Hudibras (1663)

Hudibras is a vigorous satirical poem, written in a mock-heroic style by Samuel Butler (1613–1680), and published in three parts in 1663, 1664 and 1678. The action is set in the last years of the Interregnum, around 1658–60, immediately before the restoration of Charles II as king in May 1660.

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. Colonel Hudibras' humiliations arrive sometimes by the skills and courage of women, and the epic ends with a witty and detailed declaration by the latest female to get the better of him that women are intellectually superior to men.

Hudibras is notable for its longevity: from the 1660s, it was more or less always in print, from many different publishers and editors, till the period of the First World War (see below). 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."

Or, as one of the poem's editors has written: "Hudibras, like Gulliver's Travels, is an unique imaginative work, capable of shocking, enlivening, provoking, and entertaining the reader in a peculiar and distinctive way, vigorously witty and powerful in its invective. It is the ebullient inventiveness of Hudibras which is likely to commend it to the modern reader and which raises it above its historical context. Justice still remains to be done not to Butler the moralist but to Butler the poet."

While the original proverb appears in King James Version of the Bible, Book of Proverbs, 13:24, this poem is the first appearance of the quotation and popularised the aphorism "spare the rod and spoil the child".

All Hudibras quotations and references below, unless otherwise marked, relate to the standard modern edition (Oxford, 1967), edited by John Wilders.

Overview

Hudibras is a Presbyterian colonel. His squire, Ralpho, is one of the Independents, who follow a more radical version of puritanism, one far less formal and structured than Presbyterianism. However, Butler's satire is not focused on details of their belief or theology. They regularly fall into heated argument with each other, but these arguments are never about faith or doctrine; they are always focused on the rules of argument and the definitions of words. It is noticeable that not once, in over 11,000 lines of satiric verse, does either of them laugh or smile.

Hudibras and Ralpho set out, much like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, to combat those whom they consider to be their enemies. 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. 82–87), and the rich widow herself in the last 382 lines of the last book headed "The Ladies Answer to the Knight" (pp. 310–321).

Throughout the satire, Butler seems to write from a position of broad-based ironic scepticism. Unlike many anti-Puritan writers of the Restoration period, Butler says nothing in Hudibras to suggest that he himself welcomed either the return of the Church of England or the restoration of the monarchy. 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". (It was widely said at the time that Charles II had forced his brother, later James II of England, to marry Anne Hyde.)

The characters

Hudibras

In Part One Canto One we have elaborately sardonic descriptions of Hudibras and Ralpho. "Never did trusty Squire with Knight, Or Knight with squier jump more right" (I:i:619f; p. 19). Hudibras is described as a "Mirrour of Knighthood" (I:i:16; p. 1), though we soon find that he even has difficulty mounting, and staying on, his horse. As Butler describes key points of Hudibras's very formal university learning—logic, rhetoric, geometry, algebra, arithmetic and theology—he mocks the trivial and purely verbal uses that Hudibras makes of these:

Ralpho

For Hudibras's squire Ralpho, on the other hand, who is a tailor, these formal academic skills are insignificant, or downright distractions. 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." (I:i:476–478; p. 25)Ralpho and Hudibras frequently challenge each other in long arguments, mostly about the "true" meanings of words. Ralpho, for example, argues that in reality a Presbyterian synod-meeting is the same thing as a bear-baiting: "...put them in a bag, and shake 'em Yourself o' th' sudden would mistake 'em, And not know which is which..." (I:i:833–835; p. 25f), while Hudibras uses elaborate academic terminology to try to prove logically that synod-meetings and bear-baitings are not the same thing.