Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-l7hp2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T16:19:33.688Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Realpolitik and Elizabethan Ceremony: The Earl of Hertford's Entertainment of Elizabeth at Elvetham, 1591*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Curt Breight*
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh

Extract

In a recent essay on new historicism Louis Montrose is concerned that “the terms in which the problem of ideology has been posed and is now circulating in Renaissance literary studies—namely as an opposition between ‘containment’ and ‘subversion’—are so reductive, polarized, and undynamic as to be of little or no conceptual value. A closed and static, singular and homogeneous notion of ideology must be succeeded by one that is heterogeneous and unstable, permeable and processual.“ Montrose's critique and recommended solution seem both valid and commonsensical, yet they are infrequently practiced, perhaps nowhere more hegemonically than in discussions of Renaissance elite ceremonies.

Type
Studies
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1992

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank the following people for their comments on earlier versions of this essay: Thomas M. Greene, G. K. Hunter, Jill Kraye, and J. B. Trapp. I shall use the following abbreviations in the notes: CSPD = Calendar of State Papers, Domestic and HMC = Historical Manuscripts Commission.

References

Bergeron, David. English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642. London, 1971.Google Scholar
Bernard, G. W. The Power of the Early Tudor Nobility. Brighton, Eng., 1985.Google Scholar
Bond, R. W., ed. The Complete Works of John Lyly. 3 vols. Oxford. Eng., 1902.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, Eng., 1977.Google Scholar
Boyle, Harry. “Elizabeth's Entertainment at Elvetham: War Policy in Pageantry.” Studies in Philology 68 (1971): 146-66.Google Scholar
Breight, Curtis Charles. “Caressing the Great: Viscount Montague's Entertainment of Elizabeth at Cowdray, 1591.” Sussex Archaeological Collections 127 (1989): 147-66.Google Scholar
Clapham, John. Certain Observations Concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth. Ed. Evelyn and Conyers Read. Philadelphia, 1951.Google Scholar
Cooper, Helen. “Location and Meaning in Masque, Morality and Royal Entertainment.” In The Court Masque, ed. David Lindley, 135-48. Manchester, Eng., 1985.Google Scholar
Cunliffe, J. W.The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke.” Publications of the Modern Language Association 26 (1911): 92141.Google Scholar
Empson, William. Some Versions of Pastoral. Rpt. New York, 1968.Google Scholar
Fuentes, Carlos. Terra Nostra. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Harmondsworth, 1978.Google Scholar
Haigh, Christopher. “Introduction.” In The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh, 1-25. London, 1984.Google Scholar
Haigh, , Elizabeth I. London, 1988.Google Scholar
Harrison, G. B., ed. The Letters of Queen Elizabeth. London, 1935.Google Scholar
James, Mervyn. “English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485-1642”. Past and Present, suppl. 3 (1978).Google Scholar
Levine, Mortimer. The Early Elizabethan Succession Question 1558-1568. Stanford, 1966.Google Scholar
Lucretius, . De Rerum Natura. Ed. W. H. D. Rouse. Cambridge, MA, 1937.Google Scholar
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince Trans. George Bull. Harmondsworth, 1981.Google Scholar
Manning, Roger. “The Prosecution of Sir Michael Blount, Lieutenant of the Tower of London, 1595.” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 67 (1984): 216-24.Google Scholar
Marlowe, Christopher. Edward II. Ed. Roma Gill. London. 1967.Google Scholar
McCoy, Richard. The Rites of Knighthood. Berkeley, 1989.Google Scholar
Montrose, Louis. “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture.” In The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser, 15-36. London, 1989.Google Scholar
Murphy, W. P. D., ed. The Earl of Hertford's Lieutenancy Papers 1605-1612. n.p., 1969.Google Scholar
Nichols, John. The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth. 3 vols. London, 1823.Google Scholar
Patterson, Annabel. Shakespeare and the Popular Voice. Oxford, Eng., 1989.Google Scholar
Pecora, Vincent. “The Limits of Local Knowledge.” In The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser, 243-76. London, 1989.Google Scholar
Peele, George. The Life and Works of George Peele. Ed. Charles T. Prouty et al. 3 vols. New Haven, 1970.Google Scholar
Persons, Robert. A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland. London, 1594.Google Scholar
Puttenham, George. The Arte of English Poesie [1589]. Facsimile ed. Menston, 1968.Google Scholar
Rosman, Abraham, and Paula, Rubel. Feasting with Mine Enemy: Rank and Exchange Among Northwest Coast Societies. New York, 1971.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. Complete Works. Ed. Alfred Harbage. Baltimore, 1969.Google Scholar
Sheridan, Alan. Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth. London, 1980.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. Poetical Works. Ed. J. C. Smith. London, 1912.Google Scholar
Spring, Roy. Salisbury Cathedral. London, 1987.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London, 1987.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641. Oxford, Eng., 1965.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. The Crisis of the Aristocracy 1558-1641. Abridged ed. Oxford, Eng., 1967.Google Scholar
Valentino, Lucille. “Playing for Power: The Meanings of Elizabethan Entertainments.” Ph.D. dissertation. Wayne State University, 1983.Google Scholar
Wernham, R. B. After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe 1588-1595. Oxford, Eng., 1984.Google Scholar
Wilson, Jean. Entertainments for Elizabeth I. Totowa, NJ, 1980.Google Scholar
Yoch, James J., Jr. “Subjecting the Landscape in Pageants and Shakespearean Pastorals.” In Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, ed. David Bergeron, 194219. Athens, GA, 1985.Google Scholar