Speaking in Parables

This chapter looks at Heywood’s most enigmatic and critically divisive text, the long, allegorical narrative poem, The Spider and the Fly. Against prevailing notions that it is a parable of the Reformation, in which the flies are oppressed Catholics and the arachnids persecuting Protestants, it argues, through a close reading of the poems many twists and turns, that it began as a gentle parody of lawyers’ quibbles, designed for the More circle in the 1520s. This was revisited in the aftermath of the popular rebellions in Cornwall and East Anglia in 1549, and finally repurposed for publication in the mid-1550s, at which point a short ‘conclusion’ was added, which represented the Maid’s last-minute intervention to save the Fly and crush the Spider as a reflection of Mary Tudor’s ‘merciful’ treatment at her accession of those who had conspired to place Jane Grey on the throne. It suggests how the discussion of Mary’s accession is crafted to offer counsel to Mary to take a similarly merciful approach to religious dissenters in the bloody final years of her reign.