Mason & Dixon and Hamlet

[alice malice]

Rebecca Olson argues that the relationship between Early Modern texts
and textiles, familiar in the metaphor of storytelling as weaving or
spinning, is far richer than has been recognized, and that greater
familiarity with the cultural significance of hanging arras as
material and not simply visual objects helps us understand poets’
invocation of the textile medium as a conscious appeal to their
audiences’ desire for dynamic, personal engagement with the narrative.
She argues that the effectiveness of this appeal is premised on the
writers’ and audiences’ shared appreciation of tapestries’
multidimensional, woven nature, as well as on their complex and often
non-linear narrative aesthetic, which together make viewing and
interpreting vibrant, large-scale textiles a demanding, rewarding, and
ultimately subjective experience. Invoking tapestries in
post-Reformation texts is thus understood as a conscious strategy by
which writers such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, among
others, address and manage anxieties about the unpredictability of
audiences’ interpretations; to introduce a tapestry is to point up the
kinship between text and textile, to remind the reader that the
literary or dramatic text, like the hanging arras, requires and
supports “hands-on” hermeneutics. Olson divides the book into two
parts, establishing in the first three chapters the historical and
cultural context for her argument in the final three more speculative
chapters that the “blank arras device,” the reference to a tapestry
without an ekphrastic description of its visual content, underscores
the Early Modern literary works’ “debt to, and dependence on, a
nontextual mode of representation” (13).

http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/volume-44/441/reviews-1/olson-rebecca-arras-hanging-the-textile-that-determined-early-modern-literature-and-drama/


On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 10:41 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
> Weaving.
>
>   “Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers,
> the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of whaling voyage, when
> others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and
> short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in
> farces—though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I
> recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the
> springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under
> various disguises, included me to set about performing the part I did,
> besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting
> from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment" (Melville.
> M-D. 7).
>
> Of course, as crafty critics have shown, Melville pulled threads from
> Shakespeare, ropes, tapestries woven, and one can't help but turn to
> Oedipa, as the author has done nicely. There is more to that murder of
> Hamlet's lover's old man than the author finds. Very like a whale.
>
> Nice essay, thanks again.
>
> On Fri, Aug 29, 2014 at 12:08 PM, Dave Monroe
> <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>> https://pynchon.net/owap/article/view/57
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