Samuel Butler’s Hudibras ridicules the Presbyterians, Dissenters, and others who fought against the Crown in the conflict between Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. Published shortly after the Restoration of Charles II, the poem had immense popularity for a time. The king himself carried a copy in his pocket and quoted from it. Hudibras uses burlesque with telling effect. Mean and low persons, things, and situations are described in lofty language. The contrast between the poem’s lofty language and its grubby subject matter exists to highlight the hypocrisy and absurdity of Dissenting reformers in seventeenth century England. Butler makes no pretense of impartiality. The poem shows the Dissenters as ridiculous, odious, and obnoxious. Butler also wanted to draw attention to the false learning rampant in England at the time. Astrology, fortune-telling, alchemy, sympathetic medicine, and other pseudosciences are presented in the poem in such a way as to show the readers of his time the absurdity of such practices and of their practitioners.

The word “satire” comes from a Latin word for a “mixed plate,” and Hudibras is a somewhat disorganized mix of various objects of ridicule. More specifically, Hudibras is a travesty or burlesque. Such satire depends on form. Understanding Butler’s poem is a matter of understanding what he does with form. A central technique of Hudibras is Butler’s deliberately creating a mismatch between his heroic language and his ridiculous hero. One goal of satire is to call attention to the discrepancies between the ideal and the actual, between the world as people say it is and the world as it is. The implicit message of much satire is that, compared to the inappropriate behavior of people and the absurdity of life, the silly writings of an obscure scrivener is a small thing.

The self-absorbed zeal of Sir Hudibras and Ralpho is an example of the distance between human pretense and human reality. A brief quotation from the beginning of the poem illustrates how, when describing Sir Hudibras, verse that should be gallant and romantic begins to sound like a bad jingle:

Sir Hudibras, his passing worth,The manner how he sallied forth,His arms and equipage are shown,His horse’s virtues and his own;The adventures of the Bear and FiddleIs sung, but breaks off in the middle.

This is how travesty (the word, etymologically, relates to clothing) works. Hudibras begins with a tune that breaks off in the middle. The hero’s horse’s virtues come before those of the hero. The language, meter, and tone of the beginning of the poem make clear that what is to follow is not heroic but comic. The whole serious business of the Puritan revolution in England in the seventeenth century is treated as something trivial. The satire intends, by belittling the Dissenters, to cut them down to a more realistic size. An implicit point is that where common sense, good humor, and restraint are lacking, the silly and the irrelevant are to be found in abundance.

Butler was so successful in making fun of the Puritans in Hudibras that the poem became a model of verse form. “Hudibrastic verse” is deliberately bad poetry, with jingle-jangle lines of iambic tetrameter, rhymed in couplets. Tone and diction are purposely scrambled, mixing the serious with the silly, in order to show that those who are foolish should not undertake something serious. Butler’s verse form was imitated for more than a century after Hudibras. Jonathan Swift, for example, used the form extensively in the eighteenth century.

The hero of Butler’s satire, Sir Hudibras, is named after a character in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene