Behind the arras: Tapestry ekphrasis in Spenser and Shakespeare.

by Rebecca Olson

Magnificent woven tapestries, or arras hangings, were elite status symbols in Tudor England: Flemish arras insulated palace walls, and painted versions adorned humble abodes. Once largely ignored, Renaissance tapestries are experiencing a rediscovery by art historians and cultural critics interested in how these elite objects functioned as pedagogical tools and as powerful---even propagandistic---political instruments. This project foregrounds the significance of fictional tapestries in major works of Elizabethan literature. To unpack the relevance of arras in early modern literature and drama, I describe what would have been obvious to early modern writers and their audiences---contemporary readers and playgoers would have known, for example, how these highly valued objects were made, who owned them, the occasions for their display, and what was commonly figured on their surfaces. A more fully contextualized understanding of literary tapestries forces us to reassess the operation of the rhetorical mode ekphrasis---the verbal description of the visual---in Renaissance poetry and drama.;Rather than stage a confrontation between word and image, a tapestry ekphrasis reminds us of the close relationship between texts and textiles. The arras underscores issues of representation in The Faerie Queene, Cymbeline, and Hamlet that have been overlooked or downplayed to our detriment. We have not, for instance, recognized the extent to which Spenser and Shakespeare present alternate discourses---and classical allusion, in particular---by way of a specifically material element. In so doing, they align hermeneutic processes with traditionally feminine textile practices such as weaving, translating, and unraveling. A tapestry ekphrasis creates an illusion of tangibility within a fiction and also highlights narrative threads in the text or play that are subtle but structurally imperative. The appearance of arras in these works creates opportunities for a rich array of interpretation: what is valuable about tapestries, actual and literary, is that they accommodate plurality without sacrificing narrative coherence.

250 pages, NOOKstudy eTextbook