A Parody of Pomposity: Samuel Butler's Hudibras

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Today, a bit of a genealogy of a now little read mock epic -- Samuel Butler's Hudibras -- which takes Chaucer and Spenser and Jonson and Cervantes, mixes them all up into a gloopy goo, and sprays it all over lemon-sucking Puritans!

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• 9:10 (Cont.) A Parody of Pomposity: Samuel Butler's Hudibras

Transcript

Hey, folks, thanks for joining me here on the Classic English Literature Podcast, where rhyme gets its reason.  And we’re actually back to some rhyme this time – see what I did there?.  It’s been a couple of months since we got tucked in to some really chewy poetry, so it feels good to get back to it.

The playwright and critic John Dennis said of today’s writer that he was “a whole species of poets in one,” because today’s featured guest, Samuel Butler, could deftly blend satire, elegy, burlesque, and lyric to a subtle and various effect.

Samuel Butler was well-known and quite well-regarded in his own day – the Caroline Restoration – but has faded from the consciousness of modern readers.  He still clung to his little corner of the canon in the early-20th century, but by the 1970s was reduced to a mere excerpt in the Oxford Anthology of English Literature, and today, there is a Butler-shaped hole in the Norton anthologies that dominate much undergraduate literary study.

I can sort of see why.  His great work, the mock epic poem Hudibras, is not the kind of literature fashionable in the academy anymore.  It really appeals to the concerns of antiquated critical schools like New Criticism and Historicism – its pleasure relies upon a knowledge of 17th century English history, the recognition of allusions to Renaissance literature, and a sensitivity to language that no longer occupy the central position in literary studies that they once did.  Yes, I know, I’ve produced dozens of episodes relying upon those very assumptions, but my audience is an erudite and curious community.  The fact that Butler’s poem is, at its very core, and extended allusion to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (which, too, no one reads anymore) means it was always going to get RIF’d.  Though I do have my personal preferences, I also understand that needs and interests change, and that some authors must be dropped so that others may be covered.  

But I’m here, as a podcasting necromancer, to raise the literary corpse of Mr. Samuel Butler from the dead – at least for a few minutes. Butler was born in 1613 in Worcestershire, England, to a fairly modest farming family. He was well educated—probably at the local grammar school—and later worked in various roles, including as a clerk and tutor for the Countess of Kent, the antiquarian John Selden, and Lord Carbery.  Guess whose side of the Civil War Butler was on?  If you said the Royalists, you are right!  But don’t get a big head about it.  There are creatures lying on their back at the bottom of ponds who would have sorted that out.  But Butler’s claim to literary fame wouldn’t arrive until his middle age. And when it did, it was sharp, irreverent, and pointed straight at the pious hypocrisy of his age.  By the time Charles II returned to the throne in 1660—ushering in the Restoration—Butler’s satirical talents found a ready audience. 

He published the nearly 10,000 lines of Hudibras between 1663 and 1678. Think of it as Don Quixote doing Puritan cosplay, a brilliant lampoon of the Puritans’ self-importance, legalism, and religious zeal.  The poem was a smash – went through nine editions, in fact.  Earned Butler a royal pension, too, as His Majesty was fond of quoting it.

You know what time it is, right?  Bring on the quick and dirty. 

Wait, you know what?  Butler gives us one.  Here’s the argument from the first canto:

Sir Hudibras his passing worth, 

The manner how he sallied forth; 

His arms and equipage are shown; 

His horse's virtues, and his own. 

Th' adventure of the bear and fiddle 

Is sung, but breaks off in the middle.

There’s no grand plot in Hudibras—it’s episodic, like a sitcom or picaresque tale. The real purpose is to skewer the Puritans, who, in Butler’s view, cloaked narrow-mindedness and power-hunger in the robes of piety and moral reform.  Our hero—if we can call him that—is Sir Hudibras, a knight who fancies himself a learned, righteous defender of Puritan values. He’s pompous, self-important, and utterly incompetent. His loyal sidekick, Ralpho, is a squire with equally absurd delusions of philosophical and theological wisdom.

Together, they set out to uphold moral order—or rather, butting their noses into other people's lives in the name of virtue.  Folks who, according to Butler, “Compound for sins they are inclined to / By damning those they have no mind to.”

In Part One, they attack a group of people innocently celebrating a traditional festival, seeing it as sinful. They're soon captured and imprisoned by the mob they tried to police, then released—though Sir Hudibras lies to Ralpho and pretends it was due to divine intervention.

In Part Two, Hudibras seeks to court a wealthy widow (purely for her money), but his over-the-top moralizing and hypocrisy blow up the plan. The widow mocks him and puts him through a humiliating test of love, which he fails miserably.

In Part Three, he consults a "cunning man"—a kind of astrologer-charlatan—for advice, then goes on various misadventures that further expose his foolishness, arrogance, and total lack of self-awareness.

As I hinted earlier, Butler takes the name of his protagonist from Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, in which a knight of that name is mocked for being more brawn than brain:

Yet not so good of deeds, as great of name,

Which he by many rash adventures wan,

Since errant armes to sew he first began;

More huge in strength, then wise in works he was,

And reason with foole-hardize ouer ran. . . .

Spenser may have picked up the name from the histories of Raphael Holinshed or Geoffrey of Monmouth.  At any rate, many scholars reckon that Butler’s character is based on one Sir Samuel Luke, one of Cromwell’s most inflexibly Presbyterian officers.  He later became the MP for Bedford, a position to which, in one of literature’s fun “small world” moments, John Bunyan’s future congregation elected him.

But even more than simply nicking the name of a minor presence from Spenser’s magnificent octopus, even a cursory reading of Butler’s poem reveals its great debt – or satirical contrast – to England’s great Renaissance epic.  There was an accepted rule for the mighty heroic poem, and that was it had to include an allegorical meaning, and Butler obliges with some instances of the roman a clef.  Footnote: a roman a clef is a fictional tale portraying real people under invented names.  End footnote.  So, as I said, Hudibras is the poetic embodiment of Samuel Luke.  But while, for instance, in Spenser’s poem, each of his knights is an allegorical depiction of a particular virtue (for instance, Sir Guyon in Book II stands for Temperance), Butler makes his characters the manifestations of particular vices – especially hypocrisy and stupidity, or nonsense.

Another great font of inspiration for Butler are the satires of Ben Jonson, whose plays The Alchemist and Volpone we covered in episode 68.  Jonson made his bones exposing the vices of his age—greed, vanity, false piety—through grotesque and deluded characters. In Volpone, we get a conman pretending to be on his deathbed to fleece would-be heirs. In The Alchemist, we watch a trio of charlatans swindle gullible Londoners with fake potions and mystical nonsense.  Jonson’s characters aren’t realistic—they’re humours, defined by a single dominant trait: avarice, ambition, gullibility.

Butler takes that same satirical scalpel and applies it to the Puritans. He even mimics Jonson’s tendency to use grotesque physical or verbal tics to highlight the ridiculousness of his characters.  Sir Hudibras, much like Jonson’s con artists and fools, is a man convinced of his own righteousness, yet blind to his absurdity. He talks in learned language, but his logic is nonsense. His morality is hollow. And like Jonson’s characters, he’s constantly caught in the gap between who he thinks he is and what he really is—a hypocrite in holy clothing. Hudibras isn’t a psychologically deep character. He’s a type—a satire of the self-important Puritan justice of the peace, puffed up with bad Latin and worse reasoning.

For both Jonson and Butler, the world is a kind of moral carnival—chaotic, theatrical, and crawling with frauds. There’s no grand redemption arc. The point is to expose the absurdity and let the audience laugh—or wince—at the spectacle. And while Jonson does this on stage with bustling Londoners, Butler does it in verse with Cromwellian moralizers. 

So what Butler serves up is Jonsonian ridicule in Spenserian costume.  It is parody, put simply.  The poem opens with the precis quoted above, then sets our story during the Civil Wars and the Commonwealth:

When civil fury first grew high,

And men fell out, they knew not why;

When hard words, jealousies, and fears,

Set folks together by the ears,

And made them fight, like mad or drunk,

For Dame Religion, as for punk.

Then we are introduced to our gallant knight:

A wight he was, whose very sight would

Entitle him Mirror of Knighthood;

That never bent his stubborn knee

To any thing but Chivalry.

Very Spenserian, that.  Actually, very Chaucerian – sounds like it describes the Knight from The Canterbury Tales.  Perspicacious listeners will recall from episode 39 that Spenser consciously adopted an archaic idiom as a shout-out to his medieval mentor.   There’s a nice little moment when the reader is introduced to Ralph, or Ralpho (sounds more romantic and continental), Hudibras’ no-doubt illiterate squire.  Butler writes:

A squire he had, whose name was RALPH,

That in th' adventure went his half . . . .

OK, there’s a bit more going on here than meets the eye.  I brought it up because of the slant rhyme of “Ralph” and “half.”  To read it as a perfect rhyme, we’d have to pronounce the “l” in “half” – and I think Butler wants us to here, because it sounds Spenserian or Chaucerian – rings of Middle English and the days of yore.  I don’t think we’re supposed to pronounce the squire’s name “Rafe” in this line because then the rhyme is not simply slanted, it’s downright cock-eyed.  Butler goes on to note, in a meta moment, that

Though writers, for more stately tone,

Do call him RALPHO; 'tis all one;

And when we can with metre safe,

We'll call him so; if not, plain RALPH:

(For rhyme the rudder is of verses,

With which like ships they steer their courses.)

I like this because there’s a bit of a poke in the eye to pedantic versifiers.  Butler says, “Whatever, I’ll call him anything you want so long as it fits my meter.”  Probably some comment on form over content, on what one is over against what one is known as, here that we could unpack if we felt like it.  While he seems to plead faithfulness to his line, he is careless about his characters.  Put a pin in that for the nonce – I may come back to it. 

But that “Ralph/half” thing is interesting, too, because he is by no means the equal of mighty Hudibras.  He’s half the man his master is.  We’ve already been treated to a catalogue of the knight’s gifts.  He is a polyglot, fluent in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, this latter to the extent that “some think him circumcised.”  He is a profound logician and sophist who could “prove a buzzard is no fowl / and that a lord may be an owl.”  His special gift is rhetoric:

For RHETORIC, he could not ope

His mouth, but out there flew a trope;

And when he happen'd to break off

I' th' middle of his speech, or cough,

H' had hard words,ready to show why,

And tell what rules he did it by. . . .

He surpasses Tycho Brahe in his knowledge of mathematics and is a “shrewd philosopher” – a second Aquinas or another Duns Scotus.  Umm . . . Catholic philosophers, by the by.  Hardly Presbyterian.  Ralph or Ralpho or Rafe knows none of these civilizing disciplines.  He is, however, familiar with the occult, though he has rejected that knowledge in favor of radical Protestantism:

For MYSTICK LEARNING, wond'rous able

In magick Talisman and Cabal,

Whose primitive tradition reaches

As far as ADAM'S first green breeches . . . .

If you have an irony deficiency, you might think our heroes rather awesome.  But you’d have to be absolutely insensate not to feel that something’s off.  I mean, even if you didn’t know you were going to read a satire and weren’t sure what the contrast between “Dame Religion” and “punk” was (the latter is slang for a prostitute, if you’d like to be sure), I think the rhythm and rhyme of Hudibras lets you know the poem’s tongue is firmly in its cheek.  Butler writes in rhyming  octosyllabic couplets – iambic, yes, but not the heroic and stately pentameter of Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Oh, no.  This is truncated, it hurtles along with gusto. John Dryden – we’ll meet him in a few episodes – disliked the poem because of the indecorousness of its versification. It’s bawdy – so fitting for a poem that shortly reveals itself as burlesque.  

And that’s part of Butler’s overall project, really.  Critic Ian Jack points out that “Throughout Hudibras great emphasis is laid on the difference between profession and performance, outer seeming and inner reality. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in this poem every species of human folly and crime is represented as a species of hypocrisy.”  When Ralph asks his master, “Why didst thou chuse that cursed Sin, / Hypocrisie, to set up in?,”Hudibras replies, “Because it is the thriving'st Calling, / The onely Saints-Bell that rings all in.”

Jack further points out that Butler’s purpose in Hudibras is “to kill any sympathy which the reader may feel for the subject of his satire.”  I must agree – there is a venom in this work that fellow satirists Chaucer and even Jonson fail to produce.  Quite unlike Butler’s other great model, Cervantes’ 1605 blockbuster, the above-mentioned Don Quixote – which many cite as the first, and perhaps greatest, novel.  Butler does many of the same things Butler references: the episodic plot featuring a deluded knight and his squire, the use of consciously archaic language, the deployment of irony, puns, and burlesque.  But while we have a bit of fun at old Quixote’s expense, we never get the sense that we should disdain him.  Butler is far more venomous in his satire than is his great Spanish forbear.

Broadly speaking, we’ve traditionally seen satire as belonging to two groups.  The first, Horation (named for the Roman Horace), is of a gentle, witty type – not really indignant, just bemused, and hoping that things will eventually improve.  Chaucer mostly writes in this mode, and so does Jonson, most of the time, anyway.  But Butler is pointing in another direction.  The second satirical type, Juvenalian (again, from the Roman author), is darker, heavier, much more acerbic and contemptuous.  Hudibras is, I think, more of this type.  There is, indeed, a rollicking playfulness to the verse and some rather silly jokes, but we are clearly meant to loathe the protagonists.  Their hypocrisy leads to death and destruction.  Of Hudibras’s religion, Butler says:

he was of that stubborn crew 

Of errant saints, whom all men grant 

To be the true Church Militant; 

Such as do build their faith upon 

The holy text of pike and gun; 

Decide all controversies by 

Infallible artillery; 

And prove their doctrine orthodox 

By apostolic blows and knocks; 

Call fire and sword and desolation, 

A godly thorough reformation, 

Which always must be carried on, 

And still be doing, never done . . . .

Butler goes on to list Puritanical inconsistencies, not only promulgating the gospel with violence, but also on subjects like free will and predestination, humility and obedience.  The falseness of Hudibras’s vaunted knowledge perfectly fits with the recalcitrant ignorance of radical Presbyterianism.

I think it’s good to have had episodes on Bunyan and Butler back to back – that's a lot of bees, honey.  Bunyan’s self-righteous rigidity is just begging for a skewering, and Butler is happy to oblige.  And though Hudibras no longer enjoys a place on many bookshelves, it has had some lasting impact.  On the more trivial end of the spectrum, many lines have worked their way into modern idiomatic expressions: “look a gift horse in the mouth,” “Devil take the hindmost,” “spare the rod and spoil the child.” Maybe more importantly, though, it has given us a lens through which we can critique not only Puritanism, but any movement whose putative moralism masks political tyranny and personal hypocrisy.  We’ve had satirists in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance who poked the Church and the State with a stick, but always with a bit of a wink and a nod.  Butler is a harder man and he makes possible maybe the hardest of English satirists – Dr. Swift – but he is for another episode.

Thanks for stopping by.  Please do all the nice things – post positive reviews, tell all your friends, send me some money.  I think next time we’ll do a bit of snooping in people’s diaries.  That’ll be a hoot.  Talk to you soon!