SPENSER'S late-career pastorals feature several charming insectprotagonists who demonstrate lyric smallness within an epic milieu. Virgil's Gnat (1591) frames an inset lament with a surprisingly vast allusive scope. As Ronald Bond explains, the Gnat’s complaint “touches on tragic figures such as Sisyphus and Tantalus, enduring punishment in Tartarus, various chaste women (Alcestis, Penelope, Eurydice) who epitomize heroic love, [and] military heroes from both sides of the Trojan War (Hector, Ajax, Achilles, etc.).” In Muiopotmos (1591), an equally tiny butterfly is augmented as a small-scale Achilles armed for battle in a mini-ekphrasis that, as William Oram explains, “burlesques epic convention.” Similarly, in the verses known as “the Anacreontics,” which mark the transition between the Amoretti and the Epithalamion, a “gentle Bee with his loud trumpet murm’ring” (line 25) mischievously stings baby Cupid as he slumbers. Cupid is infantilized as “little Cupid” and “Venus baby,” in lines which relate his confrontation with an equally tiny mock-epic adversary: a “beast so small” who “flyes about / and threatens all with corage stout.” As Cupid complains of this injustice, Venus reminds him of his own smallness, which stands in contrast to the vast dominion he sustains over the hearts of lovers, both human and divine: “See thou thy selfe likewise art lyttle made / … And yet thou suffrest neyther gods in sky, / nor men in earth to rest” (lines 35, 37–38).

Spenser's attention to smallness in these poems indicates a curious preoccupation with the miniature. In this essay, I propose that this impulse to miniaturize is a Neo-Alexandrian or neoteric signature, and Spenser's revision of a distinctly Catullan stylistic, formerly manifest in its original Latin context as a fondness for diminutives. As the Catullan diminutive in turn evokes the Alexandrian epic miniature, this strategic miniaturization sheds particular light on the seeming aesthetic disjunction in Spenser's late career shift from epic to lyric composition. Alongside these tiny tropes, the lyric impulse to miniaturize is similarly manifest via narrative and paratextual framing. Indeed, Spenser's paratextual apparatus often disrupts narrative continuity, miniaturizing as it reframes the narrative sequentially (as in the “Anacreontics,” Astrophel, and The Shepheardes Calender), as a self-conscious unfinished fragment (as in The Cantos of Mutabilitie), or as one of several “smale poemes” or “parcels” (as in The Complaints).