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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

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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.

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