Here at the threshold of the Temple of Venus, we begin with a negation: ‘Not that same famous temple of Diane, […] Nor that, […] Nor all’. John reminded us of Milton’s lines: ‘Not that fair field / Of Enna, where Proserpine gathering flowers …’ (IV.268-69). Scudamour must now pass the brothers, Love and Hate, to get to the twins, Peace and Friendship (not those fair twins, Amoret and Belphoebe, nor those identical friends, Amyas and Placidas). The younger (Love) masters the elder (Hate, xxxii), like Jacob and Esau or Ephraim and Manasseh, though the narrator has been careful to distance us from the Judeo-Christian world as well as the pagan one (xxx) – this is not a simple, anti-Catholic mockery of idol-worship, despite stanza xl. We wondered who Love and Hate’s parents are – one mother, two fathers – and who Peace and Friendship’s father. Lottie pointed out that, in De Rerum Natura, Lucretius personifies Love and Hate as Venus and Mars. Here, we have gone back towards the Empedoclean principles of love and strife, but Spenser’s Love and Hate are still humanoid, not forces, per se.
This canto seems like a parade of set-pieces: the ekphrastic Temple; the hymn to Venus; the description therein of the fertile earth, full of lusty animals, a callback to ‘Sumer is icumen in’. The whole of Book IV feels uneven: two main stories, with misfitting bits at the beginning and the end. What, we wondered, is the relation of the Garden of Venus to Book III’s Garden of Adonis? Is Spenser not done?
Scudamour again asserts his exceptionalism: ‘So did he say, but I with murmure soft’ (xlviii). He finds Amoret surrounded by womanly virtues, including Shamefastness, who never looks up and blushes ‘As if some blame of evill she did feare’ (xxxvi), rather like Canacee, who, with ‘dread of blame and honours blemishment’ keeps watch on her own eyes, ‘of secret foes affrayd’ (way back in Canto 2). Scudamour carries Amoret off, ‘glorious spoil’, against her wishes (an act of rape?), perhaps explaining her subsequent fear at being alone with Britomart and later with Arthur.
[EKL]