Anthony Copley's A Fig for Fortune (London, 1596) constitutes the first major poetic response to Edmund Spenser's romance epic The Faerie Queene. A Fig for Fortune thus deserves a place in studies of Spenser's early reception as well as in the literary history of the English Renaissance itself. This book is the poem's first scholarly edition. It offers readers a carefully annotated edition of the 2000-line poem, an overview of English Catholic history in the sixteenth century, a full biography of Anthony Copley, an assessment of his engagement with Spenser's Faerie Queene, and information on the book's early print history. This extensive support for student readers makes it possible to teach Copley's poem alongside The Faerie Queene for the first time. Written by an English Catholic with an uneasy relationship to the English regime and to poets who praised it, A Fig for Fortune offers a deeply contestatory, richly imagined answer to sixteenth-century England's greatest poem. In A Fig for Fortune, Copley responds to the final four cantos of Book I of The Faerie Queene. But Copley's poem does not merely rework what one Catholic reader found objectionable about Spenser's work. It also thinks in its own right and from an English Catholic perspective about romance's narrative errancy, contemporary interpretations of Revelation, Queen Elizabeth I and her established church, and much else. Through its sophisticated, perceptive response to Elizabethan England's premier poet, A Fig for Fortune challenges a contemporary literary culture in which Protestant habits of thought and representation were gaining dominance. A Fig for Fortune will be of great interest to both students and academics in English literature.