SOURCE: Ure, Peter. “Fulke Greville's Dramatic Characters.” In Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, edited by J. C. Maxwell, pp. 104-22. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1974.

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...