ABSTRACT
Revels' audience-familiarity is suggested in Pandar's comradely advice to 'set this [bathetic tale] in your painted cloths' (V.x.45). Comic presumption exhibited by 'Lord' Pandarus is, like his oxymoronically-titled name, another class joke, while his taste suggests common home furnishings. Pandar familiarly 'answers you right painted cloth' (AYLI, III.ii.273). Such 'painted cloths', visible on stage, in entertainments and in homes, were cheap substitutes for tapestries. Thus, in a series of encompassing frames, or mise en abyme, the matter of Troy is inset with the tale of Troilus and Cressida, itself inset with the bathetic fall of Pandar, in turn inset with the mini-fall of the humble-bee-a tale recommended to be set within his beholders' painted cloths. Pandar's tale within a 'painted cloth' recalls not only Arachne's weaving depiction of the gods' amours (cf. Ariachne's, V.ii.152), but also the Iliad's Helen and her weaving of tales-within-the-tale. As Elizabethan hangings often contained Trojan War themes,16 Pandar's interior-decorating advice suggests a Trojan recit speculaire, a reflective play-within-a-play.
