'“To fashion grounds, from whence artes might be coyn’d”: Commerce and the Postlapsarian State in Greville’s Poetry'

A recurring theme in the literary works of Fulke Greville is the process of ‘declination’, Greville’s term for the progressive and irrevocable corruption of humanity and its political institutions. Yet, in contrast to the related apparatuses of the early modern state, Greville represents the emergence of commercial enterprise as a divine gift designed to help a fallen humanity rise above its debased condition. Such a view is coupled with his pragmatic support for commercial relations between nations as a means of maintaining international peace. This article argues that such emphases in Greville’s works provoke a number of ambiguities that arise as he attempts to accommodate pragmatic economic policy within the framework of ‘declination’ and in his Calvinist-influenced narrative of the development of the postlapsarian political state. Such ambiguities arise from the ways in which virtuous and industrious commercial activity will be adopted by a lapsed humanity and will inevitably come to act as a bulwark supporting the compromised institution of monarchy.