Sub Rosa: Pastorella’s Allegorical Homecoming, and Closure in the 1596 Faerie Queene

Abstract

Pastorella’s homecoming at Belgard, which fills half the final canto of the 1596 Faerie Queene, should have some climactic importance for both Book VI and Spenser’s poem as a whole, but it has appeared relatively insignificant, for most scholarship addressing Book VI published during the last twenty years says little or nothing about it. However, the episode involves an allegory of major interpretive importance, with tropological and anagogical aspects. Pastorella’s return to Belgard involves detailed textual correspondences with the formerly well-known Parable of the Prodigal Son, and even repeats some of the parable’s diction as in sixteenth-century English Bibles. According to an interpretive consensus extending from patristic exegetes to Elizabethan Protestants, that parable uses family reunion to portray God as a loving parent who cherishes as his children those who are lost to him but return, and restores their heavenly inheritance. As in The Fowre Hymnes and the Graces episode of Book VI, Spenser’s...