The Adventures of Scudamour, “Cupids Man”

Scudamour, as Cupid’s man, in all the ambiguous complexity of this nomination, is a more crucial figure than he has often looked. As the specified male representative of Cupidean Love, his figure and fate could hardly be of greater thematic importance in Spenser’s epic romance. But Scudamour’s figure is also a magnet for doubleness of various sorts, for irony, ambiguity, and anomaly, and these characteristics are finally as much a part of his figuration as Love is. To a great extent, the whole of the exploratory, formally experimental Book IV answers to similar characteristics. While others’ love stories reach a happy plateau in this book, that of Scudamour accrues endless questions to itself. Scudamour’s culminating exploit in the Temple of Venus serves as a challenge to any promise of fulfillment in Book IV and asserts a typically Spenserian complexity of meaning at the erotic, gendered heart of this book. Scudamour’s tale of the Temple is the culminating instance of the doubleness that Cupid’s man cannot seem to shake, much as his figure starts to improve in Book IV before he returns in his tale to the outset of his career, the abduction of Amoret, and thereby introduces a temporal doubleness into his narrative—a doubleness marked by the conspicuous absence of Amoret. This doubleness continues in the evocation of Orpheus at his tale’s end.