Wilkes examines the text of the Chorus Sacerdotum from "Mustapha" in Fulke Greville's 1633 "Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes." The presence of the chorus in the "Workes" must be seen as an editorial interpolation.

Copyright Oxford University Press(England) Aug 1998

The Chorus Sacerdotum from Mustapha is more widely known than anything else Greville wrote, if only from Aldous Huxley's use of the first six lines of it as the epigraph to Point Counter Point (1928). The whole chorus was included by H. J. C. Grierson and G. Bullough in the Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse (1934), and by Helen Gardner in The Metaphysical Poets (1957) and The New Oxford Book of English Verse (1972). All these texts are based on that of Greville's Certaine Learned and Elegant Workes (1633), with the emendation of accidentals only. I cite the 1633 text, modernizing i and j and u and v, and representing it in roman instead of italic:

Oh wearisome Condition of Humanity!
Borne under one Law, to another bound:
Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sicke, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse Lawes? 5
Passion and Reason, selfe-division cause:
Is it the marke, or Majesty of Power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herselfe, doth her owne selfe defloure,
To hate those errors she her selfe doth give.    10
For how should man thinke that, he may not doe
If Nature did not faile, and punish too?
Tyrant to others, to her selfe unjust,
Onely commands things difficult and hard.
Forbids us all things, which it knowes is lust,   15
Makes easie paines, unpossible reward.
If Nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easie waies to good.
We that are bound by vowes, and by Promotion,
With pompe of holy Sacrifice and rites,           20
To teach beleefe in good and still devotion,
To preach of Heavens wonders, and delights:
Yet when each of us, in his owne heart lookes,
He findes the God there, farre unlike his Bookes.

The Workes were published after Greville's death. The Chorus Sacerdotum is not found in the Warwick manuscript of Mustapha, one of the set of scribal MSS of all Greville's poems and plays prepared late in his career and under his supervision, now in the British Library.¹ Its inclusion in the printed text gives the play two 'final' choruses. In 1952 Jean Jacquot reported an annotation in the copy of the Workes in the Bibliotheque Nationale² against the Chorus Sacerdotum: `This chorus is misplaced; but rather than loose it, I caused it to be inserted here to fill up this page.' ³  The hand has been identified as that of Sir Kenelm Digby. While Greville's friend Sir John Coke seems to have had charge of the publication of the Workes, he apparently devolved upon Digby the responsibility of seeing it through the press. Digby's copy is in the Bibliotheque Nationale because when he died in London in 1665 his library was still in Paris, and according to French law passed to the state.⁴

What is the meaning of the note `This chorus is misplaced'? The chorus has no place in the Warwick manuscript, nor is there any gap for it to fill in the printed text, where each act has a chorus already. Digby's 'misplaced' may be an acknowledgement of an intrusion: he has inserted the chorus where it can `fill up' a blank space. Alternatively, he could be acknowledging that in earlier texts of Mustapha the Chorus Sacerdotum had come at the end of the first act. In any event, the presence of the chorus in the 1633 Workes must be seen as an editorial interpolation.

What is the source of Digby's text? Four earlier versions of Mustapha are known, apart from the Warwick MS: the unauthorized quarto of 1609, and the manuscripts at the University Library, Cambridge⁵ at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington,⁶ and in the Robert H. Taylor collection at Princeton. There is no space to characterize each of these exemplars. Broadly speaking, the 1609 quarto is the most carelessly copied, and the most given to simplifying complexities in the text. It is the basis for the Chorus Sacerdotum in the Workes.

Digby had before him either a copy of the quarto or a text (now lost) very close to it. There are only two deviations. He reads 'rites' instead of 'rights' at line 20 - perhaps a natural correction - and `Is it the marke' instead of `It is the marke' at line 7, sustaining the series of questions from line 5 to line 12.

Otherwise I think Digby follows the quarto into error. Most obviously at line 21, when the priests declare that they are bound

To teach beleefe in good and still devotion

and the three manuscripts agree in reading (to follow the Princeton text in accidentals):

To teach beliefe in God and stine devotion.

Once the alternative version is available, it is natural to wonder why the priests should teach belief `in good and still devotion' (whatever that might be) when there is such insistence throughout Greville's work on Islam as a religion of conquest. To `stine devotion' makes more sense, and `to teach beliefe in God' fits with it. The quarto reading could be attributed to miscopying.

When at line 15 the priests observe that Nature

Forbids us all things, which it knowes is lust,

all three manuscripts read that Nature

Forbids us all things which it knowes we lust,

encouraging the interpretation of 'lust' in the broader sense of `incline to' or `wish for'. Again the quarto version is weaker, and again indicates the possibility of carelessness in transmission.

At line 9 the reading:

Nature herselfe, doth her owne selfe defloure

might seem less awkward than the reading on which all the manuscripts agree, that:

Nature her selfe doth with her selfe deflowre.

This, however, is a construction which Greville uses elsewhere, when the subject is involved in his own undoing. When in Alaham the usurper plans to use his wife to scheme against Mahomet and Caine, he makes the prediction `These Basshas with themselves she shall betray' (I. iii. 304). The less awkward version is probably an 'improvement' effected in the quarto and incorporated into the text of the Workes.

Although the Chorus Sacerdotum has been taken as the key to Greville's thinking, there seems little doubt that he discarded it from the canon of his work, as he discarded two other choruses from the early versions of Mustapha and substantially rewrote another. If anthologists are to continue to represent it, the manuscript readings seem preferable at lines 9, 15, and 21. At line 13 'Tyrant' might also be scrutinized, for though the Princeton MS supports it, the Folger and Cambridge versions have 'Tyranny'. There is no evidence anywhere for the variant in Huxley's citation, where Passion and Reason become `selfe-division's cause'.