Mock-heroic

Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically

parodies that mock common Classical stereotypes of heroes

and heroic literature. Typically, mock-heroic works either put a fool in the role of the hero or exaggerate the heroic qualities to such a point that they become absurd.

History

Historically, the mock-heroic style was popular in 17th-century Italy, and in the post-

Restoration and Augustan

periods in Great Britain.

The earliest example of the form is the Batrachomyomachia ascribed to Homer by the Romans and parodying his work, but believed by most modern scholars to be the work of an anonymous poet in the time of Alexander the Great.^[1]

A longstanding assumption on the origin of the mock-heroic in the 17th century is that epic and the pastoral genres had become used up and exhausted,^[2] and so they got parodically reprised. In the 17th century the epic genre was heavily criticized, because it was felt to be merely expressing the traditional values of feudal society.

Among the new genres, closer to the modern feelings and proposing new ideals, the satirical literature was particularly effective in criticizing the old habits and values. Beside the Spanish picaresque novels and the French burlesque novel, in Italy flourished the poema eroicomico. In this country those who still wrote epic poems, following the rules set by Torquato Tasso in his work Discorsi del poema eroico (Discussions about the Epic Poems) and realized in his masterwork, the Jerusalem Delivered, were felt as antiquated. The new mock-heroic poem accepted the same metre, vocabulary, rhetoric of the epics. However, the new genre turned the old epic upside down about the meaning, setting the stories in more familiar situations, to ridiculize the traditional epics. In this context was created the parody of epic genre.

Lo scherno degli dèi (The Mockery of Gods) by Francesco Bracciolini, printed in 1618 is often regarded as the first Italian poema eroicomico.

However, the best known of the form is La secchia rapita (The rape of the Bucket) by Alessandro Tassoni (1622).

Other Italian mock-heroic poems were La Gigantea by Girolamo Amelonghi (1566), La moscheide by Giovanni Battista Lalli (1624), the Viaggio di Colonia (Travel to Cologne) by Antonio Abbondanti (1625), L'asino (The donkey) by Carlo de' Dottori (1652), La Troja rapita by Loreto Vittori (1662), Il Malmantile racquistato by Lorenzo Lippi (1688), La presa di San Miniato by Ippolito Neri (1764).

Also in Italian dialects were written mock-heroic poems. For example, in

Neapolitan dialect the best known work of the form was La Vaiasseide by Giulio Cesare Cortese (1612). While in Romanesco Giovanni Camillo Peresio wrote Il maggio romanesco (1688), Giuseppe Berneri published Meo Patacca

in 1695, and, finally, Benedetto Micheli printed La libbertà romana acquistata e defesa in 1765.

After the translation of

burlesque, and satirical poem is the comic poem Hudibras (1662–1674), by Samuel Butler. Butler's poem describes a "trew blew" Puritan knight during the Interregnum, in language that imitates Romance and epic poetry

. 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 "
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). 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. While Dryden's own plays would themselves furnish later mock-heroics (specifically, The Conquest of Granada is satirized in the mock-heroic The Author's Farce and Tom Thumb by Henry Fielding, as well as The Rehearsal), Dryden's Mac Flecknoe is perhaps the locus classicus of the mock-heroic form as it would be practiced for a century to come. In that poem, Dryden indirectly compares Thomas Shadwell with Aeneas by using the language of Aeneid to describe the coronation of Shadwell on the throne of Dullness formerly held by King Flecknoe. The parody of Virgil satirizes Shadwell. Dryden's prosody is identical to regular heroic verse
: iambic pentameter closed couplets. The parody is not formal, but merely contextual and ironic. (For an excellent overview of the history of the mock-heroic in the 17th and 18th centuries see "the English Mock-Heroic poem of the 18th Century" by Grazyna Bystydzienska, published by Polish Scientific Publishers, 1982.)
After Dryden, the form continued to flourish, and there are countless minor mock-heroic poems from 1680 to 1780. Additionally, there were a few attempts at a mock-heroic novel. The most significant later mock-heroic poems were by

Beggar's Opera were mock-heroic (the latter in opera), and Samuel Johnson's London

is a mock-heroic of a sort.

By the time of Pope, however, the mock-heroic was giving ground to narrative

Don Juan

were uncommon.

Finally, the mock-heroic genre spread throughout Europe, in

modern Ukrainian language

.

References

^ "Batrachomyomachia: A Classical Parody – Carmenta Language School Blog". Carmenta Language School Blog. 2016-12-27. Retrieved 2017-12-23.
^ Griffin,Dustin H. (1994) Satire: A Critical Reintroduction p.135

History

References

Further reading