“Butler’s Doubtful Heroism”

Abstract

An vntruth is so much the more pleasing, by how much the neerer it resembles a truth; and so much the more gratefull, by how much the more it is doubtful and possible: for lying fables must bee suited vnto the readers vnderstandinge, and so written, as that facilitating impossible things, leuelling vntrue things, and holding the mind in suspence… —Don Quixote, tr. Thomas Shelton (1612)1 Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (1662/3, 1663/4, 1678) has not been neglected, exactly, so much as confined to a vague hinterland of important sources and major texts which are so important and so major that they are never actually read. Hazlitt said that Butler’s fame “was not circumscribed within his own age,” but fame in posterity does not always guarantee responsible critical scrutiny or close attention.2 As Ian Jack pointed out in 1978, Butler “commonly receives less than his due” and has long been the subject “of remarkably little criticism”, despite the fact that he wrote “one of the greatest comic poems in the language.”3 Caricatures of Butler as “an old paralytick claret drinker” and “a morose surly man” have, at times, determined his critical reception, and though Butler is often hailed as the greatest poet in English burlesque and a doggerel laureate of sorts, Hudibras itself has become a piece of social documentation which is more often adduced as contextual evidence than analysed as a poem.4