I. DEFINITION
P. imitates the distinctive style and thought of a literary text, author, or trad. for comic effect. Some critics distinguish between critical (satiric) and comic p., while others prefer to speak of p. as the dominant comic form and pastiche as the subordinate, more solemn form. In other words, when the imitation of another work is an end in itself, the result is pastiche; when the imitation serves to mock another work, the result is p. An example of pastiche is the player’s speech about Pyrrhus in Hamlet, a speech that imitates the style and subject of Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage (2.1) but is not intended to make the audience smile. A Shakespearean p. is Falstaff’s imitation of John Lyly’s euphuistic style in the tavern scene in 1 Henry 4:
Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though the camomile, the more it is trodden on the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.
This speech clearly imitates Lyly’s passage:
Though the camomile the more it is trodden and pressed down, the more it spreadeth; yet the violet the oftener it is handled and touched the sooner it withereth and decayeth ( Euphues, 1578).
Unlike Lyly, who is being sententious, Falstaff is being marvelously ironic in his questioning of the errant Prince of Wales. We laugh because the imitation is so accurate and, in Falstaff s mouth, so inappropriate.
One can distinguish between pastiche and p. on the grounds of purpose; distinguishing between p. and burlesque (q.v.) is more difficult. The usual distinction is said to be method: p. strives for congruence in imitation, burlesque for incongruity. Thus a burlesque may imitate a formal style but use it as a vehicle for vulgar or topical content. P., on the other hand, imitates both style and subject, so that the reader’s amusement comes from recognizing how closely the p. follows the subject. As Dwight Macdonald sums up the matter, “If burlesque is pouring new wine into old bottles, p. is making a new wine that tastes like the old but has a slightly lethal effect” (559).
II. CRITICAL ISSUES
Some critics have viewed p. as a more important literary form than burlesque, but traditionally p. was regarded as a species or subclass of burlesque. P. at its best deals with sophisticated stylistic techniques, while burlesque is often cheerfully vulgar. One wonders if it is the overly serious critics who prefer the former. P. is attractive not only for considerations of taste, but also because it is more interesting in the challenges it presents, in its nature as a “meta-fiction” (Rose) which raises questions about such theoretical issues as the process of writing, the role of the reader, the role of authority, and the social context of the text (187). Because the success of p. depends not only on the reader’s understanding of the text, but also on the recognition of the sourcetext it is based on and the comical twist or reversal of those cultural values embedded in the source-text, the readerly transaction is complex. And the p. itself of course reinstantiates the source at the same time that it subverts it.
The nature of p. continues to be a matter of discussion. On the one hand, it is seen as a highly reflexive form that celebrates textuality (q.v.). Macdonald praises p. as “an intuitive kind of lit. crit, shorthand for what ‘serious’ critics must write out at length. It is Method Acting, since a successful parodist must live himself, imaginatively, into his parodee. It is jiujitsu, using the impetus of the opponent to defeat him, although ‘opponent’ and ‘defeat’ are hardly the words. Most parodies are written out of admiration rather than contempt” (xiii). His positive view of the form is not universal, however, even among those who enjoy p.: Brett warns that “one must never forget the dependent nature of p. It is a parasitic art and, though it can hold up the eminent to ridicule, without them it could not exist” (25). To some extent the reaction that a p. draws depends on the critic’s opinion of the work it imitates. It may also depend on the critic’s attitude toward current ideology, for it is undeniable that p. is a subversive form. Freund defines p. as “a literary instrument of ideological crit. P. destroys established ideologies, such as the heroic or fascistic, by searching them for symptomatic, verbally and structurally fixed constructs and tearing these structures down along with the ideologies manifested in them” (13).
So understood, p. is uniformly subversive, even when affectionate. There is also, however, sacred p.: this takes secular themes such as erotic love and transforms them to divine purposes. Both Virgil’s incorporation of the two Homeric epics and also much East Asian practice are forms of elevating p., and Milton uses dissimiles and comparisons of “small things to great” to serious ends.
III. HISTORY
P. was originally “a song sung beside,” i.e. a comic imitation of a serious poem. Aristotle ( Poetics 1448a12) attributes its origin to Hegemon of Thasos (5th c. B.C. ), who used epic style to represent men not as superior to what they are in ordinary life but as inferior. Athenaeus (15.699a) states that Hegemon was the first to introduce parodies into the theater, but elsewhere quotes Polemo as saying that p. was invented by the iambic poet Hipponax (6th c. B.C. ), who had himself been the victim of caricature at the hands of the sculptors and painters; we have a few lines of his mock-epic on a glutton. Much earlier than these examples of p. was the pseudo-Homeric Margites, known to Archilochus, which set forth in hexameters with intermingled iambics the story of a fool. We still have the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, which parodies Homer.
But the supreme parodist of antiquity was Aristophanes, who may be thought to have reached his highest level in the Frogs, where he parodies the styles of Aeschylus and Euripides. But almost every passage of Aristophanes contains a touch of p. In later comedy this element dwindles. Plato imitates the styles of several prose writers with amusing effect; in the Symposium (194e-197e) he puts into Agathon’s mouth a speech in the manner of Gorgias. Lucian has a good many touches of p. or burlesque: in Dialogue 20, the Judgment of Paris, for example, the comic effect is achieved by making the divine characters talk in the lang. of ordinary life.
Roman humor had a strong element of p.; the phlyax pots and the performances which they presumably illustrate must have appealed to the Romans. In Lat. comedy we find occasional burlesque of the tragic manner, as in the prologues to the Amphitryon and the Rudens, the mad scene in the Menaechmi, and Pardalisca’s mock-tragic outburst ( Casina 621 ff.)—passages which, whatever the original may have been, owe their effect to lang. and meter. A more delicate irony is shown in Syrus’ mocking reply to the sententious words of Demea ( Adelphoe 420 ff.). Lucilius parodies such stylistic techniques of the Roman tragedians as Pacuvius’ unusual words and awkward compounds. The fourth poem of Catullus is closely parodied in Catalepton 10. Persius ridicules by imitation the styles of Pacuvius and other poets. Petronius gives us a long hexameter poem on the Civil War, parts of which may be meant as a caricature of Lucan.
In the later days of the Empire, the Roman mime parodied the rites of the Christian church. During the later Middle Ages, ps. of liturgy, well-known hymns, and even the Bible were popular. Ren. authors, when not embroiled in the polemics of the Reformation, preferred to parody the classics or such “gothic” phenomena as medieval romance and scholasticism; these include Pulci’s Morgante Maggiore and Cervantes’ Don Quixote (p. of romance); Giambattista Gelli’s Circe, Tassoni’s La Secchia Rapita and Scarron’s Virgile Travesti (p. of the classics); and Erasmus’ Praise of Folly and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel (p. of scholasticism). Of these authors, Rabelais is the most universal, the richest, and the most difficult to classify.
P. became institutionalized during the 17th c. The existence of academies and distinct literary movements, particularly in Italy, France, and England, encouraged debates in which p. was used as a weapon of satire. Boccalini’s Ragguagli di Parnasso (1612) was the origin for a whole genre employing p. as a device for criticizing contemp. authors.
Eng. p. of the late Middle Ages is employed in the cycle plays, where a scene of common life (e.g. the Mak episode in The Second Shepherd’s Play) provides comic relief. Chaucer’s Sir Thopas parodies the grandiose style of medieval romance (q.v.). Shakespeare burlesqued his own romantic love plots with rustic amours, and John Marston, in turn, wrote a rough, humorous travesty of Venus and Adonis. One of the best-known 17th-c. ps. was the Duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1671), which leveled its shafts mainly at Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada and at the grand manner of the heroic play In 1701 John Phillips ( The Splendid Shilling) used the solemn blank verse of Milton to celebrate ludicrous incidents. Later in the century, Sheridan’s The Critic (1779) revived dramatic p. Exceptions to the general rule that p. rarely outlives the text or trad. parodied, both The Rehearsal and The Critic have been revived in the 20th c.
The Golden Age of p. in Eng. poetry paralleled the rise of the romantic and Transcendental movements. Canning, Ellis, and John Hookham Frere produced a series of ps. in the Anti-Jacobin Journal (1790-1810). Here the Southey-Wordsworth brand of Fr. revolutionary sympathy for knife-grinders and tattered beggars provided good anti-Jacobin sport. Blake’s Vision of Judgment and Shelley’s Peter Bell likewise parodied Southey, Wordsworth, and “elemental” poetry. James Hogg in 1816 took off most of the Eng. romantics, and in 1812 James and Horace Smith published Rejected Addresses, a landmark in Eng. p., in which the styles of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Samuel Johnson, and others were skillfully but not uproariously parodied. In the later 19th c., names and titles continue to multiply. Tennyson, Browning, Longfellow, Poe, Swinburne, and Whitman become the chief targets for such p. artists as J. K. Stephen, C. S. Calverly, J. C. Squire, Lewis Carroll, Swinburne (who not only produced The Higher Pantheism in a Nutshell à la Tennyson, but also parodied himself in Nephelidia), and Andrew Lang. Best of all was Max Beerbohm. In America the names of Phoebe Cary, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Bayard Taylor, H. C. Bunner, and J. K. Bangs were most prominent before 1900. In the 20th c. The New Yorker has carried on the trad. established in the last century by Punch and Vanity Fair. During the 1920s, p. found a highly congenial locus in the temperaments of such talented practitioners as Corey Ford, Louis Untermeyer, Frank Sullivan, Donald Odgen Stewart, Wolcott Gibbs, James Thurber, Robert Benchley, and E. B. White. There has been less p. since then, but it continues in the work of such writers as Kenneth Tynan, Tom Stoppard, Veronica Geng, and Frederick Crews. After 25 centuries, p. seems unlikely to fade as a comic and critical form. But the existence of sacred p. and of Asian counterparts, for example, should be taken as reminders that amusement is not the sole end of p. Seriousness of parodic ends is fundamental to works like Joyce’s Ulysses. In addition, the mingling of sacred and profane (or erotic) in Indian poetry (q.v.) makes p. almost inseparable from the most serious of nonparodic lit.
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