“[T]he trappings and the suits of woe" (1.2.86): Hamlet’s Textile Imagination
Résumé
Hamlet is a conscious tragedy for a new theatre — both venue and genre. Early modern stage textiles were “loci of a dramaturgic and aesthetic debate” that “challenged the audience’s vision, imagination and memory” simultaneously. By combining theatre history, textual and performance analysis, this chapter argues that textiles in Hamlet guarantee the transformation of the character’s self, and the play’s genre and performance, by generating a functioning theatrical maieutic, a dialogue between the theatrical and the literary. To show that textiles partake of Hamlet’s transformative metadrama and metatheatre, this chapter begins by examining how they shape Hamlet’s stage-design, genre, setting and plot structure. Then it focuses on the way costumes and the stage arras refashion the characters and contribute to the play’s dramatic method of knowing the self. The surrogative power of textiles finally leads us to consider how revenge tragedy is modified by textile replications of the revenger and of the play-within-the-play.