Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama

By Rebecca Olson

Textiles have long provided metaphors for storytelling: a compelling novel “weaves a tapestry” and we enjoy hearing someone “spin” a tale. To what extent, however, should we take these metaphors seriously? Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama reveals that in the early modern period, when cloth-making was ubiquitous and high-quality tapestries called arras hangings were the most valuable objects in England, such metaphors were literal. The arras in particular provided a narrative model for writers such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, who exploited their audience’s familiarity with weaving to engage them in highly idiosyncratic and “hands on” ways. Specifically, undescribed or “blank” tapestries in the period’s fiction presented audiences with opportunities to “see” whatever they desired, and thus weave themselves into the story. Far more than background objects, literary and dramatic arras hangings have much to teach us about the intersections between texts and textiles at the dawn of print, and, more broadly, about the status of visual art in post-Reformation England.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Sep 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781644530689

Book preview

Arras Hanging

Arras Hanging

The Textile That Determined Early

Modern Literature and Drama

Rebecca Olson

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

Published by University of Delaware Press

Copublished with Rowman & Littlefield

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Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Olson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Olson, Rebecca, 1978–

Arras hanging : the textile that determined early modern literature and drama / Rebecca Olson.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61149-468-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-61149-469-3 (electronic)

1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Narration (Rhetoric)—History—16th century. 3. Narration (Rhetoric)—History—17th century. 4. Tapestry, Renaissance. I. Title.

PR421.O45 2013

823'.309—dc23

2013021803

™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgments

I have been working on this project, in one way or another, since I was an undergraduate, and as a consequence there are a great many people who deserve my thanks. First among these are my superb professors, beginning with Christopher Martin at Boston University, without whom I would not have pursued my passion for literature and tapestries. My passion would not have led to a book without Mary Baine Campbell (Brandeis University), the smartest reader I have known and best advisor I can imagine. I also received excellent feedback on the dissertation version of this book from other members of the faculty at Brandeis University, and especially from my second reader, William Flesch, whose suggestions for rewriting the thesis as a book made me excited to do just that. I am also grateful for the keen observations of my third committee member, Karen Robertson (Vassar University).

The book has benefited enormously from the insights of classmates, colleagues, and friends who read (and reread) its chapters, especially Vanita Neelakanta, Susan Meyers, Rachel Kapelle, Sebastian Heiduschke, Kara Ritzheimer, and Jan Priddy. Allison Hobgood has been a godsend of a reader and an inspiration. Over the years many friends have endured hours of tapestry viewing with at least a veneer of enthusiasm. Thank you all.

I would also like to thank my fine colleagues in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film at Oregon State University for their warm support. Special thanks go to Tara Williams, Peter Betjemann, Neil Davison, Vicki Tolar Burton, David Robinson, and Betty Campbell, who provided counsel throughout the exciting (and perplexing) process of writing a first book.

Fellow participants at a number of conferences and seminars, including the 2006 Mellon Summer Institute in English Paleography, likewise contributed invaluable feedback. Tapestry experts have been incredibly generous, and I could not have formed my argument without their willingness to answer my many questions. Chief among these is Tristan Weddigen, who organized a series of tapestry panels for the 2009 RSA annual meeting and edited the resulting interdisciplinary collection Textile Studies, Volume Three: Unfolding the Textile Medium in Early Modern Art and Literature (2011), in which I explain some of the premises of this project’s methodology. Richard Strier and anonymous readers for Modern Philology provided useful comments on an early version of chapter 6.

Many, many thanks go to Donald Mell and Julia Oestreich at the University of Delaware Press and Brooke Bures at Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. The astute and helpful reviewers of the manuscript also have my sincere gratitude.

Research for this book was supported in part by funds from the Renaissance Society of America, the Oregon State University Libraries, and Oregon State’s School of Writing, Literature, and Film. An Oregon State University Center for the Humanities research fellowship allowed me the time and space to finish the manuscript. I received excellent assistance from Stewart Tiley at St John’s College, Oxford, as well as librarians at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British National Archives at Kew, and the British Library. I am grateful also to Emma Biggs at the Textile Conservation Studio at Hampton Court Palace, who gave me a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at Henry VIII’s existing tapestry collection.

Finally, I thank my family for making it possible for me to do the work I love. I am especially grateful for my brilliant husband, Jeremy Colson. Last but not least, I thank my son, Elliot, who was born two weeks after the manuscript was accepted for publication, and who provided delightful company as I prepared it for press.

An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as "Hamlet’s Dramatic Arras" in Word & Image 25, no. 2 (April–June 2009): 143–53 (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02666280802261387). An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as "Before the Arras: Textile Description and Innogen’s Translation in Cymbeline" in Modern Philology 108, no. 1 (August 2010): 45–64.

Introduction

Hiding in Plain Sight

Large-scale woven tapestries, or arras hangings, were among the most expensive and coveted objects in early modern England. They were also one of the most written about: arras hangings appear in fictional courts in many of the most famous works of the period, from the evil House of Pride in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to Gertrude’s bedchamber in Hamlet. This book argues that, more than being mere decorative background objects, arras hangings represent an aesthetic to which early modern writers aspired. Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama reveals that some of the most foundational works of the English canon are more indebted to a preindustrial textile tradition than we have acknowledged.

The popularity of ornate arras hangings forces us to rethink long-held assumptions about iconoclastic tendencies in Elizabethan England, assumptions that have continued to influence our approach to early modern literature. The standard account has been that while Italian painting and architecture flourished during the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation left whitewashed England virtually devoid of visual representation. What the English did have, scholars have maintained, was poetry and drama: Shakespeare instead of Michelangelo. Tapestries, which were central in English courts and were also found in more humble settings, are among the best evidence that early modern England did, in fact, enjoy a lively visual culture. In fact, it was likely in part because of tapestries and their images—as opposed to or in lieu of representational art—that poetry and drama flourished at the end of the sixteenth century. Indeed, it would seem that weavers and writers had been inspiring one another in England, as they were in other European countries, for centuries.[1]

Many scholars have therefore begun to think about the ways that Renaissance tapestries—many of which depicted stories from famous works of literature such as the Iliad or Petrarchan poetry—were read as visual texts. New work on Renaissance arras hangings in the fields of art history and cultural studies, by essentially representing tapestries as visual texts, has placed increasing importance on what subjects were figured on their surfaces. Thomas P. Campbell has suggested that Henry VIII used tapestries as Protestant propaganda,[2] and Susan Groag Bell has traced a tapestry series owned by some of the most powerful women of the sixteenth century in an attempt to excavate the legacy of the French writer Christine de Pizan.[3] Literary scholars, meanwhile, have tended to focus on the surface of a described tapestry in a text in order to tease out the relationship between the fictional woven surface and the narrative’s larger objectives. I appreciate these readings, which essentially present the literary tapestry as an example of self-conscious intertextuality. In her account of Lydgate’s tapestry poems, for example, Claire Sponsler writes:

Tapestry poems confront us with an insistent blurring of representational forms that leaves us wondering what difference, if any, it made that a story was read from a manuscript page or viewed on a wall hanging or listened to in a performance; such mixing of forms urges us to reassess the modern preference for sorting texts out into discrete representational modes when they originally inhabited two or more at once.[4]

Indeed, a fascination with such insistent blurring of representational forms has characterized readings of specific literary tapestries; for example, Frederick Hard’s 1930 article Spenser’s ‘Clothes of Arras and of Toure’ argued that Edmund Spenser’s Ovidian tapestries were probably modeled on tapestries the poet had seen in life.[5]

This book takes a different approach, in that it is not primarily interested in what is on tapestries in literary and dramatic works. Instead, my focus is the way that texts could be, and were, read like tapestries. For early modern writers, the tapestry provided an aesthetically pleasing narrative model that was complex, multidimensional, and nonlinear. It was, furthermore, an established narrative model that had a much longer history than the printed word. In exploring the tapestry as a narrative model, Arras Hanging exposes the long connection between woven and written narratives: text and textile both come from the Latin tex-ere, to weave, and the traditional association between storytelling and weaving is preserved by narrative terms such as plot, clue, or spinning yarns, which explicitly refer to textile vocabulary. In the early modern period, when most households still produced their own cloth, such metaphors would have seemed very apt. When early modern writers represent tapestries in their works, they not only evoke the alternate narrative tradition of weaving but also highlight the real parallels between cloth making and storytelling operating in their specific works.

I did begin this project with an interest in tapestry descriptions—because tapestries were arguably the most prized and admired visual texts of the Elizabethan period they could, I thought, help us rethink the sometimes fraught relationship between the written word and visual display in post-Reformation England. In particular, I believed that the text/textile association could help us reconsider the rhetorical trope ekphrasis: the verbal representation of the visual. Ekphrasis has traditionally been seen as a paragonal or antagonistic move on the part of the poet: in describing a work of art, the poet takes on the visual artist and ultimately proves his own dominance.[6] A tapestry ekphrasis, however, would seem to challenge this assumption: because of the long association between poetry and weaving—what I call the tapestry metaphor in chapter 1—tapestries would seem especially well suited to represent the text itself, or literary texts in general, within a fiction. Rather than stage a contest between word and image, then, the tapestry ekphrasis would instead call attention to what these modes have in common.

However, as my project progressed, it became increasingly hard to ignore the fact that Spenser’s lengthy and detailed description of arras hangings in The Faerie Queene was rather singular, at least in the early modern period. Although long descriptions of wall hangings are common in medieval literature, with a few notable exceptions they seem to have fallen out of favor during the sixteenth century. Yet if sustained descriptions of tapestries are somewhat rare in Elizabethan literature and drama, tapestries are not. Once you begin to look, you begin to see them everywhere: in allegorical castles, in Mistress Quickley’s pub, and in long-winded prefaces to popular printed works.

In other words, most arras hangings in early modern literature are hiding in plain sight. We do not know what Gertrude’s arras depicts, nor what stories are figured on the arras hangings in Spenser’s House of Pride—we just know that they are there. Without a better sense of the significance of arras hangings, it is hard to know what to do with that. I have chosen to focus primarily on these blank or unekphrastic tapestries in Elizabethan poetry and drama precisely because the blank arras hanging presents the tapestry qua tapestry, as a three-dimensional object. Because we do not know what is on it, the undescribed tapestry in fiction helps us to think about what the materiality of an arras hanging—independent of its figured surface—contributes to a literary or dramatic scene. A poet’s reluctance to describe an arras surface can, I suggest, often indicate a larger indebtedness to this specific palpable narrative format.

Arras Hanging explains that writers used allusions to tapestries to signal opportunities for surprisingly dynamic audience engagement. The relationship between texts, textiles, and audiences in the early modern period was, it turns out, far more literal and reciprocal than we have recognized, for early modern writers invite individual audience members to materialize the fictional arras in accordance with their own experiences with texts and textiles outside the fiction. In the work of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser, in particular, the arras hanging often functions as a blank or unfixed screen that invites readers and playgoers to project something highly idiosyncratic onto the text. They might, for example, imagine arras hangings they had seen in life, and in this way weave their own experiences into the fiction. I think of the arras hanging in early modern fiction as a choose your own adventure moment in even a highly didactic text, such as The Faerie Queene. Spenser did this, I propose, to ensure his readers’ satisfaction with the text.

I began this project with the working assumption that to understand this dynamic, we needed to know more about the arras hanging’s cultural significance as a tangible object, as opposed an exclusively visual text. I knew that these tapestries were commissioned and purchased primarily by monarchs, woven abroad in Flemish workshops, and displayed for important political events. I set out to learn more about the conditions in which people actually interacted with the objects, such as when they were maintained, rotated on and off display, or otherwise physically handled in the day-to-day activities of the court. I assumed, that is, that how people would have seen and touched tapestries in life would have influenced the way they read their appearances in literary texts and dramatic scripts. To unravel this cultural history, I relied not only on textual modes of research (scholarship in both literary criticism and art history, contemporary manuscripts, and the literary texts themselves) but also on what I think of as textile modes of research: I interviewed tapestry conservators, learned to weave, and, perhaps most important, spent long hours in front of existing Renaissance tapestries in seven countries. These hands-on experiences with textiles helped me to better imagine how an early modern person—whether a home weaver, a courtier at Hampton Court, or a child witnessing a royal progress—might have seen an arras hanging, and which characteristics of that hanging, in addition to its figured content, they might have been struck by. I will never know, of course, what it felt like to behold a newly woven Flemish arras hanging while waiting to be admitted to the queen’s privy chamber. Similarly, it seems futile to even attempt to recover how an early modern person would have read a text like The Faerie Queene. However, my proximity to tapestries has helped me to imagine an early modern aesthetic I had not previously associated with the period’s most canonical works: an aesthetic characterized by flexibility, collectivity, and malleability.

This seems like a particularly good time to think about the relationship between Renaissance texts and textiles. Recent technology, almost all of which has freed us from paper, has somewhat paradoxically made us more interested than ever in the palpable aspects of reading, and the materiality of text itself. Email has all but replaced letter writing, and people are increasingly purchasing e-books rather than hardcovers or paperbacks. Even so, more traditional material forms metaphorically persist: for example, the file folder and envelope icons on my laptop—a "MacBook"—replace a fading, but not yet obsolete, physical system of organizing information.

We might see such icons as remediation or as transitional—as mechanisms that help to bridge the gap between one form of technology and another. But I suspect that it also indicates a deeper longing for the tangible, as our computers get lighter and lighter and our iTunes libraries larger. We love our new technologies precisely for the ways they are different from old technologies, and yet the metaphors we ascribe to them—and that envelope icon on my email program really is a metaphor—testify to the pleasure we took in those older, more palpable formats. It is especially telling, I think, that our new digital technologies borrow so heavily from the vocabulary of textiles—the images of the net, the web, and threads continue to help us conceptualize not only the transmission of information over space and time but also the organization of complex systems characterized by multiple participants.

The late Elizabethan period was, of course, also a time of great technological change. Books were more accessible and cheaper than they had ever been; literacy was on the rise, especially among women; and poets seemed confidently optimistic that their works would last for all eternity. Tapestries, meanwhile, began to be increasingly referred to as moth-eaten: bound, like flesh, to the ravages of time. Even so, poets called attention, again and again, to the inherent similarities between textile and textual production. Furthermore, as this book demonstrates, they consistently invoked arras hangings to underscore the beauty, complexity, and pleasing sophistication of their own narrative structures. What we might call the thingness of tapestries mattered to them, because it could be exploited to increase the dynamic potential of their works and therefore ensure reader satisfaction. This book provides the cultural and aesthetic contexts modern audiences require so that we, too, can actively participate in the collective narrative making encouraged by the blank arras device.

When one stands today before an arras at Hampton Court Palace in Surrey, one is immediately humbled by scale—first because of the sheer size of the hangings (many are over fifteen feet tall and twenty feet wide), but also because in these quiet chambers, the personal and quotidian is continually measured against an unseen time line felt throughout the palace, a historical thread that connects the enduring tapestries to the present day. The magnificent Flemish tapestries at the palace adorned the very same walls almost five hundred years ago. Many of the existing tapestries in the English Royal Collection were purchased by Henry VIII or Cardinal Wolsey in the sixteenth century and were woven from designs (cartoons) originally intended for monarchs and high-ranking officials in the countries where they were produced (England did not have its own weaving workshop until the late sixteenth century). We have a fairly good idea of what subjects were figured on the tapestries, thanks to the inventory that was taken upon Henry’s death: biblical stories, classical themes, and verdures (foliage) were among the most popular. On a recent visit to the palace, tapestries on display depicted the story of Abraham, the War of Troy, and the labors of Hercules.

Of course, many things about the tapestries have changed since the mid-sixteenth century. For one, they are now hung by Velcro: an ingenious substitute for the traditional iron hooks, the Velcro allows the arras hangings to be removed promptly in case of emergency (and even then it takes eight to ten people to bring them down safely). The tapestries have suffered considerable damage over the centuries: their colors, made from natural dyes, have faded (yellow has altogether vanished); some of the pieces’ borders have been cut off, while others sport water stains. Five hundred years ago, by contrast, the life-size images on quality tapestries would have seemed very animated: hung about a foot away from the wall, they would have swung slightly, their bright threads glimmering in candlelight.[7] But perhaps one of the biggest differences is that today, out of respect for the delicacy of these objects and with the hope that they will continue to persevere, we leave all interactions with the tapestries to the talented conservators who painstakingly wash and mend them back to something approximating their original glory. Even in the Great Hall—a room that housed hundreds of courtiers when the king was in residence and may have been built specifically to the dimensions of some of Henry VIII’s finest hangings in order to impress those courtiers—the tapestries are flat background objects, as still as wallpaper. In the public rooms of Hampton Court, tourists shuffling through in groups led by costumed guides would not think to duck behind the arras hangings to relieve their bladders, meet lovers, or listen in on high-stakes conversations, as they almost certainly would have in Henry’s day. The discovery several years ago at the Cloisters in New York that a lined sixteenth-century unicorn tapestry in their collection was actually double-sided, the original colors intact on its reverse side, thrilled many: we might see the brittle lining that obscured the back of the tapestry from Met curators for over sixty years as analogous to a larger blind spot, one that prevents us from thinking of tapestries as two-sided, three-dimensional, and vibrant works of art.[8]

It would be hard to overstate the importance of tapestries in early modern England: they were ubiquitous objects that could be found not only in courts and noble estates but also in schools, churches, and more humble homes across the nation. In 1587, William Harrison observed that the use of wall textiles—not necessarily woven—were widespread: The walls of our houses on the inner sides in like sort be either hanged with tapestry, arras work, or painted cloths, wherein either divers histories, or herbs, beasts, knots, and suchlike are stained.[9] When I began this project, I assumed that only noblemen would have been familiar with the very highest-quality woven arras hangings in England, but it turns out that they may have been far more accessible than I presumed. The portability of arras hangings meant they could be transported to whichever palace the monarch frequented at any given time, but also that they could be moved to churches or displayed outdoors. Many state processions, including coronations and the reception of foreign ambassadors, were occasions to line the streets of London with arras, which were admired by city crowds.

If it is therefore conceivable that lower-class readers of a text like The Faerie Queene had some degree of familiarity with royal arras hangings, we can be sure that Spenser’s explicit audience—gentle noblemen and the queen herself—would have had significant experience with the objects. Arras hangings were such an important element of royal iconography that English monarchs even took them on campaigns abroad, where they provided the backdrop for important international events; during the 1513 Tournai Campaign, for example, Henry VIII arrived on the shore of that city in an arras-covered barge.[10] These tapestries appear to have been chosen with great care and with the intention of communicating political messages, sometimes subtly. Although we cannot be sure which specific tapestries Henry used in this particular situation, we do know that he strategically purchased tapestries with biblical subjects such as King David, with whom he apparently wished to be identified.

Within royal homes, courtiers and royals would have spent long hours in front of arras hangings, for they lined waiting chambers and even created spaces within larger chambers by functioning as makeshift walls. For example, the Household Ordinances of 1493 specify that the queen’s confinement chamber be lined with arras hangings, including the ceiling.[11] The tapestries would have effectively blocked sunlight and draughts, which were presumed to be harmful, and they created