Anthony Copley and the paradoxes of parody

This essay investigates the parodic structure of A Fig for Fortune (Anthony Copley’s 1596 parody of The Faerie Queene ) and argues that greater attention to the poem’s parodic features illuminates its incongruities and expands our understanding of early modern parody at the intersection of religion and politics. Given parody’s dual commitments to both echoing and diverging from its source material, the essay highlights key examples of each, demonstrating how and why Copley imitates and deviates from Spenser as he does. While Fig ’s divergence from FQ accentuates Copley’s pacifist, anti‐jesuitical, and firmly Catholic impulse, the poem’s echo of Spenser threatens to undermine this very message, which ultimately points, to the paradoxes that define both Catholic dissent and the parodic mode. It is the poem’s structure as a parody – as much as its expression of the religious and political experience of English Catholics – that makes it valuable to our understanding of early modern literature.