Although Fulke Greville's literary reputation rests principally upon the lyric poetry in his sonnet cycle Cælica, he was an unsettled experimenter in all of the genres available to a gentleman Renaissance author, including the drama. He is known to have written three plays--Alaham,Mustapha, and Antony and Cleopatra--none of which were produced and only the first two of which are extant, the manuscript of Antony and Cleopatra having been destroyed by Greville himself. The reasons for this act of artistic annihilation were pragmatic and political; for a courtier who was ambitious to rise through the ranks of his monarch's government, the sacrifice of a piece of writing that might retard that advance was a small price to pay.

Greville had been born with a sense of his own worth. The scion of a wealthy Warwickshire land-owning family (son of Sir Fulke Greville, de jure...