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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
The image of the Hermaphrodite with which Spenser presents the union of Amoret and Scudamour in his original conclusion to Book IIIof The Faerie Queene draws on two distinct iconographic traditions: the Ovidian scene of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis which had become a symbol of marriage in Renaissance emblem books, and the single androgynous figure found in antique Roman statues which bear an uncertain relationship to Platonic notions of perfection. Such a conflation enables Spenser to emphasize and complete patterns of imagery which he has been developing throughout Book III: Britomart as patroness of Chastity has assumed an Amazonian role which stresses her androgynous self-sufficiency, but she has been repeatedly shown as tormented by visions of love. Like Guyon in Hook II, she fulfills her immediate quest when she liberates a victim of enchantment; but although she differs from Guyon in her destined participation in British history, she remains aware that within the context of the Book of Chastity she can be wholly chaste only at the price of her continuing incompleteness as a woman. Spenser's poem in its three-book form shares with other Elizabethan works a preoccupation with the paradoxical identification of love and death, a recognition that the self can triumph over change only by accepting its own destruction in marriage.
An earlier version of this essay was delivered to a Graduate Colloquium at the Univ. of Western Ontario in March 1969.
1 The Allegory of Love (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 330–33.
2 Spenser's Images of Life, ed. Alastair Fowler (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), p. 38; see also Allegory of Love, p. 344.
3 Thomas P. Roche, Jr., The Kindly Flame (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 134–36; Johannes Sam-bucus, Emblemata (Antwerp : Plantinus, 1564), pp. 124–25; Nicholas Reusner, Aureolorum Emblematum (Strassburg, 1591), sig. Diii.
4 Spenser's Images of Life, pp. 36–44. This Biblical con text of Adam's sexuality may appear as an image of the Fall as well, as the iconography of “Le Procès de Paradis” makes clear. Frances J. Stillman (“The Visual Arts and Spenser's Faerie Queene,” Diss. City Univ. of New York 1971) describes a copy of a tapestry in the collection of Henry viii at Hampton Court: a man and a woman are shown embracing, while the theological virtues appear in an arbor holding a cloth with a picture of the same scene. The tapestry is illustrated by D. T. B. Wood, “Tapestries of The Seven Deadly Sins,” Burlington Mag., 20 (1912), 210–22, 277–89.
5 “Venus and Diana: Some Uses of Myth in The Faerie Queene,” ELH, 28 (1961), 101–21.
6 A. R. Cirillo, “Spenser's 'Faire Hermaphrodite,' ” PQ, 47 (1968), 136–37, has suggested that Spenser may be alluding to a statue in the collection of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese (1520–89). While it is possible that Spenser may have seen an illustration of this statue, I can see little reason for singling it out as his source. Although Farnese was a Roman and certainly rich, he neither commissioned the work nor placed it in his bath: these elements in the allusion seem to point to an ancient Roman patron. And Cirillo's assumption that he is discussing a marble statue seems based on a number of misreadings of his Latin and Italian sources, with the further consequence that he has confused two separate statues. He describes the Farnese Hermaphrodite (actually an Apollo) as being of marble while quoting a description of it as “ex indice lapide,” i.e., of gray basalt. And he seems to have taken Piero Valeriano's allusion (Hieroglyphlca, Basel, 1575, fol. 135r ) to an Hermaphrodite “apud Petrum Melinum” (i.e., in the house of his patron, Pietro Mellini, on via dell' Anima) as meaning that it is “of white stone.” Obviously two different statues are involved, and two different collections; Aldrovandi, whom Cirillo quotes as having seen the Farnese statue while it was temporarily stored outside the Palazzo Farnese (and who adds that it was later installed in the Palazzo), records that this Farnese statue was discovered in the house of M. Fabio Sasso, which was on via del Governo Vecchio, 48.
I have been unable to find further reference to the Mellini Hermaphrodite; but it seems wholly possible that Spenser conflated verbal allusions to antique statues without direct recourse to any single model. Perhaps, too, Ovid is in some sense the source of this specific artistic allusion as well. He does describe the bathing youth as seeming a work of art to the watching Salmacis: in Golding's translation (The XV Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso . . ., 1567): “As if a man an Ivorie Image or a Lillie white / Should overlay or close with glasse that were most pure and bright.” Harry Berger, Jr., has suggested (“Busirane and the War Between the Sexes,” English Literary Renaissance, 1, 1971, 119) that Spenser may be referring obliquely “to the artistic riches, or richness, of Ovid” ; though 1 have been unable to find any references to Ovid as a “rich Roman,” or any use of “rich” in this sense as applied to a writer. But Spenser may be identifying the poet's paralysis as a result of his own copie with the fate of Narcissus expressed by his motto : Inopem me copia fecit. “This poésie,” says E. K. in his gloss to “September,” “I knowe to have bene much used of the author, and to suche like effecte as fyrste Narcissus spake it.” Anne Hollander, commenting on the story of Narcissus as an instance of “Arcadian mirror-gazing,” makes the point that “His death comes not from self-love, but from the revelation that the beautiful stranger he loves is a fiction of his own making” (“The Clothed Image: Picture and Performance,” New Literary History, 2, 1971, 490). In Spenser's poetic mythology from The Shepheardes Calender to the Faerie Queene, the poet appears as both binder and bound, both Busyrane and Prometheus.
7 Nicolas Reusner, Emblemata (Frankfurt: Feyerabendt, 1581), Part m, No. 25.
8 G. P. Valeriano, Hieroglyphlca (Basel, 1575), fol. 135r ; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 164–65.
9 The similarity between Spenser's conclusion to Book iii, and Donne's “Extasie” is touched on briefly by Merritt Y. Hughes in “Some of Donne's ‘Ecstasies’, ” PMLA, 75 (1960), 509–18. Writers on Donne have surveyed the Neo-platonic and alchemical literature with a sensitivity to their poet's ambiguous treatment of sexual and spiritual elements; see John Freccero, “Donne's ‘Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,’” ELH, 30 (1963), 335–76, esp. p. 365 for discussion of the alchemical identification of the “Hermaphrodite's” “dissolution” as both a death and a marriage; and Jay A. Levine, “ ‘The Dissolution’: Donne's Twofold Elegy,” ELH, 28 (1961), 301–15. By contrast, A. R. Cirillo, “The Fair Hermaphrodite: Love-Union in the Poetry of Donne and Spenser,” SEL, 9 (1969), 81–95, finds both poets using the Hermaphrodite image to convey the concept of a purely spiritual union. David Novarr, “Donne's ‘Epithalamion made at Lincoln's Inn’: Context and Date,” RES, 1 (1956), 256–63, sees that poem as celebrating a student mock-wedding with a male impersonating the bride; since Donne is already working variations on Spenserian themes, such a context would give a further irony to his refrain, “To day put on perfection, and a womans name.” The bridegroom's friends are in any case called “strange Hermaphrodites” from their attempts to mix study and play (1. 30).
10 Michael J. B. Allen, “The Chase: The Development of a Renaissance Theme,” CL, 20 (1968), 301–12, provides a useful summary of Renaissance treatments of the motif.
11 A. Kent Hieatt, “Scudamour's Practice of Maistrye upon Amoret,” PMLA, 77 (1962), 509–10, sees Scudamour (from the vantage point of Book iv) as losing Amoret in consequence of his excessive boldness in winning her. His comments on the Chaucerian context seem convincing; though as Roche points out (The Kindly Flame, p. 129, n.), to speak of “Scudamour's culpability” implies a moral judgment that the poem does not make. An adequate discussion of Spenser's debt to Chaucer remains a felt need; and it might usefully focus on the relation of Books iii and iv to the Marriage Group.
12 Merritt Y. Hughes, Virgil and Spenser, Univ. of California Publications in English, ii, No. 3 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1929), pp. 348–54; see also Roche, The Kindly Flame, pp. 53–56. William Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 142–43, sees this as an example of an “almost perverse” treatment of his sources characteristic of Spenser.
13 For a fuller discussion of this episode, with somewhat different emphasis, see Harry Berger, Jr., “The Discarding of Malbecco: Conspicuous Allusion and Cultural Exhaustion in The Faerie Queene, m.ix-x,” SP, 66 (1969), 135–54.
14 Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser, pp. 159–64.
15 Hermaphroditus himself, incidentally, owed his birth to the stimulus of a similar tableau vivant. When Hephaistos exposed his wife's infidelity with Ares (in an episode echoed by the trapping of Acrasia and Verdant, ii.xii.81), Hermes expressed his readiness to be caught in a similar trap. Aphrodite overheard the remark, and Hermaphroditus was the product of their union.
16 Barthélémy Aneau, Picta Poesis (Lyon: Bonhomme, 1552), p. 14; rpt. in Henkel and Schone, eds., Emblemata (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlags buchhandlung, 1967), cols. 1631–32.
