Hamlet's dramatic arras
2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 25; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666280802261387
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Mary Baine Campbell, William Flesch, Ramie Targoff, Thomas A. King and Vanita Neelakanta for their helpful questions and suggestions. Notes 1. – See, for example, Christopher Pye's reading of Hamlet's slaying of Polonius in The Vanishing: Shakespeare, the Subject, and Early Modern Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 140–8; on Polonius' presence in the closet, see Lisa Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 151; Alastair Fowler discusses Gertrude's inability to see the ghost in Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 113–14; and Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones explore the challenges in costuming a Ghost in Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 245–68. 2. – Evidence for the kind of textiles that might have been used on the Shakespearean stage is inconclusive. Companies may have used plain curtains, borrowed or purchased tapestries or arras hangings, or even commissioned painted cloths — a Revels Office account from 1611, for example, lists ‘painted clothes’ among the stuffs needed for a performance at court (PRO E 351/2805). Peggy Muñoz Simonds has argued that a borrowed tapestry could have been used in early productions of Cymbeline (Myth, Emblem, and Music in Shakespeare's Cymbeline [Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992], p. 95); I wonder about the likelihood of this, however, since playhouse audiences could be notoriously unruly and abusive to stage hangings (see, for example, Andrew Gurr's The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], pp. 125 and 162–3). On the difference between arras hangings and tapestries, see Thomas Campbell, ‘Tapestry quality in Tudor England: problems of terminology’, Studies in the Decorative Arts (Fall–Winter 1995–1996), pp. 29–50. 3. – Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 59. The Short Discourse of the English Stage attached to Richard Flecknoe's Love's Kingdom (1664) maintains: ‘Now for the difference betwixt our Theaters and those of former times, they were but plain and simple, with no other Scenes, nor Decorations of the Stage, but onely old Tapestry’; cited in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), p. 4.370. Although Johannes de Witt's famous sketch of the Swan playhouse (1596) omits hangings, scholars have nonetheless determined that they were consistently used onstage for several purposes; see Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, p. 125. Plays spanning Shakespeare's career include direct references to arras — King John (1596), 1 Henry IV (1596–97), Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–98), Hamlet (1600–01), and Cymbeline (1609–10). 4. – See Jerry Brotton's argument for a Trojan tapestry onstage in Hamlet, which he says would retain ‘the trace of sexual violence and death that permeates the hanging in The Rape of Lucrece’; ‘Ways of seeing Hamlet’, in Hamlet: New Critical Essays, ed. Arthur F. Kinney (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), p. 172. 5. – Barachio refers to ‘the shaven Hercules in the smirched, worm‐eaten tapestry, where his codpiece seems as massy as his club’ (3.3.120–21). The inventory of the Royal Tapestry Collection taken upon the death of Henry VIII (1547) includes nine entries of Hercules tapestries, and the inventory of Kennelworth upon the death of Robert, Earl of Leicester (1588), includes 15 Herculean pieces; see The Inventory of Henry VIII: Society of Antiquaries MS 129 and British Library MS Harley 1419, ed. David Starkey (London: Harvey Miller for the Society of Antiquaries, 1998) and Ancient Inventories of Furniture, Pictures, Tapestry, Plate, &c. illustrative of the Domestic Manners of the English in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. James Orchard Halliwell (London: Adlard, 1884). 6. – (1.2.153–54). For other Herculean references, see 1.4.60 and 5.1.291. At least one of Hamlet's references to Hercules is traditionally interpreted as a nod to a visual feature of the Globe; in the second act, when Hamlet and Rosencratz discuss the players, Hamlet asks, ‘Do the boys carry it away?’ His friend replies, ‘Ay, that they do, my lord — Hercules and his load too’ (2.2.344–46). This has been presumed to be an allusion to the Globe's sign of Hercules supporting the world; Richard Dutton debates the likelihood of its existence in ‘Hamlet, An Apology for Actors, and the sign of the Globe’, Shakespeare Survey, 41 (1989), pp. 35–43. 7. – On Hamlet's Senecan attributes, see Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 7 (London and New York: Routledge and Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 24–6. 8. – Alan C. Dessen, ‘Recovering Shakespeare's images’, Word and Image, 4 (1988), p. 618. 9. – Charles Gildon, The Life of Thomas Betterton (London: Frank Cass, 1970), pp. 6–7. Linsey Woolsey was a plain cloth of loosely woven linen or wool; M. Channing Linthicum writes, ‘In drama, this material is always spoken of contemptuously, sometimes to indicate confused talk’; Costume in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), p. 81. 10. – Brotton, ‘Ways of seeing Hamlet’, pp. 168–9. Brotton argues that in this climactic scene in Hamlet, ‘there is a complacent tendency to overlook the importance of its cultural objects, which are, as it were, hidden in plain view, amid the intense psychological violence that we too readily assume the play is offering us’; p. 163. 11. – Dale Churchward, ‘Hamlet's editors and Gertrude's closet: putting Polonius in his place’, Études Théâtrales: Essays in Theatre, 15 (1997), pp. 221–38. 12. – Ibid., p. 236, n. 19. 13. – Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 63. Thomas Campbell has argued that Henry VIII, an enthusiastic collector of tapestries, strategically procured pieces with the idea of communicating specific, even propagandistic, political messages; see Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty: Tapestries at the Tudor Court, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 229–38. 14. – Brotton, ‘Ways of Seeing Hamlet’, p. 170. Henry VIII, for one, may have in turn sent spies to the Low Countries with the ostensible mission of arranging tapestry commissions; see W.G. Thomson, Tapestry Weaving in England from the Earliest Times to the End of the XVIIIth Century (New York: Charles Scribners', 1914), p. 30. 15. – King John (4.1.2); George Chapman, Bussy D'Ambois, ed. John H. Smith, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, gen. ed. Allan Holaday (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1987); 4.2.110–11. 16. – Non‐Shakespearean works that refer to arras hangings either in the scripted dialogue or in stage directions include Jonson's Bartholomew Fayre (Induction, line 7), Cynthia's Revels (Induction line 141, 3.4.65, 4.1.124, 5.4.39), The Divel is an Ass (1.2.46), and Epicoene (4.5.30); Chapman's The Conspiracie of Charles Duke of Byron (3.1.50), The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois (5.4.35), and The Widow's Tears (4.1.37); Lyly's Gallathea (4.2.1217); and Marlowe's Dr. Faustus (A‐Text, 2.3.113, B‐Text 2.3.114) and Tamberlaine The Great Part II (1.2.44, 2.4). 17. – Harington's letter is dated 9 October 1601; the current consensus is that Hamlet was written in 1601 (it was entered in the Stationer's Register 26 July 1602); see the Arden Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Thomson, 1982), pp. 1–13. Harington's letter was first published in Nugae Antiquae, 1804; see Harington, The Letters and Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930), p. 391. 18. – Harington, Letters, 20. 19. – Foxe's martyrology was one of the most printed texts of its time; new editions came out in 1570, 1576 and 1583. In 1571, Convocation ordered that a copy of the latest edition be placed, alongside the Bible, in every collegiate church in England. It has consequently been seen as a key text in England's ‘project of national religion and nation‐building’; see Jesse Lander, ‘Foxe's Book of Martyrs: printing and popularizing the Acts and Monuments’, in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 64–92. 20. – John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley. Vol. 8 (London: Seeley & Burnside, 1839), p. 621. 21. – Brotton, ‘Ways of Seeing Hamlet’, p. 170. 22. – Ibid. 23. – The space behind the arras would be a logical place for Claudius and Polonius to withdraw at Hamlet's approach; Andrew Gurr and Mariko Ichikawa suggest that if they do, ‘the suspense the audience experiences during the dialogue between Hamlet and Ophelia would be much keener’; Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 91. 24. – In John Webster's Duchess of Malfi, the Duchess asks to be overheard: ‘Good dear soul. / Leave me: but place they self behind the arras, / Where thou mayst overhear us. Wish me good speed, / For I am going into a wilderness / Where I shall find nor path, nor friendly clew / To be my guide’ (1.1.348–53). The position of being behind the arras — where one can at least hear what is going on but cannot be seen — is analogous to the audience's own position as ‘unseen’ voyeurs; in Thomas Dekker and Webster's Northward Hoe (c.1605; published 1607), one Bellamont says, ‘Lie you in ambush behind the hangings, and perhaps you shall heare the peece of a Commedy’ (4.1.116–17). 25. – According to Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones, one of the central attacks against theaters was that ‘audiences used the liberty of the theatrical space to rival the actors themselves in their dress’ — the theaters being a space where the Sumptuary Laws were rarely enforced; Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, pp. 180–93. 26. – As Andrew Gurr has argued, ‘Tricks with metatheatricality were an essential outcome of the discomfort writers and their audience shared, as staging techniques grew more sophisticated, over the dangers that lay in the deceptions of realism’; ‘Metatheatre and the fear of playing’, in Neo‐Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History, and Politics, ed. Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK, and Rochester, New York: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 100–1. 27. – (2.2.161–68) and (3.2.91–93). The metatheatricality of Polonius' actions would only be compounded if, as is suspected, the actor playing Polonius had also played Ceasar in Shakespeare's roughly contemporaneous Julius Ceasar (c.1599). 28. – Polonius gives Reynaldo specific instructions for initiating rumors about Laertes (2.1.40–67); advises Claudius to hide with him behind the arras in order to observe Hamlet with Ophelia (2.2.161–68); tells Ophelia how to conduct herself in this encounter (3.1.45–51); suggests that Gertrude call Hamlet in for an interview after the presentation of his play, and tells Claudius to be within earshot for that interview (3.1.180–86); and finally, directs Gertrude in how to question her son during that interview (3.4.1–5). 29. – Lisa Jardine notes, ‘The closet scene is more ostentatiously stage‐managed, more contrived within the suffocating court atmosphere of watching, controlling, and generalised espionage, than any other scene in the play’, Reading Shakespeare Historically, p. 149. 30. – Ian Gadd points out that the rat was the civic symbol of the town of Arras, so that when Hamlet cries ‘A rat!’, he ‘calls out an alternative representation of the town itself, gloriously subverting the original metonymy’; ‘The rat and Hamlet's arras’, Notes and Queries 44 (1997), pp. 61–2. 31. – West argues that Hamlet's own concept of theater, as expressed to the players (‘hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature’) breaks down with The Murder of Gonzago: ‘Hamlet's rational meaning‐ and knowledge‐producing mimesis escapes his control and begins to produce the knowledge in the wrong places’; William N. West, Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 127. 32. – Churchward points out that the stabbing of Polonius through the arras in Gertrude's closet is an editorial inference (now solid tradition) with no basis in early copies of the text — the second quarto does not indicate a stage direction, and the first folio simply states, ‘killes Polonius’; ‘Hamlet's editors and Gertrude's closet’, pp. 221–38. Although Churchward is right to point out alternative staging possibilities (Polonius could dart out from behind and immediately be stabbed, etc.), the traditional ‘through the arras’ is a reasonable clarification, given that in both the second quarto and the first folio Polonius tells Claudius he will convey himself ‘Behind the Arras’ and Gertrude later verifies, in her recounting of the murder, that Hamlet heard something stir ‘Behind the Arras’. 33. – Gurr and Ichikawa, Staging in Shakespeare's Theatres, pp. 113 and 144. 34. – Stern also suggests that the playwright might, on occasion, observe the play from behind the hanging; Tiffany Stern, ‘Behind the arras: The prompter's place in the Shakespearean theatre’, Theatre Notebook, 55 (2001), p. 114. 35. – Alan C. Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 151. 36. – Frank Nicholas Clary summarizes this debate in ‘Pictures in the closet: properties and stage business in Hamlet 3.4’, in Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions, ed. Hardin L. Aasand (London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 2003), pp. 170–88. Even the word ‘this’ in this scene has been carefully analyzed; Ejner J. Jensen claims that ‘By representing the word so frequently and with such emphasis, Shakespeare generates maximum energy, reinforcing its pointing function with an aggressive sibilance’; ‘‘This’ and ‘this’ in Gertrude's closet: an issue in annotation’, Hamlet Studies, 19 (1997), p. 100. 37. – Debate continues as to whether portraits should be full or half‐sized; see Clary, pp. 170–2. In Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (Two Cities, 1948), the prince wears his father's picture on a locket, and pulls a locket from Gertrude's neck to point to Claudius; in Kenneth Branagh's (Columbia Tri‐Star, 1997), the camera zooms in on what appears to be photographs. Two well‐known illustrations in Rowe's Shakespeare (1709 and 1714) depict Gertrude sitting beneath large side‐by‐side portraits of the two kings; see Marvin Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 644–5. 38. – See Rosenberg, p. 676; and Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare: Looking Through Language (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000), pp. 129–30. 39. – Harry Levin notes Hamlet's use of icon here, but nonetheless maintains that Hamlet confronts his mother with a pair of miniatures; The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 60. 40. – Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellenies. London, 1784. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1971), p. 63. 41. – Dessen, Elizabethan Stage Conventions, p. 61. 42. – Clary, ‘Pictures in the closet’, p. 172; Brotton, ‘Ways of seeing Hamlet’, p. 166. 43. – As the players arrive, Hamlet tells Rosencrantz: ‘It is not strange; for mine uncle is King of Denmark, and those that would make mows at him while my father lived give twenty, forty, an hundred ducats apiece for his picture in little’ (2.2.347–50). 44. – This is somewhat of a tautology, as the line from Hamlet, ‘the counterfeit presentment of two brothers’, is given as an example of def. 5, ‘imitated or represented in a picture or image’. See also Alastair Fowler, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 164, n. 155. Stephen Booth defines ‘counterfeit’ as ‘portrait’ in the context of Sonnet 16, but adds, ‘Shakespeare elsewhere plays on this meaning and counterfeit meaning “fraudulent imitation”’, Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 159. 45. – Sonnet 16 reads: ‘a. Now stand you on the top of happy hours, / b. And many maiden gardens yet unset, / c. With virtuous wish would bear your living flowers, / d. Much liker than your painted counterfeit’ (5–8). In a climactic moment in A Merchant of Venice, Bassanio opens the leaden casket and exclaims, ‘What find I here? / Fair Portia's counterfeit’ (3.2.114–15). 46. – 1 Henry IV, (5.4.34–35) and (5.4.115–17). 47. – (4.5.76). John Fletcher, A Wife for a Moneth, ed. David Rush Miller (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1983). 48. – Sidney writes: ‘Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis — that is to say, a representing, a counterfeiting, a figuring forth — to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture — with this end, to teach and delight’ (219–22); The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan‐Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 49. – The inventory of Henry VII (c.1522) distinguished between seven grades of arras, ‘counterfeit arras’, tapestry and verdure — the term was in use from the mid‐fifteenth century and became ‘one of the standard distinctions applied in the inventories of the wealthier nobility’; Thomas Campbell, ‘Tapestry quality in Tudor England: problems of terminology’, pp 34–7. 50. – Thomson, Tapestry Weaving in England, pp. 240–1. A ‘painted cloth’ is mentioned in Love's Labor's Lost (1594–95) (5.2.567). 51. – Campbell, ‘Tapestry quality in Tudor England’, pp. 37–48. 52. – I am not the only one to assume ‘counterfeit arras’ was still in use at the close of the sixteenth century; Brotton follows Clark Hulse in speculating that the ‘pictures’ Lucrece gazes on in The Rape of Lucrece were painted ‘counterfeit arras’; Brotton, ‘Ways of seeing Hamlet’, p. 174 n. 12; Clark Hulse, ‘A piece of skilful painting in Shakespeare's Lucrece’, Shakespeare Studies, 31 (1978), p. 15. 53. – The Two Noble Kinsmen, 5.5.41–55. 54. – See Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty, p. 79. Dynastic tapestries, with figures easily recognizable as members of royal or noble families, were more common in countries where large‐scale luxury tapestries were produced; see, for example, Frances Yates's comparison of French Royal portraiture and a series of grand tapestries now hanging in the Uffizi, The Valois Tapestries (London: Warburg Institute, 1959). 55. – One production for Forbes Robertson did, in fact, have a full‐length portrait ‘embroidered’ onto tapestry; see Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet, p. 676. 56. – Late sixteenth‐century ‘portraits’ were not, in any case, the examples of verisimilitude that we associate with portraiture today. Alison Thorne writes that figures in Elizabethan portraiture tended to be represented as ‘flat icons’: ‘The purposes which shaped the making of such images were an additional factor militating against illusionism, in that their primary function was to express the subject's social role, office, status and lineage rather than to records the quirks of an individual appearance or personality’, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare, p. 41. 57. – We might also include Ceres, the Roman goddess of corn, if we take the ‘mildewed ear’ to also allude to an image on the arras. 58. – The possible exception is Hyperion: a Titan, Hyperion does not feature in the more popular mythological stories (such as those in Ovid's Metamorphoses). Thomas Campbell discusses Henry VIII's Triumphs of the Gods tapestries (which includes the pieces Triumph of Bacchus, Triumph of Venus, etc.), possibly rewoven from the Grotesques of Leo X, in Tapestries in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence, Metropolitan Museum of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 225–9. For illustrations of Flemish Grotesques and Triumphs pieces, see Guy Delmarcel, Flemish Tapestry (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), pp. 86–8. 59. – We do know that the famous Italian painter and architect Giulio Romano, the ‘rare Italian master’ mentioned in Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale (5.2.88), designed a series of Gigantomachia tapestries (the war between the gods and the giants) for Ercole II d'Este of Ferrara. The foure‐piece set (now lost) were woven by the Netherlandish brothers Jan and Nicolas Karcher between 1538 and 1540 — Giulo's modelli are housed in the Louvre; see Campbell, Tapestry in the Renaissance, pp. 484–5. See also Thomson, A History of Tapestry, p. 201. 60. – Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book named the Governor, ed. S.E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), pp. 103, 173. Campbell, Henry VIII and the Art of Majesty, p. 172. 61. – Steffen Heiberg, Christian IV and Europe, Art Exhibition of the Council of Europe (Denmark, 1988), p. 115. The list of kings is drawn in part from Saxo Grammaticus' Gesta Danorum, which includes the legend of Amleth and is thought to be a source for Hamlet, probably through François de Belleforest's Histoires Tragiques: see Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, pp. 5–10; and M. Mackenprang and Sigrid Flamand Christensen, Kronborgtapeterne (København: A.F. Høst, 1950), p. 102. See also Jan Stefansson, ‘Shakespeare at Elsinore’, Contemporary Review, 69 (1896), p. 29. 62. – Ralph Berry, ‘Shakespeare's Elsinore’, Contemporary Review, 273 (December 1998), p. 313. 63. – Cay Dollerup, Denmark, Hamlet, and Shakespeare: a study of Englishmen's knowledge of Denmark towards the end of the sixteenth century with special reference to Hamlet (Salzburg: Instiut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975), p. 203. 64. – The account of Coroneburgum reads: ‘Intus magnificis ac planè regiis conclaubus, cubiculis, porticibus, menianis, ad stuporem, magnificè exornata, quæ picturis tapetisque vestita, in quibus omnes Daniæ reges acu venustè depicti videntur, spuernè, sculpturis polita & auro obducta resplendent’; Civitates Orbis Terrarum, 1572–1618 (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1966), p. IV.26. 65. – John Stowe, The Annales of England (London: George Bishop and Thomas Adams, 1605), p. 1436. Stowe's information on ‘the Castell of Elsenor’ came from William Segar, ‘King‐at‐Arms of the Order of the Garter, who traveled to Denmark with the Earl of Rutland in 1603’; see Stefansson, ‘Shakespeare at Elsinore’, p. 28. 66. – On the performative aspects of this very ritualized marriage, see Clare McManus, Women of the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing in the Stuart Court 1590–1619 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 60–8. 67. – Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: The Life of James VI & I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain (New York: St Martin's Press, 2003), p. 113. 68. – See Dessen's reading of the scene, Elizabethan Stage Conventions, p. 153. 69. – According to Pavis, text and stage operate on different symbolic levels, for while text is based on ‘the linguistic system of arbitrary signs’, stage is founded on ‘iconic signs which present a figurative form of the reality’; it is one of the efforts of mise‐en‐scène to fuse these two discourses. The only requisite for an ideal mise‐en‐scène, Pavis writes, ‘would be to make sure that the recourse to reference and to the text's situation of enunciation makes it possible to account for the greatest possible number of aspects of the text, without having these aspects contradict each other constantly; in short, that the interpretation of the text by the stage be at once productive and coherent; ‘Towards a semiology of the mise‐en‐Scéne?’, trans. Susan Melrose, in Languages of the Stage: Essays in the Semiology of the Theatre (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), pp. 131–161. 70. – T.S. Eliot's influential reading, for example, was that Hamlet's disgust ‘envelops and exceeds’ Gertrude: see Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically, p. 154.
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