A Fig for Fortune

"A Fig for Fortune" is a 1596 long allegorical poem by the English Catholic writer Anthony Copley written as a parodying response to Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.[1] It intended to reject both Protestant portrayals of English Catholics as inherently disloyal to Queen Elizabeth, as well as hard-line Jesuit calls for Catholics to become martyrs by resisting the Protestant Queen.

Text

Unlike The Faerie Queene, which is written in Spenserian stanzas, A Fig for Fortune is written in the Venus and Adonis stanza: iambic pentameter rhyming ABABCC.

Vested in sable vale, exild from Joy,
I rang'd to seeke out a propitious place
Where I might sit and descant of annoy
And of faire fortune, altered to disgrace,
  At last, even in the confines of the night
  I did discerne aloofe a sparkling light.[2]

— Stanza 1

References

1. Shell (1999) p. 134.
2. Copley (1883) p. 1.

Bibliography

• Copley, Anthony (1883). A Fig for Fortune. Manchester: C.E. Simms, for the Spenser Society.
• Shell, Alison (1999). Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660. Cambridge University Press.