The hudibrastic has been traditionally used for satire. Jonathan Swift, for example, wrote nearly all of his poetry in hudibrastics.
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Ward is also important for his history of secret clubs of the Augustan age. These included The Secret History of the Calves-Head Club, Complt. or, The Republican Unmask'd (1706), which sought humorously to expose the silly exploits of radicals. Ward also translated The Life &Adventures; of Don Quixote de la Mancha, translated into Hudibrastic Verse in 1711, where the Hudibrastic, which had been born in Samuel Butler's imitation of Cervantes, now became the fit medium for a translation of the original (CBEL).
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The catalogue extends to 379 pages, and the separate books number 8,155; it sold for £2,210. A scurrilous pamphlet, entitled 'The Battle between Dr. Farmer and Peter Musgrave, the Cambridge Taylor, in Hudibrastic verse,’ appeared at London in 1792.
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After Butler, there was an explosion of poetry that described a despised subject in the elevated language of heroic poetry and plays. Hudibras gave rise to a particular verse form, commonly called the "Hudibrastic". The Hudibrastic is poetry in closed rhyming couplets in iambic tetrameter, where the rhymes are often feminine rhymes or unexpected conjunctions. For example, Butler describes the English Civil War as a time which "Made men fight like mad or drunk/ For dame religion as for punk/ Whose honesty all durst swear for/ Tho' not one knew why or wherefore" ("punk" meaning a prostitute).
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Hudibrastic is a type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras, published in parts from 1663 to 1678.Cox, Michael, editor, The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004, For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure.
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Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is the same as in heroic verse (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.), but Butler used frequent feminine rhyme for humor.Baldick, Christopher (1996). "Hudibrastic verse" in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.
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The Anti-Leveller of 1793 is considered an “elder relative” to the Anti-Jacobin. Alexander Watson's The Anti-Jacobin, a Hudibrastic Poem in Twenty-one Cantos (1794) had a similar motif and also contained stanzas filled with heavy sarcasm and rhymed couplets. Historians consider both of these works less interesting than the Anti-Jacobin.Stone, p. lvii.
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Considered as drama, such discourse features black-and-white disorder, a guilt-mongering logician, distorted clownish opponents, limited scapegoating, and a self-serving redemption.Edward C. Appel, "Burlesque drama as a rhetorical genre: The hudibrastic ridicule of William F. Buckley Jr.," Western Journal of Communication, Summer 1996, Vol. 60 Issue 3, pp. 269–84 Lee (2008) argues that Buckley introduced a new rhetorical style that conservatives often tried to emulate.
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The strained and unexpected rhymes increase the comic effect and heighten the parody. This formal indication of satire proved to separate one form of mock-heroic from the others. After Butler, Jonathan Swift is the most notable practitioner of the Hudibrastic, as he used that form for almost all of his poetry. Poet Laureate John Dryden is responsible for some of the dominance among satirical genres of the mock-heroic in the later Restoration era.
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Written in Hudibrastic couplets, the poem is, on its surface, a scathing Juvenalian satire of America and its colonists, and a parody of the pamphlets that advertised colonization as easy and lucrative (38, 40). The persona comes to Maryland as a tobacco merchant, or "sot-weed factor". He is shocked by the brutishness of Native Americans and English settlers alike, and he is swindled by an "ambodexter quack", or corrupt lawyer. He leaves the colony in disgust.
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Hudibras was written in an iambic tetrameter in closed couplets, with surprising feminine rhymes. The dramatic meter portends tales of dramatic deeds, but the subject matter and the unusual rhymes undercut its importance. This verse form is now referred to as Hudibrastic. On in no the following from the opening of the poem, where the English Civil War is described thus: The work was published in three parts, each divided into three cantos with some additional heroic epistles.
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The rhyme of "swear for" with "wherefore" and "ecclesiastic" with "(in)stead of a stick" are surprising, unnatural, and humorous. Additionally, the rhyme of "-don dwelling" with "a colonelling" is strained to the point of breaking, again for humorous effect. Further, the rhyme scheme in a Hudibrastic will imply inappropriate comparisons. For example, the rhyme of "drunk" and "punk" (meaning "a prostitute") implies that the religious ecstasies of the Puritans were the same as that of sexual intercourse and inebriation.
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Two months later he bought it again to try to find what he was missing. He still found nothing funny about it, due to his finding its treatment of Puritans too vicious and being insensitive to the humour of the rhymes. The mock heroic epic and its jaunty verse form known as Hudibrastic became the standard of satire for some time after that with at least twenty- seven direct imitations being produced. Of the most famous was Ned Ward and his Hudibras Redivivus with Samuel Wesley father of John Wesley emulating the work.
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