PARODY (Gr. s-apybia, literally a

See also:

• SONG

song sung beside, a comic parallel)  , an imitation of the form or style of a serious writing in matter of a meaner kind so as to produce a ludicrous effect . Parody is almost as old in European literature as serious writing . The Batrachomyomachia, or " Battle of the Frogs and Mice," a travesty of the heroic epos, was ascribed at one time to Homer himself; and it is probably at least as old as the 5th century B.C . The great tragic poetry of Greece very soon provoked the parodist . Aristophanes parodied the style of Euripides in the Acharnians with a comic power that has never been surpassed . The debased grand style of medieval romance was parodied in Don Quixote . Shakespeare parodied the extravagant heroics of an earlier stage, and was himself parodied by Marston, incidentally in his plays and elaborately in a roughly humorous burlesque of Venus and Adonis . The most celebrated parody of the Restoration was Buckingham's Rehearsal (1672), in which the tragedies of Dryden were inimitably ridiculed . At the beginning of the 18th century The Splendid Shilling of John Philips (1676–1709), which Addison said was " the finest burlesque poem in the English language," brilliantly introduced a fashion for using the solemn movement of Milton's blank verse to celebrate ridiculous incidents . In 1736, Isaac Hawkins Browne (1705–176o) published a volume, A Pipe of Tobacco, in which the poetical styles of Colley Cibber, Ambrose Philips, James Thom-son, Edward Young and Jonathan Swift were delightfully reproduced . In the following century, Shelley and John Hamilton Reynolds almost simultaneously produced cruel imitations of the naivete and baldness of Wordsworth's Peter Bell (1819) . But in that generation the most celebrated parodists were the brothers Smith, whose Rejected Addresses may be regarded as classic in this kind of artificial production .

The Victorian

age has produced a plentiful crop of parodists in prose and in verse, in dramatic poetry and in lyric poetry . By common consent, the most subtle and dexterous of these was C . S . Calverley, who succeeded in reproducing not merely tricks of phrase and metre, but even manneristic turns of thought . In a later day, Mr Owen Seaman has repeated; and sometimes surpassed, the agile feats of Calverley .