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Butler's Sidrophel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joseph Toy Curtiss
Joseph Toy Curtiss*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Few readers of Hudibras have escaped the fascination of trying to identify the characters in the poem. Yet after two hundred and fifty years, during which readers have wondered and scholars have pondered, we are little nearer the goal. We do not even know whether Butler intended his titular hero to be the satiric portrait of a particular Puritan or the personified picture of a type.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , December 1929 , pp. 1066 - 1078
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1929

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References

Note 1 in page 1066 See Zachary Grey's note on the first line of the Epistle to Sidrophel. I have not had access to the Key he speaks of.

Note 2 in page 1067 Op. cit., line 86. This is a reference to Ben Jonson's Sir Politick Would-be.

Note 3 in page 1067 Zachary Grey's note on the first line of The Heroicall Epistle.

Note 4 in page 1067 Roger North, Examen . . . . of a pretended Complete History, Lond. 1740, p. 60.

Note 5 in page 1067 Thyer, Butler's Genuine Remains, I, 1.

Note 6 in page 1067 Op. cit., Vol. VIII, p. 69.

Note 7 in page 1067 Robert Surtees, History of Durham, I, lxxxix. The family pedigree is printed there.

Note 8 in page 1067 Thomas Birch, History of the Royal Society, Lond. 1756, II, 460.

Note 9 in page 1067 John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence, Lond. 1906, II, 84.

Note 10 in page 1069 The Poetical Works of Samuel Butler, ed. R. B. Johnson, 1893, I, xxiii-iv.

Note 11 in page 1069 Hudibras, Part II, Canto iii, lines 139-42.

Note 12 in page 1069 Wallace Notestein, A History of Witchcraft in England, Washington, 1911, p. 165.

Note 13 in page 1069 Hudibras, lines 143-4.

Note 14 in page 1070 I have not had access to a copy of Hopkins' book; this statement is repeated from the article on him in the DNB. That the work was published in May or slightly before can be seen from the fact that Thomason received his copy on the 18th. of that month.

Note 15 in page 1070 Op. cit., lines 153-4.

Note 16 in page 1070 Francis Hutchinson, Historical Essay concerning Witchcraft, Lond. 1720, pp. 86-87.

Note 17 in page 1070 Notestein doubts the validity of this legend for reasons which are not at all cogent. He believes the assertion made by Stearne, Hopkins' partner, that the latter died “peacefully, after a long sicknesse of a Consumption.” Both Notestein and the Rev. Alexander Gordon, author of the article in the DNB, assume that Hopkins according to this tradition died during the experiment. Notestein asserts that the tradition is that he was drowned; Gordon, that he was hanged afterwards. Neither assumption is necessary. Hutchinson says Hopkins swam; hence there is no reason to suppose that he drowned. The story that he was hanged seems to have originated in the mind of Mr. Gordon himself. The validity of the tradition, however, makes no difference. Butler heard the story, whether it was true or not, and we are only concerned with the date at which he might have heard it.

Note 18 in page 1071 Op. cit., lines 999-1002.

Note 19 in page 1071 This fact has been pointed out by all the editors of Butler.

Note 20 in page 1072 This is quoted by J. B. Williams (A History of English Journalism, London 1908, p. 49). Mr. Williams gives no reference.

Note 21 in page 1072 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Clark, Oxford 1898, Vol. I, p. 175.

Note 22 in page 1072 Hardin Craig, Manly Anniversary Studies, Chicago, 1923, p. 145 ff.

Note 23 in page 1073 Line 260.

Note 24 in page 1074 Op. cit., lines 305-18.

Note 25 in page 1074 Hooke made reports of his experiments during the late summer and autumn of 1663. (See Birch, Hist. of the Royal Society, Vol. I pp. 301, 303, 308, 316, 346, 347, etc.) No details of the reports are given, but we know that they were incorporated in his Micrographia, which was published in 1665. As Butler obviously used this material before its publication, he must have obtained it from some member of the Society.

Note 26 in page 1074 Robert Hooke, Micrographia, Lond. 1665, p. 212.

Note 27 in page 1074 Ibid., p. 210.

Note 28 in page 1074 Ibid., p. 214.

Note 29 in page 1074 Ibid., pp. 242-6.

Note 30 in page 1075 It may not be amiss to point out the close proximity of the names Tom Jones and Whachum in a book which was undoubtedly known to Fielding.

Note 31 in page 1075 We may dispose at once of the tradition preserved in The Key to A Poem of Mr. Butler's (1706) that Whachum is one Richard Green, who published a pamphlet of about five sheets of base ribaldry called Hudibras in a Snare. This pamphlet was published in 1667, whereas the description of Whachum appeared in 1664.

Note 32 in page 1075 See Grey's note on line 360.

Note 33 in page 1075 William Lilly, Life and Times, 1715, p. 28.

Note 34 in page 1076 Op. cit., lines 377-90.

Note 35 in page 1076 George Wharton has been suggested as the original of Whachum (See Hudibras, ed. Alfred Milnes, 1883, II, 282). This suggestion is preposterous and based solely on the fact that Wharton was an important astrologer. The inventor of this theory has forgotten that Wharton was a prominent royalist and undoubtedly a friend of Butler, who ridiculed only his political opponents.

Note 36 in page 1077 The lines already quoted, “fire a mine in China, here By sympathetic gun powder” (lines 295-6), remind one at once of Digby's famous treatise, The Powder of Sympathy.

Note 37 in page 1078 In 1674 appeared the new poem, The Heroicall Epistle of Hudibras to Sidrophel.