suggests that James's understanding of himself as a monarch-poet-and the fantasy of parthenogenetic selfreplication implied by that image -needs to be corrected through a reassessment of Sidney's understanding of the poet-monarch.

Greville's analysis relies upon dominant Elizabethan aesthetic theories of the relationship between poets and the state. Traditionally, a monarch such as Elizabeth would be referred to in courtly encomium as herself a "poet" insofar as her living example would require poets to emulate her virtues in their writing. More than just patron or muse, Elizabeth becomes represented as a king of generative force behind works such as The Faerie Queene.14 At the same time, poets also represented themselves as having a civic obligation to provide royal readers with models for imitation. As a monarch, Elizabeth was as much the intended reader of court poetry as she was its subject. Court poets thus depicted a reciprocal relationship in which Elizabeth "made" their poetry, even as they could help "make" her through the images they created." Yet, as critics have recognized, when James styled himself as a monarch-poet, he complicated the existing rhetoric of court poetry: what need had such a king of other, lesser poets to either celebrate or admonish him? 16 Responding to James's problematic conflation of the distinct roles played by poet and king, Greville overturns that by a conflation of his own in which-rereading the Defense-he depicts Sidney himself in the terms generally associated with either works of art or monarchs. When he categorizes Sidney's poetry as "barren" and "infertile," Greville does so in order to represent Sidney's life as a more natural and productive form of art. This claim extends the common Renaissance notion that the self is a work of art-the poem that Milton says a man must be in order to create a true poem. What distinguishes Sidney's life from his art is that it makes possible a natural, rather than an artificial, engendering of virtue in those who model themselves on Sidney. At the same time, Greville also figures Sidney in terms ordinarily associated with monarchs: as a "prince" among men, Sidney becomes a model for others. That is, Greville revises the theory of "making" inherent in Sidney's poetics in order to critique the "making" of Jacobean politics.

For Greville, Sidney's poetic theory intersects with James's political model because they both fail to understand how to "make" kings in a way that is naturally accordant with patriarchal political theory. By critiquing the king's understanding of himself as a "maker," Greville is questioning not specific actions, but the power that the king has to undertake such actions. Transforming the "art" of courtly counsel that after Machiavelli and Elyot became central to Tudor political theory into an act of natural "begetting," Greville conjoins James's insistence that the king be a "nourish father" to his political subjects with Sidney's conception of the poet as a "nursing father" to his royal readers. In adapting Philip Sidney's aesthetic theory, Fulke Greville would not so much counsel the king as create him. No longer a poet-"maker" as defined in the Defense of Poesie, Greville's Sidney becomes a kind of political kind-"maker." In order to critique James through Sidney, Greville had to respond to James's own conception of himself as a "nourish father" in the Basilikon Doron. First written in Middle Scots and published privately in 1599, the Basilikon Doron is primarily a practical manual on how to be a king which is modeled after royal "instruction" books such as the Political Testament thought to have been written by Charles V for his son Philip." The biblical subtext to the instruction in the Basilikon Doron is Isaiah 49.23: "And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queenes thy nursing mothers." Not widely used as a sermon text during Elizabeth's reign, this definition of the king as a "nursing father" became a central component of James's royal iconography." As James argues in the Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies, the king becomes, upon coronation, a "naturall father" to all his subjects and as such is "bound to care for the nourishing, education, and vertuous government" of those subjects.19 Having styled himself as a "son" to Elizabeth while she was still alive, James begins representing himself as a "father" almost as soon as he takes office?O James's presentation of himself as a "nourish father" in the terms defined by Isaiah 49.23 obviously responds to the popularity of Elizabeth: while James was neither English nor Elizabeth's son, he could distinguish himself by the fact that he had male heirs when he took the throne. Where Elizabeth used the image of herself as a "Virgin Mother" to England in part as a way to avoid having children, James used his children to justify his kingship?' In the context of belief that a king's children were physical confirmations of the character of his rule, any concerns that James was not a direct descendant of the Tudor line-or was perhaps even illegitimate -could thus be answered by a proleptic look at the succession that James seemed already to have secured before taking the throne. As a "natural" father, James thus paradoxically became a "natural" successor to the throne.

The publication of the Basilikon Doron clearly established the terms for a new familial relationship between the monarch and his subjects: initially written from a "naturall Father" to his "dearest sonne" (3), James authorized the printing, in separate English and Scottish editions of the text, of more than io,ooo copies when he took the English throne in 1603. Unlike the 1599 edition, the ascension year editions are addressed as much to James's political children in England and Scotland as they are to his biological son Henry.' Having authorized the printing of so many copies of the book, James clearly intended to use this manual on how to be a king as an introduction to his new subjects. Certainly, other early readers understood the Basilikon Doron as an exemplary text whose goal was to re-create its reader: Henry Peacham transformed the Basilikon Doron into an emblem book for Prince Henry which underscored the inherent didacticism of the text, while William Willymat suggested that the Basilikon Doron offered a counterargument to the influential Mirror for Magistrates (1559) by entitling his adaptation of the text A loyal subjects looking glasse (1604)-' In his "Panegyric Congratulatorie" (16o3), Samuel Daniel likewise suggests that James complemented and fulfilled the original birth of Henry through the Basilikon Doron: while begetting Henry secured the succession in James, writing the Basilikon Doron perpetuated the institution of monarchy for all his subjects 24 By describing himself as a "natural" father, James invokes his biological paternity to establish claims for both literary and political fatherhood.

Writing within a culture that replicates itself through patrilineal succession, early modem authors frequently imagine their work as a form of self-engendering. When such writers compare books to childrenor children to books-they recognize that all acts of creation involve the duality of both an intellectual form and its material realization. The book is a "child" as a tangible, physical product of intellectual labor, while the child is a kind of offprint that images the father's thoughts and character. James follows this familiar trope: the illicit publications that force him to publish his authoritative one are "the children of envie" (5), whereas his "birth" is "rightly proportioned in all the members, without any monstrous deformitie in any of them" (11). What distinguishes James's use of this otherwise conventional rhetoric is the interplay between the book he has written and the child he has engendered. In the act of writing the Basilikon Doron, James participates in a metaphorical begetting that is perhaps finally more important than his original physical begetting of Henry because the text guarantees the making of Henry who, as a king, becomes responsible for making others. James presents the Basilikon Doron to Henry as the "true image" of his mind so that the book "makes" Henry, even though Henry was made, so to speak, before the book (ii). James expands on this presentation of himself in the Basilikon Doron by actively disseminating the image of the "nourish father" through court writers, preachers, and painters as well as in his own writings. James "fathers" courtiers, subjects, and the commonwealth itself through his actions. Thus, when James addresses George Villiers, then marquis of Buckingham, in his private letters as "my only sweet and dear child" and signs himself as "thy dear dad," he is not simply expressing a homoerotic affection as critics have sometimes suggested. By using the language of paternity even as he mentions Buckingham's own family, James is also reminding Buckingham that he "fathered" him, and by extension his family, through generous acts of patronage that gave Buckingham his title and social place.' Lancelot Andrewes, as a court preacher under James, repeatedly uses Isaiah 49.23 to argue that kings have parental authority over the church itself. As a "nutritius Ecclesiae," the king is obligated to act as a parent in exercising authority over the church.26 Richard Mocket's God and the King (1.615), which James probably commissioned, expands upon Andrewes's argument in defining kings as "the nursing Fathers of the Church [Isa. 49:23], and therefore the nursing Fathers also of the Common-weal."27 Although specific details of Jacobean iconography changed over time and in response to different situations, James was repeatedly represented in terms of biological procreation that figure his "making" of England and its people.

Throughout the Dedication, Greville follows James in figuring acts of artistic and political "making" as forms of procreation in order to articulate his belief that Sidney's life can serve as a counsel in the "making" of kings. Greville's account of Sidney's birth thus attributes to him qualities ordinarily associated with royalty: the virtues that are, for Greville, "bred" into Sidney are those necessary for the creation of true princes. Recounting John Pietro Pugliano's assertion that horsemen make the best soldiers and soldiers the best subjects, Sidney opens his Defense with the whimsical thought that Pugliano almost "persuaded me to have wished myself a horse" (4)?8 While in part an ironic introduction to what Sidney implies will be his own equally prejudicial defense of the poet, Sidney's introduction also defines the civic importance of the poet. If for Pugliano the only "serviceable courtier without flattery" is a horse, then for Sidney the only such courtier is the poet (4). Greville clearly recognizes the political implications of Sidney's putative wish that he could be a horse when he suggests in the Dedication that Sidney's nature is derived from his parents in the same way that in "the races of horses and breeds of other cattle ... diverse humours mixed ... make different complexions" (4). Where Sidney's horse had defined the good subject, Greville by contrast transforms that account to attribute to Sidney the qualities of a good monarch.

Greville undercuts his own patrilineal assumptions by insisting that both father and mother contributed equally, "in diverse humours mixed" (4), to the "breeding" of Sidney. Sidney's father, Sir Henry Sidney, is depicted as a good governor, one who did not seek his own purposes but would "plant his own ends in the prosperity of his country" (4). Departing from portraits of Lady Mary Sidney in existing histories of the family, Greville describes Sidney's mother as "ingenuous," of a generous and noble disposition, and suggests that Sidney acquired from his father the virtue of "sincere monarchial governors" and from his mother the bounteous nobility of "a large ingenuous spirit" (4).29 Significantly, the attributes that Greville sees Sidney having acquired from his parents are not the qualities that humanists such as Elyot traditionally associated with the "good son" or even the "good subject." Instead, these qualities of virtuous governance and generous bounty are the features that James had made central to his image of the ideal king. As the royal iconography associated with Isaiah 49.23 suggests, James developed the ideal of an androgynous king who brought together masculine virtues of political wisdom with a feminine spirit of bounty in the figure of the kingly "nourish father." Greville insists on the contributions of both mother and father in order to describe Sidney in the same terms that James uses to describe kings. Sidney thus becomes not just a royal counselor, but indeed what Greville refers to as a natural and princely "nourishes of virtue" to readers like the king himself (21).

If Greville's account of Sidney's development begins with his physical birth to his parents, it culminates in what Greville sees as Sidney's second, more important intellectual engendering by Hubert Languet. While Sidney's parents were responsible for his physical being, Greville has Languet produce his intellectual being. Sidney first met Languet in 1573 and remained in contact with him during his tour on the Continent.'l After Sidney's return to England in 1575, Languet continued to be important as a correspondent to whom Sidney confided his frustrations about court politics 3' In his account of this relationship, Greville suggests that Languet's mentoring of Sidney exemplifies Plato's understanding of the male love that leads to intellectual reproduction 32 Greville transforms what in Plato is largely aesthetic into a more explicitly political statement by his reliance on Jacobean rhetoric of the "nourish father." As Greville understands it, Languet's paternalism is central to the achievement of their relationship. Languet is a formative figure because he was a "Nurse of knowledge" to Sidney:

this ingenious old mans fulness of knowledge, travaylinge as much to be delivered from aboundance by teachinge, as Sir Philips rich nature and industry thirsted to be taught and manured ... out of a naturall descent both in love, and plentie. (6)33

Greville depicts Languet's influence on Sidney as an act of reproduction: Languet is pregnant, "travaylinge" to be "delivered from aboundance" and the "fulness" of his knowledge. What Greville describes is an autonomous and intellectual male reproduction that supersedes Sidney's first physical birth.

In his depiction of the relationship between Languet and Sidney, Greville draws on the dominant sixteenth-century humanist model of education: noble men must be educated so that they can serve the state and counsel kings. As exemplified by figures such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley, humanist education was inherently paternalistic as the tutor supplanted the parent in re-educating, re-birthing, men who would become the "sons" of England? In this context, accounts of young scholars and princes often employ a language of procreation to emphasize the formative qualities of education: thus Elizabeth and Edward Tudor are described in being tutored by Roger Ascham as "So pregnant ingenious were either, that they desired to looke upon bookes as soone as the day began to breake."35 Where Elizabeth and Edward are described as simply "ingenious" in their intellectual vigor, Greville plays on the double meaning of the term in order to elaborate on an ambiguity inherent in the paternalism of humanist education. Specifically, the humanist model for educating gentlemen raised the question of where virtue comes from: to what extent is it an innate quality and to what extent can it be learned? In Greville's account, his mother's born nobility can be transformed by Languet into a higher form of intellectual power. In keeping with the androgyny characteristic of Jacobean imagery, Languet becomes not so much a surrogate father to Sidney as he does a surrogate mother. Like Sidney's mother, Languet possesses a generosity that is clearly maternal: by mentoring Sidney, he is giving in "fulness," "abundance," "love, and plentie." Yet, as the equivocation in Greville's language makes clear, what in Lady Mary is simply noble "ingenuousness" (L. ingenu-us) is transformed in Languet into the means for the production of "ingeniousness" (L. ingeniasus).36 Languet's feminine generosity thus becomes the basis for Sidney's distinctly masculine intellectual self-realization.

If in Greville's description, Languet in some sense supplants Sidney's mother, he also takes over the role and qualities of his father in the realm of politics. By identifying Languet as a "nurse to knowledge," Greville revises Sidney's arguments in the Defense that poetry has been our "first nurse" and poets "deliverers of knowledge to posterity" and "fathers in learning" (102). Other critics identified poetry as dangerous because of its seemingly "maternal" ability to reproduce itself without adhering to the proper form of truth ("mother of lies," "nurse of abuse," [125]) and because of its "effeminate" tendency to provoke passion. Sidney responds by arguing that as a kind of procreative act, making poetry is inherently masculine and intellectual. In defining the poet as a "maker," Sidney draws on a Platonic understanding of intellectual procreativity. For Plato, the great thinkers are "fathers" in learning and "deliverers" of knowledge in the sense that Sidney describes because they recreate themselves through acts of intellectual, rather than physical, engendering?'

The procreative language that underpins Sidney's understanding of the poet as a "maker" emerges out of the contradictions inherent in the pedagogy of humanism. The role of Sidney's poet closely follows the role that humanists such as Ascham, More, and Erasmus assigned to the educator: the poet must create works that become a means for the production of good servants and good governors. Sidney's use of procreative language in the Defense thus becomes a way of emphasizing the doubly formative nature of poetry: as a verbal artifact, a poem is itself the result of an act of creation, but, more importantly, it is also the means by which the poet can create his readers through the lessons he teaches. As Sidney argues, the poet must "make a Cyrus" in his poetry "to make many Cyruses" in his readers (io6). Yet even as Sidney argues that poetry is a means by which readers can acquire and learn virtue, he also wants to insist that poets themselves write out of an inborn and God-given quality. As Steven May demonstrates, Sidney's belief that poetry is a natural gift typifies the attitude of courtier poets? In arguing that poetry and the virtue that it depends on is an innate gift, Sidney transfers the courtier's understanding of social nobility-itself fostered by humanist education-to his poetic theory. The procreative language in the Defense thus serves in part to obscure any inconsistency in Sidney's arguments about the educative power of poetry.

As other readers have noted, Greville hardly discusses Sidney's writing at all in the Dedication. The first chapter, however, both begins and ends with oblique references to the Defense. With these allusions, Greville acknowledges Sidney's theory of the moral and social value of poetry primarily as a means of establishing how his text will depart from Sidney's aesthetics. As readers have recognized, these passages are important in demonstrating how Greville's "highly individual aesthetic" differs from Sidney's. Focusing on these passages in the Dedication, Hugh Maclean has argued that where Sidney is interested in the image-making function of poetry, Greville is concerned primarily with practical utility. Maclean is right to conclude that for Greville this utilitarian and ethical poetry is finally always directed "toward controlling political authority; that is, toward the king."39 While it is fair to say that Greville is more concerned with practical politics and Sidney with art, what has not been fully recognized is that Greville himself is cognizant of the differences separating him from Sidney. Instead of rejecting Sidney's poetics, Greville adapts Sidney's understanding of the creative power of poetry to counsel the king. Greville begins by presenting Sidney himself as an example of how the representations of virtues and vices in the "characteristical kind of poesy in defense whereof [Sidney] hath written so much" (3) can produce noble men. Where Sidney suggested that poetry, in effect, makes one a better person, Greville does him one better and emphasizes the poet over the poetry so that in Sidney, "the life itself of true worth did ... far exceed the pictures of it in any moral precepts" (3). Sidney's argument for the creative power of poetry is transformed by Greville into an argument for the ethical power of Sidney as an exemplary model.

Greville presents his Dedication as a text that supplants the Arcadia insofar as it gives counsel to kings and subjects more perfectly than Sidney's romance did. The introductory account of Sidney's birth thus concludes with a literary analysis of what might be called the "death" of the Arcadia. Greville argues that in the Arcadia, Sidney intended to "turn the barren philosophy precepts into pregnant images of life" to demonstrate the proper roles of princes and their subjects (lo). Greville may be referring here, as Joan Rees suggests, to Sidney's transformation of the philosophy of the Old Arcadia into the more developed fiction of the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Certainly, what Greville describes does conform to the theory of poetry that Sidney argued in the Defense. In invoking the procreative language of the Defense, however, Greville argues that poetry is ultimately inadequate: when Sidney asked, on his deathbed, to have the Arcadia burned, he recognized how lifeless his creations were. Greville includes this deathbed anecdote here, in the first chapter rather than in the longer section on Sidney's death, so that Sidney's "renunciation" of poetry becomes an implicit acceptance of the different aesthetic assumptions governing Greville's biography. By suggesting that Sidney recognized that the Arcadia was only an "unpolished embryo," Greville thus reminds us of his earlier description of Sidney himself as a living "plant of [Languet's] own polishing" (8). Where Sidney regarded poetry as an act of life-giving creation, Greville claims that it is Sidney himself who can "nourish" and "plant" life through his own example as Greville has described it in this Dedication.

Not only does Sidney become for Greville a compelling example of the Renaissance concept of the self as a work of art, but he also serves as the "pattern" for his royal reader to imitate. In making this argument, Greville adapts Sidney's aesthetics to retain his politics. In the intellectual genealogy that Sidney imagines, the poet's "procreancy of the spirit" becomes emphatically civic and militaristic: Sidney's poets "father" kings, military commanders, and civil governors through their works. Reading Greville's introduction in the context of Sidney's definition of poetry, it is clear that figures such as Languet take on the role that Sidney assigned to the poet. As a "father" and "nurse of knowledge," Languet gives Sidney what Sidney would have the poet give his readers. For Greville, however, Languet becomes this initiatory figure precisely because he was a political thinker and international diplomat rather than a poet. Languet "delivers" ideas to Sidney that in better circumstances he would have given to princes and governors. In Greville's account- disingenuous as it is - Sidney and Languet meet because Languet had been "sequestered from his serverall Functions under a mighty King, and Saxonnie, the greatest Prince of Germany" (9). Unable to fulfill his rightful role as advisor to the prince of Germany, Languet thus gives Sidney a royal education. Greville places so much emphasis on Languet because he gives to Languet the role with Sidney that the exiled Greville wished to play for James.

Having begun the Dedication by defining Sidney's life as a true "creation" that supplants his art, Greville then shifts his attention to focus entirely on the exemplary force of Sidney's life. To show how Sidney became a "natural" work of art, Greville introduces what he describes as "pregnant evidence from the dead" to testify to the worth of Sidney's life (13). Using examples from William of Nassau, the prince of Orange, the earl of Leicester, and Sir Francis Walsingham, Greville demonstrates how princes and other men of the highest standing in society recognized that Sidney, as a good subject, exceeded and transcended that category. Greville draws on a rhetoric of procreation to insist again that acts, not artificial representations, are man's truest creations:

to manifest that these were not compliments ... [but] ingenuities of spirit to which the ancient greatness of hearts every frankly engaged their fortunes, let actions, their lawfully begotten children (equal in spirit, shape, and complexion to their parents), be testimonies every sufficient. (18)

Just as Sidney was most powerfully creative in what he did, rather than in what he wrote, such men produce "lawfully begotten children" through their acts rather than in their words. In employing the language of procreation here, Greville aligns these noble men with Languet: they helped "make" Sidney through their actions and, in doing so, participate in the creations that are proper, as "louing nourish fathers," to kings and magistrates?l

While Greville's definition of acts as "creations" reflects a dichotomy between art and life, his comments are directed primarily at what for Greville is the more important question of how subjects and monarchs both "create" and are "created" through the paternal acts that James defined as integral to monarchy. These apparently disparate subjects intersect, of course, because Sidney had argued in the Defense that poets are "makers" whose ultimate goal is to create of their readers good monarchs and good subjects. Greville thus intertwines his two accounts involving the duke of Anjou to demonstrate both how subjects may be created by monarchs and how, perhaps more importantly, monarchs may reciprocally be created by the actions of their subjects. The first example concerns Sidney's famous letter enjoining the queen not to consent to the match with the duke of Anjou. The second involves Sidney's altercation on the tennis court with the earl of Oxford, as witnessed by the duke's French delegation and other supporters of the Anjou marriage. Both situations initially appear to show Sidney failing to understand his proper place in the world and attempting to usurp rights that were not his. By writing against the Anjou match, Sidney presumes, as one who was "neither magistrate nor counsellor," to give adverse advice to the monarch on a matter involving "things indifferent" (37). When he refuses to leave the tennis court at the command of an earl, Sidney forgets rank and precedence (40).

For Greville, the point of these two "matches" is that both sovereigns and subjects must have a proper understanding of how they make one another through their actions. Elizabeth's decision not to punish Sidney for his letter shows her recognizing that, as a monarch, she must "fashion" her people (37). If the first episode offers an exemplum of how the monarch must be responsible in the creation of subjects, the second shows how subjects can in turn inform the creation of monarchs. When Elizabeth reprimands Sidney for quarreling with a lord, she suggests that she must uphold the earl's actions because rank is an institution of the Crown's making: there is a "necessity in princes to maintain their own creations, as degrees descending between the people's licentiousness and the anointed sovereignty of crowns" (40). Sidney responds by arguing that if great men are not open to honorable challenge, then "the over-grown might be tempted, by still coveting more, to fall (as the angels did) by affecting equality with their maker" (41, my emphasis). Sidney's answer shows that only good creations can be justified by a monarch: otherwise, such men may usurp the monarch's role by acting to "unmake" their maker. Greville thus transforms the comparatively simple notion of the king as maker articulated in the Basilikon Doron by demonstrating how Sidney can reciprocally create the monarch in ways that support and enable the monarch's true creations.

Although Greville primarily addresses James through Sidney's life, he also covertly critiques James through an analysis of other monarchs. I The discussions of these rulers are not "digressions" so much as they are the culmination of the lessons introduced in the Sidney sections. Where the account of Sidney thus concentrates on the proper role of the subject, Greville's analysis of other monarchs provides lessons on the role of the king. Throughout the Dedication, Greville argues for a redefinition of the Jacobean image of the king as a "nourish father." For Greville, weak kings are lavish in giving away gifts and titles; strong kings are wise in maintaining control over both their favorites and their finances. Greville introduces Philip II, Henry III and IV, and Elizabeth and Mary Tudor to attack James's behavior as a king. In his wide-ranging discussions of these monarchs, Greville repeats some of the criticisms most often leveled against James by his contemporaries. James was attacked for debasing the nobility when he created new gentlemen and for ruining the treasury by giving lavish gifts and grants to his favorites? Thus, as early as 1584, the French ambassador described James as a monarch who "loves indiscriminately and obstinately." Antony Weldon later attacked James for expressing that "love" in prohibitively expensive ways by bestowing gifts and honors on his favorites: James "never loved any man heartily untill he had bound him unto him by giving him some suite" and he "ever desired to prefer meane men in great places."' Complaints that James's profligate love translated into a dangerously profligate generosity became increasingly strident by the end of his first decade in office. As Neil Cuddy has demonstrated, critics such as Thomas Wentworth increasingly resisted royal appropriations requests by asking "to what purpose to draw a silver stream into the royal cistern if it shall daily run out thence by private cocks?"' During this period when Greville was probably revising the Dedication, complaints about James's practices in creating new titles also became prominent: although there was resentment over the ascendancy of favorites such as Somerset, the "sale" of titles that resulted in the creation of new baronetcies produced widespread anxiety among existing members of the nobility.

What distinguishes Greville from other observers, however, is his recognition that James's excesses are the consequence of the king's understanding of himself as a "nourish father." When Greville insists that good kings must be frugal and careful with their "creatures," he is not just repeating contemporary criticism of James. Greville does not rehearse any of the more vicious personal attacks against James: he makes no allusion, for instance, to physical deformities and limitations such as James's lisp.45 Instead, Greville consistently focuses on the creation of favorites and the bestowing of gifts and honors because these questions are consistent with his understanding of the king as a "maker." Greville thus compares the king's "creation" of favorites-in giving them court positions and noble titles-to the hatching of birds. As the king's "creatures," court favorites are the unnatural and ungrateful hatchlings of political expediency: "those creations of chance which hatch other birds' egges and, by advancing men out of chance or compliment, lose them again as fast by neglect" (7). Where proverbially it is the cuckoo who is considered foolish for laying her eggs in the nests of other birds, Greville instead emphasizes the stupidity of the bird who hatches the eggs: such court fosterlings will supplant both the true heirs and then the king himself. Henry III's favorites, "like lapwings with the shells of authority about their necks, were let loose to run over all the branches of his kingdom" destroying the law, the nobility, and the order of the country (107). Thought to run around with the broken shell on its head after birth, the lapwing epitomized the foolish "hatchlings" that the king created by indulging in foolish preference. With a shell on its head, the lapwing becomes an image of the false king, for it "seemeth to have some royal thinge, and weareth a crowne."4 For Greville, this false crown the broken pieces of shell-figures the usurpation of royal power that is the consequence of a sovereign's failure to recognize his role as a "nourish father." Elizabeth, by contrast, exercised control over her favorites. Even with Essex, she did not "make" creatures who were greater than she was: she did not try to "enlarge the eagle's nest" by allowing Essex to exercise dominion over her subjects or government (105, 107). In introducing such examples, Greville intimates that when James's hatchlings break their shells they might also break the crown.

As a text that critiques the definitions of kingship that, after the Basilikon Doron, became integral to James's reign, the Dedication is notably circumspect. Neither James nor any of his published works are mentioned directly. In this context, John Gouws warns that the literary conventions informing Greville's writing should make us careful not to read the Dedication simply as a covert topical criticism:

at least some of the discussion reflects Greville's reaction to conditions under the Great Queen's successor, James I.... [but] one should be very careful of regarding even parts of the work as attacks on the government of the day... [Greville] would have deplored efforts to find a set of correspondences between the literary works and his experience.?

Gouws is right to remind us that Greville is not writing revisionist history as topical propaganda. Nonetheless, as Annabel Patterson has demonstrated, courtly dissimulation had developed into a sophisticated art during this period. In the culture of censorship in which Greville lived and wrote, "restraint became a source of literary energy and motive." " Thus, Greville's clearest "instruction" on how this work should be read appears in the narrative arrangement of the "digression" on Elizabeth. Both the account of Elizabeth and the account of why he wrote about Elizabeth use the topic of royal censorship to point to James as the subject of Greville's self-censorship in the Dedication. Greville burned his manuscript of Antony and Cleopatra after the fall of Essex out of concern that it might "be construed or strained to a personating of vices in the present governors and government" (93). The Dedication, in turn, includes this discussion of Essex because Greville had to abandon his intended biography of Elizabeth due to Cecil's concern that "many things done in that time ... might perchance be construed to the prejudice of this" (131). Having seen how Essex's papers were read by court officers in a way that "warrants the construction of every line in the worst sense against the writer" (94), Greville here desists from his project when he recognizes that Cecil would "require sheet after sheet to be viewed, which I had not confidence in my own powers to abide the hazard of" (132). The same political caution that made Greville burn his Roman play and made him desist from any real attempt to write a biography of Elizabeth clearly influenced his decision not to publish the Dedication. By referring to the loss of those earlier works, however, Greville makes us recognize that the Dedication imagines a different solution to the problems of political censorship. Greville kept his Dedication, so often revised but never published, because it would establish a new kind of king who would be able to read texts such as Antony and Cleopatra as acts of counsel instead of stories of sedition.

That Greville stopped giving James advice was not only an act of political expediency. To Greville, the fact that James misunderstood his own self-appointed role as a "nourish father" made it impossible for Greville to continue in his role as counselor since James's understanding of what it meant to be a king precluded any true counsel. Instead, Greville records his dissatisfaction and his unheeded advice in the closet dramas which show more vividly than the Dedication what happens to kings who misconceive their role as king. In this context, it is clear that the Dedication is as political, in its way, as are the plays and treatises that it was intended to introduce. Where the treatises function as "choruses" to the plays, the Dedication provides a topical prologue to the whole subject of "ambitious governors" (133). Prefacing the plays with the Dedication, Greville uses Sidney's Defense to imagine the Basilikon Doron that he would have had James write-or better yet, the book that James should have read when he himself was a young prince. Texas Christian University