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4 SHAKESPEARE'S ENGLAND
tapestry arras works or painted cloths wherein divers
histories, herbs, beasts, knots, and such like are stained '.
The ' histories' included episodes from the Bible and
ancient mythology. 1
With hangings of tapestry or arras work which invariably
covered the walls of the chief rooms in the large houses,
Shakespeare was perfectly familiar. Falstaff hid himself
behind the arras in the inn, when he fell asleep and suffered
his pocket to be picked by Peto (I Hen. IV, II.. iv. 585 ff.).
Polonius met his death when hiding behind the arras in
Queen Gertrude's chamber (Hatnl. 111. iv. 23). Tapestry,
as distinguished from 'hangings', usually presented like
' painted cloths' pictorial subjects, sometimes woven with
gold and silver thread, as in the Great Hall at Hampton
Court Palace. The base Iachimo, in his accusation of
Imogen, gave an air of truth to his slanders by describing
her chamber, which was
hang'd
With tapestry of silk and silver; the story
Proud Cleopatra, when she met her Roman.
{Cymb. 11. iv. 68-70)
Elsewhere Shakespeare suggests that tapestry was in his
day in process of supersession by the painted cloth. When
the tavern hostess, Mistress Quickly, laments the threatened
necessity of pawning ' the tapestry' of her ' dining chambers
'; Falstaff consoles her by declaring his preference for
the more modern and less expensive painted cloth :
for thy walls, a pretty slight drollery, or the story of the Prodigal,
or the German hunting in water-work [probably a guazzo or d la
gouache], is worth a thousand of these bed-hangings and these flybitten
tapestries. (2 Hen. IV, 11. i. 139-41)
As a boy Shakespeare must have been familiar, in
addition to ' painted cloths', with the curious scenes of
mural paintings in the Chapel of the Guild of the Holy
Cross, which adjoined the Grammar School at Stratford-on-
Avon. The walls of this chapel were covered with allegorical
and legendary paintings in fresco. Among these
had been a ' Dance of Death', but this seems to have been
destroyed with other religious subjects by the pious
reformers in the time of King Edward VI. The paintings,
1 A remarkable series of' painted cloths ', evidently inspired by the Mysteries
or sacred dramas of the Middle Ages, was painted for the Hotel-Dieu at Rheims,
and was, until 1915, in the Museum of that city.