Arras Hanging: The Textile That Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama by Rebecca Olson (review)

There are six chapters in Rebecca Olson’s book: the first three provide the historical and cultural contexts for her presentation of the theoretical and speculative possibilities of “blank” arras hangings (13)—woven tapestries about which writers provide no ekphrasis in their literary texts. Spenser’s arras hangings in the House of Temperance (book 2 of The Faerie Queene) and Shakespeare’s arras hangings in Hamlet and Cymbeline are the focus of interpretive analysis and persuasion in the three chapters that comprise the second half of her book. Although the book’s subtitle may appear to be an overstatement, Olson makes a deliberate case for the intertextual and metatextual relevance of arras hangings, whether ekphrastically described or “blank,” in the development of early modern literature and drama.

Given the focus of this book, it may be surprising that the cover illustration is neither identified nor cited. It is Alessandro Alliori’s Gobelin tapestry of The Adoration of the Magi in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore (1583). Furthermore, only two illustrations are provided: a miniature, black-and-white image of the “Boar and Bear Hunt” from the fifteenth-century Devonshire Hunting Tapestries, along with an enlarged black-and-white detail, and the title page from John Bale’s Illustrium Maioris Britanniae scriptorum, hoc est, Angliae Cambriae, ac Scotiae summariu[m] (1548). This lack of visual examples may seem more surprising when, in her conclusion, Olson recounts a memorable experience at Hampton Court Palace. She was invited to attend a special exhibit of one of the Abraham hangings and was astonished at what was “gloriously, breathtakingly illuminated” during the exhibit: “At that moment I was certain that for anyone who had seen tapestries as we just had, the mention of an arras in fiction would not fail to provoke him or her to remember, speculate, and admire” (152). The reader of her book has no opportunity to share her enthusiasm by looking at reproductions of a few colorful arras hangings to which she refers. The absence of visual images, with or without ekphrasis, is not entirely inappropriate, however, since Olson is not primarily interested in what is on tapestries in literary and dramatic works. Instead, her focus is on the way that “texts could be, and were, read like tapestries” (2).

Olson initially seeks to establish the parallel between writing and weaving, noting the etymological link between texts and textiles in the Latin texere, “to weave” (2). Unlike embroidery, which superimposes designs onto fabric, arras hangings and tapestries are composed entirely of intricately woven threads of bright colors. Olson offers the sonnet as an illustrative model of the structural relationship between writing a poem and weaving a tapestry by pointing out how the sonnet’s vertical and horizontal structure (fourteen-line rhyme scheme and iambic pentameter lines) is similar to “preparing a warp and then weaving in the weft” in a tapestry (20). After alluding to a variety of sources both literary and nonliterary, she posits that woven tapestries and arras hangings represented in fictions of the period were more metatextual and less ornamental than might be imagined. In order to illustrate, she examines examples in poetry, drama, and prose fiction.

Olson’s first example is Spenser’s ekphrastic description of the arras hangings in the Hall of Busirane (Faerie Queene, 3.11). She argues for the “self-conscious meta-textuality” of the arras thread as a “discolourd Snake” (29, 26). Olson claims that by presenting the thread as a snake “à la Genesis,” Spenser suggests that there is something not only deceptive but “both manipulated and … manipulative” about the representation (30). When Olson shifts her attention to Chapman’s Conspiracie of Charles Duke of Byron, she focuses on a metatheatrical moment when Byron is skeptical of “‘the stuffe, / Prepard for Arras pictures,’” which is nothing but “‘welcoloured threads, / Put into fained images of truth’” (31). This metaphor invites the...