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The three poets who can be considered England's first laureates- Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, and William Davenant-all wrote miniature mock epics in which they are concerned not with imperial greatness but, in various ways, with human littleness1; in so doing, they undermined to some degree the heroic, monarchic values their roles were supposed to underpin, and give the first hints of a tradition ambivalently critical of heroic values which would culminate in the great mock epics of Dryden and Pope. Spenser's "Muiopotmos," Jonson's "The Famous Voyage,"2 and Davenant's "Jeffereidos" differ from the Ovidian epyllion of the 1590s in their focus on heroic, martial matters, and a more direct use of Virgilian tropes; they all attempt to reduce the heroic mode to an absurd minimum, but they also attempt to find by that reduction what is worth preserving in the mode.
"Muiopotmos" is part of a larger collection, the volume of Complaints which Spenser and his publisher put together to capitalize on the success of The Faerie Queene. Though the volume might be seen as a 'collected shorter poems,' it is in fact remarkably coherent, its focus on the vanity of human things. This is a subject Spenser had begun his poetic career with, in his translations for Jan van der Noot's Theatre for Worldlings,3 and which was to be a persistent remora of his epic intentions. The volume can also be seen as an extended set of laments and meditations on the death of Philip Sidney, the patron Spenser may have intended to put in the centre of his epic. Although only the volume's first poem, "The Ruines of Time," is explicitly dedicated to Sidney's sister, the positioning of that first dedication allows thoughts of Sidney's death to hang over all the poems.4
The poem claims to be about "deadly dolorous debate" and "open warre" "[bjetwixt two mightie ones of great estate" (lines 1, 8, 3), yet tells the story of a spider killing a butterfly.5 Though it consequently seems to be a mock epic, filled with the bathos later characteristic of the genre, it ends on a note of genuine tragedy. On the other hand, as in The Rape of the Lock, there are continual hints of larger philosophical and political meanings which are...