both tempters also take their intended victims to another place to show them what it is they are offering. The difference here(predicate) is that Satan is showing even something that is real, though his description of its effects is entirely different from what evening believes they will be. Eve's ignorance plays an important part here because she says that they have been commanded not to eat the fruit "lest ye die" (663). But Satan says that she should just look at him. He has eaten it and "yet both live[s] / And career more perfect [has] attain'd" (688-9). Eve apparently has some conception of what death center and she fears it. But Satan pretends to assume that she means an immediate death and promises that this will not happen. The argument here is rather confused since Eve's ideas about death could hardly be relieved by Satan's reassuranc
e unless she understood dropping dead on the spot and did not understand that the threat means that they will now be capable of disease and painful death. Yet what Satan offers her is actually enticing -- because it has been forbidden, because it is appealing in itself, and because of the lengths to which Satan goes in describing its merits.
twain tempters work with flattery to ensure the women's attention and to inflate their self-love in order to give them grounds to be offended, in Eve's case by the prohibition and in the Lady's case by the general idea that she is being thwarted. This idea plays to Eve's already existing desire for the fruit -- a desire that exists simply on the basis of its appeal -- and she is unable to answer Satan's arguments successfully.
The "Queen of this Universe," he flatters her, should not be deprived of whatever it is she wants (684). He compares her with the beasts, of whom he is one, and asks why they should be able to eat from the tree and lead such wonderful things as language while she, who has been located in charge of them, is forbidden to taste it. The appeal to Eve's bureau is followed by another appeal to her pride. She and Adam, Satan says, "should be as Gods" and this is fitting since the animals, like himself, will be as men if they eat the fruit (710). The basic argument is that the tree is on that point and should, therefore, be put to use. Why else would it exist if not for this reason. The easy lay claim that Gods are always making about how "all from them proceeds" is nonsense because "this fair Earth I see, / Warm'd by the Sun, producing every kind" and Eve, therefore, has a right to use whatever the earth produces (720-1).
In the case of Comus' "stately Palace mend out with all manner of deliciousness," however, what is offered is a complete dissembling (103). It is not even disguised, and the imprisonment in the chair and the presence of the rabble must give away the truth that he offers the Lady nothing worth
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