Susannah Brietz Monta’s impeccable new edition of Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune (1596) will be of interest to all readers concerned with Early Modern history, literature and poetics, and of particular interest to those who wish to explore the place of confessional identity and the politics of recusancy within these fields. It also has great significance for Spenserians. Beautifully presented by the Manchester Spenser series, Monta’s edition makes a substantial and convincing case for Copley’s place in literary history, a position that rests on both his status as ‘Spenser’s most sophisticated early reader’ (p. 56), and the poem’s own merits. Monta’s extremely comprehensive introduction notes that Copley’s verse ‘thinks in its own right and from an English Catholic perspective about romance’s narrative errancy, interpretations of Revelation, Queen Elizabeth I and her established church, and much else’ (p. 1). At the same time, A Fig for Fortune radically reimagines the final four cantos of Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (published in 1590; a fuller version appeared in 1596). Copley contests and imitates Spenser’s epic, in Monta’s formulation, to create an experience both ‘profoundly and productively disorientating’ for those familiar with his textual precursor (p. 1). Monta’s fulsome notes highlight points of connection with Spenser’s epic while situating Copley’s text within the wider literary and political discourses with which he engages.

As such Monta’s work forms part of ongoing critical efforts to restore the place of Catholic poetry as an interlocutor within—and not merely as an external commentary upon—English literary history, engaging most explicitly with the important work of Alison Shell, but also evoking the contributions of Michael Questier, Michael Graces, Scott Pilarz, Jeffrey Knapp and others. Monta’s overview of the context of Early Modern Catholicism within which A Fig for Fortune sits is powerful and concise (so much so that it might have been better placed before the biographical details of the Copley family that would be productively illuminated by it, or might be integrated into it, as she begins to do on p. 26). Robert Southwell is central here—to the ongoing critical debates around literary recusancy, to the poetry of the Early Modern period itself, and to the writing of his cousin, Anthony Copley, upon which his far-reaching influence is readily apparent. Like Southwell, Copley seeks to reimagine a fundamentally Protestant genre in terms that critique the English national church—but what Southwell does for lyric, Copley seeks to do for epic. Monta astutely observes that such instances show how many of our previous orthodoxies about confessional identity and genre need re-examining. Copley’s copious scriptural allusions show that biblicism is not the preserve of Protestantism alone, she argues, in a well-judged revision of Barbara Lewalski’s work on Protestant poetics, for instance.

More broadly, Copley provides an illuminating case study of the complex web of tensions between individual belief, religious conviction and political loyalties felt by so many—on either side of the confessional divide—in Early Modern England. A Fig for Fortune praises ‘Eliza,’ allegorically invoking Queen Elizabeth I, while distancing its narrative persona from her national Church, as in stanza 234 (p. 124):

Copley’s poetry here plays brilliantly upon the ‘eare-delightes’ of Spenser’s verse, deploying many of its characteristic archaisms (including a love of compound words and obsolete, pseudo-Chaucerian diction), speaking in the Protestant tongue of its predecessor to equivocally praise Eliza even as its poetic persona seeks out ‘another kind’ of spiritual joy (‘the proper hierarchy of loyalties is clear,’ writes Monta, p. 49). The potential for such moments to cast new light on our understanding of the intricacies of Early Modern poetic imitatio is significant.

Likewise, the implications of Copley’s response to The Faerie Queene are highly rewarding for our understanding of how Early Modern readers understood and used allegory, a topic that has been much theorized but for which we often lack precisely the kind of historically-situated documentary evidence that A Fig for Fortune offers. Other early responses to Spenser’s epic (such as that of Norfolk farmer Henry Gurney, or the annotations of John Dixon) have long frustrated critics in their preoccupation with Spenserian diction and insistence upon the most straightforwardly moralistic interpretations of The Faerie Queene’s allegory. Copley’s more subtle rendering of Spenser’s Duessa in the character of Doblessa adds nuance to the picture that we otherwise miss; she is ‘a figure representing both fortune and, arguably, the Church of England,’ Monta observes, ‘she is threatening precisely because she looks so much like the true Church’ (p. 29). Doblessa suggests that early modern readers such as Copley read Spenserian allegory in a much more multivalent way than the evidence furnished by his contemporaries might suggest. We as modern readers would do well to heed his lessons, and to recognize the multiplicity that the genre allows.

One brief note of skepticism: while I applaud the hopes of both Monta and the Manchester Spenser series editors that this volume might appeal to students of Spenser (p. 62), I fear that the cost of the volume may prove prohibitive in this regard. There is often little room in the undergraduate curriculum for the kind of detailed intertextual study of Copley’s response to Spenser that Monta persuasively argues for here. More’s the pity. This volume demonstrates the rich rewards of attending closely to such instances of trans-confessional textual dialogue, and for reshaping our literary canon accordingly.