ABSTRACT
Readings of Fulke Greville’s political writings have quarrelled over whether the writings are inconsistent, ironic, self-contradictory, deliberately opaque, or systematically dualistic. They have also debated whether more background information would make the writings more transparent, comprehensible, and coherent. This chapter argues that Greville is in fact a dualist, but a dualist without a philosophical system. It further argues that the tension among the dualities in those writings cannot be philosophically resolved. Rather the very tension between them is what enables Greville to write the kind of political texts he writes, which are at once idealistic and pessimistic.
