8.8 Louis Montrose

Louis Montrose helped define new historicism as a critical practice during the 1980s. His signature contribution was a framework for understanding how literary texts and their historical contexts shape each other, rather than treating history as a passive backdrop to literature. His work on Renaissance drama, especially Shakespeare, remains central to how scholars think about the relationship between power, culture, and literary production.

Montrose's New Historicism Approach

Montrose is one of the founding figures of new historicism, the critical movement that emerged in the 1980s alongside scholars like Stephen Greenblatt. Where earlier approaches treated historical context as background information, Montrose argued that literature and history are locked in a two-way relationship: texts don't just reflect their moment, they actively participate in constructing cultural meaning.

His method involves reading literary texts alongside non-literary documents (court records, sermons, royal proclamations, conduct manuals) to uncover how literature interacts with the broader culture. This isn't about finding "sources" for a play or poem. It's about seeing how different kinds of texts circulate within the same network of social meanings.

Renaissance Literature and Culture

Montrose focused almost exclusively on the English Renaissance, particularly the Elizabethan period. He was drawn to this era because it was a time of intense cultural negotiation: the consolidation of monarchical power, the rise of commercial theater, shifting gender norms, and religious upheaval all created a charged environment where literature carried real political weight.

For Montrose, Renaissance texts can't be understood apart from these dynamics. A Shakespeare play performed at the Globe wasn't just entertainment; it was an event embedded in specific power relations between the crown, the theater companies, the audience, and the culture at large.

Textuality and Historicity Interplay

This concept is probably Montrose's most quoted theoretical contribution. He captured it in a memorable chiasmus: the study of new historicism involves "the historicity of texts and the textuality of history."

• The historicity of texts means that every literary work is a product of specific historical conditions. Its language, themes, and forms are shaped by the moment of its creation and reception.
• The textuality of history means that our access to "history" always comes through texts, documents, and narratives. History isn't a set of raw facts sitting outside of language; it's constructed through the same processes of representation that shape literature.

The relationship between these two is reciprocal. Texts shape how people understand their historical moment, and historical conditions shape what texts get written, performed, and preserved. Neither side has priority over the other.

Subversion and Containment Dynamics

Subversive Elements in Texts

Montrose argued that Renaissance texts frequently contain elements that challenge dominant power structures. These might appear as marginalized characters who speak uncomfortable truths, transgressive themes that question social hierarchies, or alternative perspectives that complicate official narratives.

But Montrose was careful not to treat subversion as simple or transparent. A moment that looks subversive on the surface might serve more complex functions. Subversive readings are always open to debate, and Montrose resisted the temptation to declare any text straightforwardly "radical."

Containment Through Power Structures

Alongside subversion, Montrose identified containment: the mechanisms by which texts ultimately absorb, neutralize, or redirect challenges to the status quo. Containment can take several forms:

• A rebellious character is defeated or punished by the play's end
• Traditional hierarchies are reasserted after a period of disruption
• Transgressive energy gets channeled into forms that actually reinforce existing power

The tension between subversion and containment is central to Montrose's reading of Renaissance literature. He didn't argue that one always wins out over the other. Instead, he saw this push-and-pull as reflecting the genuine complexity of power negotiations in early modern England, where authority was always being tested and reasserted simultaneously.

Montrose's Key Essays

"Professing the Renaissance"

This essay lays out Montrose's theoretical program for new historicism. He argues that Renaissance scholars need to move beyond treating literary texts as self-contained aesthetic objects and instead situate them within the cultural and political networks that produced them.

A distinctive feature of this essay is Montrose's insistence on self-reflexivity. He argues that critics must examine their own institutional positions and historical circumstances. The scholar interpreting a Renaissance text is not a neutral observer; they bring their own ideological assumptions and professional pressures to the reading. Acknowledging this is part of doing responsible criticism.

"The Purpose of Playing"

Here Montrose turns to the social and political functions of theater in Elizabethan England. His central argument is that the playhouse was not a space set apart from politics but a site where power relations were actively negotiated.

He examines how Shakespeare's plays engage with gender, class, and royal authority, showing how theatrical performance could simultaneously question and reinforce Elizabethan ideologies. The theater's ambiguous social position (commercially driven, dependent on aristocratic patronage, subject to censorship, yet capable of staging dissent) made it a uniquely rich space for these negotiations.

Influence on Greenblatt and Gallagher

Montrose's work shaped the broader new historicist movement in significant ways:

• Stephen Greenblatt built on Montrose's framework to develop his concept of the "circulation of social energy," exploring how cultural capital moves between literary and non-literary texts. Greenblatt's interest in self-fashioning and identity construction in Renaissance literature owes a clear debt to Montrose's emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between texts and power.
• Catherine Gallagher extended new historicist methods to questions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in early modern literature. She also pushed the approach toward examining how literary and historical narratives compete with and inform each other.

Both scholars share Montrose's commitment to reading literature as culturally embedded practice rather than as autonomous art.

New Historicism vs. Old Historicism

Understanding what Montrose was reacting against helps clarify what's distinctive about his approach.

Old historicism treated the text as a window onto its period. New historicism treats the text as a participant in its period, one that both reflects and reshapes the culture around it.

Critiques of Montrose's Approach

Accusations of Political Bias

Some critics charge that Montrose and other new historicists project contemporary political concerns (particularly left-leaning ones) onto Renaissance texts. The worry is that new historicist readings find "subversion" and "power" everywhere because that's what the critics are looking for, not because the texts demand it.

Defenders respond that all interpretation is shaped by the critic's position. The difference is that new historicists acknowledge this openly, whereas older approaches often disguised their own ideological commitments behind claims of objectivity.

Overemphasis on Historical Context

A related critique is that new historicism can reduce literary works to symptoms of their historical moment, losing sight of what makes them distinctive as literature. If a Shakespeare play is treated primarily as evidence of Elizabethan power dynamics, what happens to its formal complexity, its language, its aesthetic power?

Montrose would counter that close reading and historical analysis aren't opposed to each other. The best new historicist work, in his view, emerges from sustained attention to both the text's literary features and its cultural situation. The goal is dialogue between text and context, not the subordination of one to the other.

Applications to Shakespearean Texts

Power Dynamics in Plays

Montrose's approach has proven especially productive for Shakespeare, whose plays are saturated with questions of authority, resistance, and legitimacy. New historicist readings have examined:

• Hamlet: The play's preoccupation with surveillance, performance, and the instability of royal succession, read against Elizabethan anxieties about the aging queen and the uncertain line of inheritance
• King Lear: The breakdown of patriarchal authority and its connections to early modern debates about kingship and filial obligation
• The Tempest: Prospero's control over the island as a figure for colonial power and theatrical authority alike

Reflections of Elizabethan Society

Beyond broad power dynamics, Montrose's method illuminates how specific plays engage with particular cultural tensions:

• The Merchant of Venice has been read in light of early modern attitudes toward Jews, usury, and commercial exchange, revealing how the play both reflects and complicates Elizabethan prejudices
• Romeo and Juliet has been situated within Renaissance debates about marriage, parental authority, and the competing claims of family loyalty and individual desire

Placing these plays in dialogue with the historical forces that shaped them doesn't flatten them into historical documents. It reveals the complex ways literature and society interact, which is exactly what Montrose's framework is designed to show.

Legacy in Literary Theory

Montrose's contributions have had a durable influence on literary studies. His insistence on the reciprocal relationship between literature and history is now a widely accepted premise across many branches of criticism, not just new historicism. His work also helped break down disciplinary barriers between literary scholars and historians, encouraging the kind of interdisciplinary research that has become standard in the humanities.

New historicism itself has evolved considerably since the 1980s, absorbing influences from postcolonial theory, gender studies, and cultural studies. But Montrose's core insight, that texts and contexts are mutually constitutive, remains foundational. If you're working with any critical approach that takes historical context seriously without treating it as mere background, you're working in territory Montrose helped map.