Quilligan - Elizabeth's Embroidery.

Shakespeare Studies, 2000.

Elizabeth's Embroidery.

by MAUREEN QUILLIGAN

THE ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Princess Elizabeth covered a manuscript volume that she presented as a gift to her stepmother Katherine Parr in 1544 with an embroidered sleeve or chemise, for which she, apparently, had done the needlework.(1) Embroidered in bright turquoise blue and decorated with an interlaced design picked out in still-shiny silver thread, the volume makes an elaborate gift, with Katherine's initials, "K.P.," raised up in cotton batting-stuffed relief in the center of both back and front covers. Raised-work embroidered silver flowers are at each of the four corners, probably pansies, forming a pun on the French word for thoughts, "pensees." The French pun is appropriate because the manuscript is of Elizabeth's translation of Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir de l'Ame Pecheresse [The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul]. More cotton batting is used to raise cord-marks on the book's spine, as if the embroidered cover were part of the manuscript's actual binding, allowing the book to mimic authorship of a bound manuscript volume such as one might find in a library.

Paradoxically, the contrast between the smooth, nearly professional perfection of the gobelin-stitched embroidery in its elaborate interlaced design and the rather awkward italic printing of the manuscript itself, if it does not betray the hand of a more mature sewing teacher, reveals that even for royally born Elizabeth, the needle was a far more practiced instrument in her eleven-year-old hand than the pen.(2) She had not yet come under the tutelage of Roger Ascham, who, after age fourteen, had a pronounced effect on her handwriting. Perhaps the most important aspect of this object--which may help us to understand how the embroidery assists rather than detracts from her writerly authority--is that she dedicated the volume to her stepmother. Such a dedication may be no more than an attempt to please a queen of pronounced Protestant sympathies by translating the work of another, but it is uncanny that the text of this translated poem, sent from one female family member to another, covered in a personally worked textile, results in a gesture that looks oddly like the trade in woven heirloom items that Annette Weiner finds generic to female communities and that, she has brilliantly argued, requires us to revise our sense of the "traffic in women" outlined by Levi-Strauss and Marcell Mauss.(3) Indeed, using Weiner's theory of "inalienable possessions" as central to her understanding of the function of some gift-giving in Elizabethan society, Lisa M. Klein has argued that 1544 was the year Elizabeth had been established in the succession by an act of Parliament, although she was still illegitimate.(4) As a gift to a female member of her father's family--in which Elizabeth now had a slightly more secure place--the woven nature of the object calls attention to its inalienable status.(5) Klein never discusses the actual contents of Elizabeth's translation (her concern is for the embroidery), but the central trope of incest insists upon the endogamous withholding from circulation of the female speaker. Elizabeth's one remark about the content of the translation insists upon multiple intimacies:

 The which book is entitled, or named, The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful 
 Soul, wherein is contained how she (beholding and contemplating what she 
 is) doth perceive how of herself and of her own strength she can do nothing 
 that good is, or prevaileth for her salvation, unless it be through the 
 grace of God, whose mother, daughter, sister, and wife by the scriptures 
 she proveth her self to be.(6)

Such a metaphor speaks directly against the traffic in women that, according to Levi-Strauss, the incest taboo was supposed to protect: the textual content of a woman-to-woman gift of cloth, as Weiner has further suggested, and the endogamous status of the object indicate Elizabeth's very youthful self-citing at an anthropologically very powerful position for a female.(7) We usually understand the pen and needle to be opposed in the protofeminist discourse of the Renaissance, of course, but here, in Elizabeth's first production, the pen and needle go together in a first gesture of intrafamilial authorship. Indeed, Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass have recently argued that far from confining women, embroidery and sewing, especially in an aristocratic setting, were means for artistic display: "Whatever repressive and isolating effects sewing as a disciplinary apparatus might have been intended to produce, women used it both to connect to one another within domestic settings and to articulate public roles for themselves in the outer world."(8)

Nothing expresses the claims for female agency possible to make for embroidery and sewing more clearly than the cloth-draped interior of Hardwick Hall. Covering as much interior surface as the famous windows by Smythson--by which the house is knownthrough its jingle, "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall"--the embroideries and other cloth hangings made by Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury, her women, and her professional male embroiderers, are often of militant female virtues as well as more passive kinds. One set of very large applique hangings--made from recycled ecclesiastical cloth bought by two of Elizabeth's husbands during the dissolution of the monasteries--celebrates famous historical women along with their personified virtues: Zenobia (Maganimity and Prudence), Penelope (Patience and Perseverance), Lucretia (Chastity and Liberality), Cleopatra (Fortitude and Justice), Artmesia (Constancy and Pietas--Aeneas's heroic virtue). Other panels represent various female allegorical virtues conquering famous tyrants: Faith squashing Mahomet, Hope against Judas, Temperance conquering Sardanapalus.(9) The Hardwick Hall records reveal that in 1591-92 Bess gave Elizabeth's embroiderer a large sum of money to work pieces for a gown for the Queen; such payments are perhaps in lieu of the actual cloth that may have been given at various other times (Levey, 36).

Elizabeth's manuscript sleeve is on a much smaller scale than these gifts, of course; but it is clear that its transferral is the beginning of the object's familiar circulation which will work to increase (or decrease) the creator's reputation.(10) The eleven-year-old Elizabeth asks Katherine to keep the volume private, at least until its faults have been corrected: "But I hope that after having been in Your Grace's hands there shall be nothing in it worthy of reprehension and that in the meanwhile no other (but your highness only) shall read it or see it, lest my faults be known of many" (112). In essence asking for collaborative correction, Elizabeth fearfully expects that many will read the volume and, while not exactly assuming "publication" thereby, she reveals her concern for the performance as one by which she will be judged. One of the faults about which she worries is clearly her understanding of the French she has translated, but it is the entire object, including the embroidery, which would have been displayed by the Queen when she offered it to another reader. Elizabeth's needlework as well as her verbal mastery are both on display in the gift. At eleven she would not have known, of course, that the text would be reprinted five separate times throughout her reign; its reproduction in print means that the text ceases to be a private and inalienable object--but for all that it does not cease to work to increase the authority of Elizabeth and of the women whose writing it accompanies in the massive compilation in which it appears in 1582, Thomas Bentley's three-volume Monument of Matrons (later expanded to five volumes). In a very real sense, this print version of the text merely replicates in monumentally public form the authority the embroidery-covered object implicitly had within it.

Notes

(1.) Margaret H. Swain, "A New Year's Gift from the Princess Elizabeth," The Connoisseur 36 (1973): 258-66. I am indebted to Martin Kauffman, Department of Western Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, Oxford, for this reference and for aid in handling the volume.

(2.) Alfred Fairbank and Berthold Wolpe, in Renaissance Handwriting: An Anthology of Italic Scripts (London, 1960), 67, argue that Elizabeth was at the time a student of the writing tutor Jean Belmain, and that Ascham and Grindal only influenced but did not radically change her elegant hand. See figures 2 and 3.

(3.) Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Calif., 1992); see especially chapter 2, "Reconfiguring Exchange Theory."

(4.) Lisa M. Klein, "Your Humble Handmaid: Elizabethan Gifts of Needlework," Renaissance Quarterly (1997): 459-93.

(5.) See Klein, p. 465.

(6.) Marc Shell, Elizabeth's Glass (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 111.

(7.) For the now classic discussion of Levi-Strauss on which most feminist uses of the traffic in women rest (including Weiner's) see Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: 1975), 157-210.

(8.) See Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass, "The Needle and the Pen," in Worn Worlds: Clothes and Identity in the Renaissance (forthcoming).

(9.) Santina M. Levey, An Elizabethan Inheritance: The Hardwick Hail Textiles (London: 1998), 69.

(10.) Susan Frye, "Sewing Connections: Elizabeth Tudor, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth Talbot, and Seventeenth-century Anonymous Needleworkers," in Maids and Mistresses: Women's Alliances in Early Modern England (Oxford: 1999), 165-82, emphasizes the differences between Elizabeth Tudor's girlhood embroidery and Elizabeth Talbot's heroic wall hangings; without an appreciation of the theoretically powerful incestuous content of the translated text, it is difficult to see the similarities between the two Elizabeths' needlework. For further discussion see "The Case of Elizabeth" in my Incest and Agency: Female Authority in the Renaissance (forthcoming).