Many of us will be in sympathy with some of the views of Thomas P. Roche, Jr., in “Britomart at the House of Busyrane” (PMLA, lxxvi, Sept. 1961, 340–344). On one important point, however, he is almost certainly wrong. It is not a shortcoming of Amoret, “lessoned/ In all the lore of love and goodly woman-head,” that she must view her relation to Scudamour in terms of the abusive Masque of Cupid, and that she must confuse her marriage with “adulterous” or “courtly” love. It is Scudamour who forces her into this position by his own practice of an aggressive mastery in the Chaucerian sense. He does not understand the love which depends on mutual freedom of choice and on concord, as in The Franklin's Tale; what he does understand is the imperious force of the love-deity who is imaged, for instance, in The Knight's Tale, in the Masque itself, and on his shield.