Hudibras

An engraving depicting Hudibras overcoming a fiddle player and placing him in the stocks. Above the stocks, the fiddle and its case are displayed.
One of twelve engravings illustrating the adventures of Hudibras by William Hogarth.

Hudibras (/ˈhjuːdɪbræs/)[1] 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."[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. 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."[3]

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".[4]

All Hudibras quotations and references below, unless otherwise marked, relate to the standard modern edition (Oxford, 1967), edited by John Wilders.[5]

  1. ^ Jones, Daniel; Roach, Peter (2006). James Hartman; Jane Setter (eds.). Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (17th ed.). Cambridge UP.
  2. ^ Hargreaves, A. S. (2009). "Hudibras". In John Cannon (ed.). Oxford Companion to British History. ISBN 978-0-19-956763-8.
  3. ^ Wilders, John (July 1979). "[untitled book review]". The Modern Language Review. 74 (3): 655–656. doi:10.2307/3726715. JSTOR 3726715 – via JSTOR.
  4. ^ Thomas, Gary (2021). Education: A Very Short Introduction (Second ed.). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-885908-6.
  5. ^ Butler, Samuel (1967). Wilders, John (ed.). Hudibras. Oxford: At the Clarendon Press.