Life & Wisdom Quote by Elizabeth Montagu

Montagu’s line is a sly rebuke disguised as common sense: stop putting Shakespeare on trial in a court that never had jurisdiction. In the 18th century, “Aristotle’s rule” wasn’t a neutral yardstick so much as a badge of taste, wielded by neoclassical critics who treated the unities and decorum as cultural law. Shakespeare, with his time-jumps, genre-mixing, and appetite for the messy fullness of life, kept getting indicted for refusing to behave like a proper French tragedy.

Her legal metaphor does more than defend Shakespeare; it delegitimizes the entire prosecution. If the “laws” are local, then criticism becomes a kind of cultural imperialism: an attempt to annex one imaginative world to another. Montagu is arguing for a criticism that reads works on their own terms, but she’s also making a political point about authority. Who gets to declare the standard? Who benefits when “taste” is framed as timeless, rather than historically contingent?

The subtext is nationalist and modern. Shakespeare becomes not just a writer but an ecosystem, a homegrown genius whose value can’t be reduced to imported rules. Montagu, writing as an influential woman in a male-coded literary arena, also models a power move: she shifts the debate from whether Shakespeare “obeys” to whether the judges have misunderstood their job. It’s an early argument for contextual reading, and it lands because it treats criticism as ethics: fairness isn’t optional just because the defendant is dead.