Realpolitik and Elizabethan Ceremony: The Earl of Hertford's Entertainment of Elizabeth at Elvetham, 1591
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. Scholars from David