HUDIBRAS

Hudibras

Introduction

Indisputably the most important work by Samuel Butler, the mock-epic satire Hudibras appeared in three parts. An attack against Puritans, especially Butler's former employer and a colonel in the Puritan War, Sir Samuel Luke, it nevertheless focused on the masses as rabble, and any leader as vain and equally ignorant to the common man. He did, however, charge the dissent movement on six counts according to the scholar Edward Ames Richards: "hypocrisy, greed, lust, intellectual narrowness, low social status, and foolish mysticism." Richards is quick to explain that Butler did not write as "a bigoted Anglican or a blind royalist," as his "intellectual designs" proved much broader than those of the mere pamphleteer. "Isolated in his own cold and scornful mind," Butler lacked the capacity for identity with "current concerns," a fact Richards associates with his "remote tempers." Believing in neither spirituality nor science/logic as a source of truth, Butler did believe that truth existed and that it could be discovered through an application of human intelligence and a close observation of nature. The work proved so successful that the first part merited nine editions in the year it appeared, at least two of those pirated. Later scholars described the poem as too lengthy, discursive to an extreme, and challenging to readers of later generations.

While 21st-century aficionados and students generally experience Hudibras in excerpts, some critics adamantly declare it can be understood only when read in its entirety. Butler probably gathered much material during his employment with Sir Luke, who became the model for the character Hudibras. Influences may have included the Satire Ménippée, an anonymous French pamphlet that first circulated in Paris in the 1590s. A cunning political satire, it attacked leaders of the Catholic League at the 1593 States General and supposedly helped gain public support for Henry IV. Butler also looked to works featuring companions such as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in Miguel Cervantes's 1605 satire Don Quixote in fashioning his Hudibras and Ralpho. Capturing perfectly the tone of malice suitable to such a satire, Butler spent little effort in developing any high drama in the dialogue/diatribes of his subjects. He understood the importance of avoiding humanization of his characters, who remained monstrous in their perfidy and arrogance, never achieving any three-dimensional development, both man and master too vile to imagine within a real world. Its wit has supported its continued reading in a century ...