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Samuel Butler (poet)

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Samuel Butler
Portrait of Samuel Butler by Pieter Borsseler
BornFebruary 1613
Strensham, Worcestershire, England
Died25 September 1680 (aged 67)
London, England
NationalityEnglish
Notable workHudibras (1663–1678)

Samuel Butler (baptized 14 February 1613 – 25 September 1680) was a poet and satirist. He is remembered now chiefly for a long satirical poem entitled Hudibras.

Biography

Samuel Butler was born in Strensham, Worcestershire, and was the son of a farmer and churchwarden, also named Samuel. His date of birth is unknown, but there is documentary evidence for the date of his baptism of 14 February.[1] The date of Butler's baptism is given as 8 February by Treadway Russell Nash in his 1793 edition of Hudibras. Nash had already mentioned Butler in his Collections for a History of Worcestershire (1781), and perhaps because the latter date seemed to be a revised account, it has been repeated by many writers and editors. However, The parish register of Strensham records under the year 1612: "Item was christened Samuell Butler the sonne of Samuell Butler the xiiijth of February anno ut supra". Lady Day, 25 March, was New Year's Day in England at the time, so the year of his baptism was 1613 according to the modern Gregorian calendar.[1] Nash also claims in his 1793 edition of Hudibras that Butler's father entered his son's baptism into the register, an error that was also repeated in later publications; however, the entry was clearly written by a different hand.[1]

He was educated at the King's School, Worcester, under Henry Bright whose teaching is recorded favourably by Thomas Fuller, a contemporary writer, in his Worthies of England. In early youth he was a servant to the Countess of Kent. Through Lady Kent he met her steward, the jurist John Selden who influenced his later writings. He also tried his hand at painting but was reportedly not very good at it; one of his editors reporting that "his pictures served to stop windows and save the tax" (on window glass).

After the Restoration he became secretary, or steward, to Richard Vaughan, 2nd Earl of Carbery, Lord President of Wales, which entailed living at least a year in Ludlow, Shropshire, until January 1662 while he was paying craftsmen working on repairing the castle there.[2] In late 1662 the first part of Hudibras, which he began writing when lodging at Holborn, London, in 1658 and continued to work on while in Ludlow,[2] was published, and the other two in 1664 and 1678 respectively. One early purchaser of the first two parts was Samuel Pepys. While the diarist acknowledged that the book was the "greatest fashion" he could not see why it was found to be so witty.[3]

Despite the popularity of Hudibras, Butler was not offered a place at Court. However, Butler is thought to have been in the employment of the Duke of Buckingham in the summer of 1670, and accompanied him on a diplomatic mission to France.[4] Butler also received financial support in the form of a grant from King Charles II.[5]

Butler was buried at St. Paul's, Covent Garden. Aubrey in Brief Lives describes his grave as "being in the north part next to the church at the east end.. 2 yards distant from the pillaster of the dore".[6] Also, a monument to him was placed in Westminster Abbey in 1732 by a printer with the surname Barber, and the Lord Mayor of London.[7] There is also a memorial plaque to him in the small village church of Strensham, Worcestershire, near the town of Upton upon Severn, his birthplace.

Hudibras

Frontispiece and titlepage of a 1744 illustrated and annotated edition of Butler's Hudibras

Hudibras is directed against religious sectarianism. The poem was very popular in its time, and several of its phrases have passed into the dictionary. It was sufficiently popular to spawn imitators. Hudibras takes some of its characterization from Don Quixote but unlike that work, it has many more references to personalities and events of the day. Butler was also influenced by satirists such as John Skelton and Paul Scarron's Virgile travesti; a satire on classical literature, particularly Virgil. [8] Hudibras was reprinted many times in the centuries following Butler's death. Two of the more noteworthy editions are those edited by Zachery Grey (1752) and Treadway Russell Nash (1793). The standard edition of the work was edited by John Wilders (1967).

Other writings

Most of his other writings never saw print until they were collected and published by Robert Thyer in 1759. Butler wrote many short biographies, epigrams and verses the earliest surviving from 1644. Of his verses, the best known is "The Elephant on the Moon", about a mouse trapped in a telescope, a satire on Sir Paul Neale of the Royal Society. Butler's taste for the mock heroic is shown by another early poem Cynarctomachy, or Battle between Bear and Dogs, which is both a homage to and a parody of a Greek poem ascribed to Homer, Batrachomyomachia. He wrote the poem Upon Philip Nye's Thanksgiving Beard[9][10] about the Puritan Philip Nye and later also mentioned him in Hudibras.[11]

His supposed lack of money later in life is strange as he had numerous unpublished works which could have offered him income including a set of Theophrastan character sketches which were not printed until 1759. Many other works are dubiously attributed to him.

Quotations

  • A News-monger is a Retailer of Rumour, that takes up upon Trust, and sells as cheap as he buys. He deals in a perishable Commodity, that will not keep: for if it be not fresh it lies upon his Hands, and will yield nothing. True or false is all one to him; for Novelty being the Grace of bothe, a Truth grows stale as soon as a Lye...
    — Samuel Butler, Characters

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Wilding, R.M. (May 1966). "The Date of Samuel Butler's Baptism". Review of English Studies. 17 (66): 175. JSTOR 512478.
  2. ^ a b Dickins, Gordon (1987). An Illustrated Literary Guide to Shropshire. Shropshire Libraries. pp. 12, 101. ISBN 0-903802-37-6.
  3. ^ Samuel Pepys. Diary, 10 December 1663. Retrieved 23 January 2012.
  4. ^ Norma E. Bentley. "'Hudibras' Butler Abroad", Modern Language Notes, Vol. 60, No. 4, April 1945, pp.254–9
  5. ^ Norma E. Bentley. "A Grant to 'Hudibras' Butler", Modern Language Notes,Vol. 59, No.4, April 1944, pp.281.
  6. ^ John Aubrey. Brief Lives, chiefly of Contemporaries, ed. Andrew Clark, (Oxford, Clarendon Press 1898) vol. 1, p.136.
  7. ^ Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey. Fourth ed. (London, John Murray, 1868), p. 280.
  8. ^ Butler, Samuel, Hudibras: The Second Part, London 1663. Facsimile ed., 1994, Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, ISBN 978-0-8201-1469-9.
  9. ^ http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details/collection_image_gallery.aspx?assetId=899641001&objectId=3315139&partId=1
  10. ^ Samuel Butler, The Genuine Poetical Remains, page 175
  11. ^ http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=45401

References

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