Hudibras
The story shows Hudibras, a Cromwellian knight and colonel in the New Model Army, being regularly defeated and humiliated, as in Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, Butler's main inspiration.
Apart from Lord Byron's masterpiece Don Juan (1819–24), there are few English verse satires of this length (over 11,000 lines) that have had such a long and influential life in print.
The satire "delighted the royalists but was less an attack on the puritans than a criticism of antiquated thinking and contemporary morals, and a parody of old-fashioned literary form.
"[2] Or, as its most recent editor wrote: "Hudibras, like Gulliver's Travels, is an unique [sic] imaginative work, capable of shocking, enlivening, provoking, and entertaining the reader in a peculiar and distinctive way, vigorously witty and powerful in its invective.
Throughout their adventures and humiliations, the third key person of the story, the rich widow whose money Hudibras would dearly like to get his hands on, plays an increasingly important role, and the conclusion of Part III is a lengthy, detailed, and unqualified declaration by the rich widow that men, on the basis of the entire preceding story, are clearly inferior to women.
This declaration is notable, in a large-scale popular satire written by an English male author in the seventeenth century, and reminds the reader that Hudibras's most crushing defeats were at the hands of Trulla, the village prostitute (I:iii:757–928, pp.
In his Commonplace book, recorded by his old friend William Longueville (1639–1721), Butler has a section on "Princes" (fols 70r–72v), where he shows a witty contempt of, amongst others, Charles II of England and his family: "No man can oblige a Prince more then hee that kills his father", and "CR [Charles Rex] came to the Throne by the Right of two Women [Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots] and therfore has the more Reason to be Kind to Them", and "One Brother ruind another by forcing Him to marry a Whore and was after ruind himself by whores".
[...] he by Geometrick scale Could take the size of Pots of Ale [... ] And wisely tell what hour o'th' day The Clock does strike, by Algebra.
He guides his life not by philosophical systems but by direct personal inspiration: "Some call it Gifts, and some New light; A liberal Art, that costs no pains Of Study, Industry or Brains."
'Tis a dark-Lanthorn of the Spirit, Which none see by but those who bear it: [...] An Ignis Fatuus, that bewitches, And leads men into Pools and Ditches, To make them dip themselves, and sound [i.e. "dive"] For Christendome in Dirty pond; [...] Thus Ralph became infallible... (I:i:493–506, 519; pp.
Under their heroic descriptions (Part One Canto Two) they are in fact Crowdero, a fiddler with a wooden leg; Orsin the bear-warden and his Bear, Bruin; Trulla the prostitute; Cerdon the shoemaker; Talgol the butcher; Magnano, a tinker; and Colon, a farmer.
In The First Part (1663) Hudibras and Ralpho set out, seeking knightly adventure, and encounter a local bear-baiting which they agree that they have to prevent, though they disagree about exactly why.
The skimmington procession pelts Hudibras and Ralpho with rotten eggs and attacks their horses; they make their escape, and go to find a pond to get clean in.
The Third and Last Part (1678) begins with a satiric letter from Hudibras to Sidrophel, satirising the activities of the recently formed Royal Society.
She traps Hudibras into a long argument about the true nature of marriage (she pointedly maintains that men get married principally because they are after a woman's money), which takes them till after sunset.
Terrified that it might be Sidrophel, Hudibras hides under a table in a nearby room, in the dark, only to find that he is being pulled out and trampled by what appears in the dark to be a group of demons; one cloven-hoofed demon, standing on him just as Trulla had done in Part One, makes him admit his intention to defraud the rich widow of her money; also to confess his lie about having scourged himself, and to confess his dishonesty and mercenariness, and more.
In Canto Three, as daylight breaks, Hudibras discovers that the "blackguard sprite" who upbraided him in the darkness was in fact Ralpho, who tells him that the cloven-hoofed demon who stood on him and questioned him was a local weaver in a parson's gown, and that the widow heard every word, and laughed.
The widow reads Hudibras's letter, smiles, and writes him a reply that avoids his trap, while spelling out in riotously contemptuous detail how right women are to despise men.
(I:i:155–160; p.6) He often echoes the complex, sometimes surreal, fantasies of the earlier Metaphysical poets such as Donne and Crashaw:[Love]'s but an Ague that's reverst, Whose hot fit takes the Patient first, That after burns with cold as much, As Ir'n in Greenland, does the touch, Melts in the Furnace of desire, Like Glass, that's but the Ice of Fire, And when his heat of Fancy's over Becomes as hard, and frail a Lover [and so on!]
So, the Emperour Caligula, That triumph'd o're the British Sea; Took Crabs, and Oysters Prisoners, And Lobsters, 'stead of Curasiers, Ingag'd his Legions in fierce bustles, With Perywinkles, Prawns and Muscles: And led his Troops with furious gallops, To charge whole Regiments of Scallops.
288f; cf Suetonius, Caligula xlvi) Butler relishes extremely long-developed images and arguments (too long to quote); an example is the start of Part One Canto Three where the reader encounters an epic battle, described in grand style in 145 lines, between a solitary hero and a crowd of his enemies.
The episode is described at heroic length, and the grandeur of the language both conceals and highlights the comic reality: the hero is a performing bear, his attackers are stray dogs, and his rescuers are a prostitute and a shoemaker.
[12] The book had such immediate popularity that even before the end of December 1662 at least one pirated edition had appeared, which led the licenser to put a notice in the official government newsletter (Mercurius Publicus) published on 1 January 1663, denouncing the unlicensed publication.
Henry Hart Milman (1791–1868), Dean of St Paul's Cathedral and editor of Edward Gibbon, remarked, "Two modern writers of imagination, Mr. Beckford and the late Mr. Hope, originally wrote, the one Vathek, the other Anastasius, in French; but perhaps the most extraordinary effort of composition in a foreign language by an Englishman is the translation of Hudibras by Mr.
Grey added extensive and rambling notes, many of them quite irrelevant, in which he determinedly tried to position Hudibras as solidly supporting the Church of England.
William Warburton, the friend of Alexander Pope, editor of Shakespeare, and later Bishop of Gloucester, wrote that he doubted whether so "execrable a heap of nonsense had ever appeared in any learned language as Grey's commentaries on Hudibras".
Neither Johnson nor Waller had accurately sorted the textual history, so neither could establish an authoritative text, but at least they both dropped Grey's misleading Church of England-focused obsession, and a good many of his partisan footnotes, so letting Butler tell his story from his own standpoint.
Charles Cotton (1630–1687) was one of the earliest to pick up on the new fashion, with a burlesque travesty (1664) of Book One of Virgil's Aeneid, beginning: I sing the man, (read it who list, A Trojan, true, as ever pist) Who from Troy Town, by wind and weather To Italy, (and God knows whither) Was packt, and wrackt ,and lost, and tost, And bounc'd from Pillar unto Post.
[26] In his edition of Hudibras (1893) R. Brimley Johnson published the remark: "...a very voluminous writer, but a sorry imitator of Butler, the notorious Ned Ward, an industrious retailer of ale and scurrility.
He, perfect Dancer, climbs the Rope, And balances your Fear and Hope: If after some distinguish'd Leap, He drops his Pole, and seems to slip; Straight gath'ring all his active Strength, He rises higher half his Length.
