Fulke Greville's Figures of Repetition

Extract

AT THE MIDPOINT of his Treatie of Humane Learning, a long poem on the scope of human knowledge and the branches of the arts, Fulke Greville issues a self-scuppering precept:

For Sciences from Nature should be drawne,

As Arts from practise, neuer out of Bookes[.]¹

This appears shortly after a turn from a sceptical catalogue of the failures of human intellection in a fallen world, and the inadequacy and futility of art, to a more constructive vision of the possibilities of pragmatic action and limited knowledge. The epistemological pessimism of the first sixty-one stanzas is partially salved by a turn from theory to practice. But Greville's spurning of what can be learned from literature is of course a paradox. His overt rejection of theory appears within a didactic treatise. That rules should not be drawn from books is itself a rule in a book.

Such performative contradictions – what we might call, following Cælica 10, moments of ‘selfe-disagreeing’ – are characteristic of Greville's poetry. Cælica 66, for example, rejects ‘dead Books or Arts’ as ‘second hand’ and ‘False Antidotes for vitious ignorance’: