Parody

The imitative use of the words, style, attitude, tone and ideas of an author in such a
way as to make them ridiculous. This is usually achieved by exaggerating certain
traits, using more or less the same technique as the cartoon caricaturist. In fact, a
kind of satirical mimicry. As a branch of satire its purpose may be corrective as well
as derisive.
If an author has a propensity for archaic or long words, double-banked adjectives,
long, convoluted sentences and paragraphs, strange names, quaint mannerisms of
expression, is sentimental, bombastic, arch or pompous, then these are some of the
features that the would-be parodist will seek to exploit.
Parody is difficult to accomplish well. There has to be a subtle balance between close
resemblance to the ‘original’ and a deliberate distortion of its principal
characteristics. It is, therefore, a minor form of literary art which is likely to be
successful only in the hands of writers who are original and cre- ative themselves. In
fact, the majority of the best parodies are the work of gifted writers.
The origins of parody are ancient. Aristotle refers to it in Poetics and attributes its
invention to Hegemon of Thasos who used an epic style to represent men as being
inferior to what they are in real life. Hegemon was supposed to have been the first
man to introduce parody in the theatre, in the 5th c. bc. However, the 6th c. poet
Hipponax has also been credited with this.
Aristophanes used parody in the Frogs where he took off the style of Aeschylus and
Euripides. Plato also caricatured the style of various writers in the Symposium.
Lucian used parody in his Dialogues. It was so common among Latin authors that
Cicero listed its varieties. In the Middle Ages paro- dies of the liturgy, hymns and the
Bible were fairly frequent. One of the first and best-known English parodies was
Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas (c. 1383), a skit on some of the more absurd
characteristics of medieval romances (Chaucer was in turn to be well parodied by
Alexander Pope and W. W. Skeat).

Late in the Renaissance period Cervantes parodied the whole tradition of medieval
romances in Don Quixote (1605, 1615). Erasmus in Moriae Enco- mium (1509) and
Rabelais in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534, 1532) turned scholasticism upside
down. Shakespeare parodied the euphuism (q.v.) of John Lyly in Henry IV, Pt I
(1597), Marlowe’s bombastic manner in Hamlet (c. 1603) and the general style of
Nashe in Love’s Labour’s Lost (c. 1595). Later Sir John Suckling took off Donne
splendidly as a love poet, and in 1701 John Philips parodied Milton very cleverly in
The Splendid Shilling. Somewhat earlier Buckingham produced one of the few
dramatic parodies which have survived contemporary interest; namely The
Rehearsal (1671), which mocked Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada.
In 1736 Isaac Hawkins’s A Pipe of Tobacco created a precedent because it was the
first collection of parodies of various authors’ supposed attempts on a single subject.
Fielding’s burlesque drama Tom Thumb appeared in 1730; and Fielding’s Shamela
(1741) was a complete parodic novel at the expense of Richardson’s Pamela (1740).
To the 18th c. also belongs Sheridan’s The Critic (1779), a successful parody of
sentimental drama and the malicious literary criticism of the period.
The Romantic period and the 19th c. provided a succession of ample targets for
literary iconoclasts. In 1812 James and Horace Smith published Rejected Addresses
in which Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Dr Johnson and others were parodied
very successfully. Thereafter, Burns, Byron, Wordsworth, Poe, Longfellow,
Tennyson, Browning, William Morris, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Southey, Whitman,
Hopkins and Kipling were quite frequently parodied, often by writers equally
distinguished. For example, Keats on Wordsworth, Byron on Wordsworth, James
Hogg on Wordsworth, Swinburne on Tennyson, C. S. Calverley on Browning, Lewis
Carroll on Swinburne, Hogg on Coleridge – and so forth. The favourite victims were
Southey, Wordsworth, Browning and Swinburne.
Max Beerbohm refined parody to art, and his collection of his own paro- dies in A
Christmas Garland (1912), which includes pieces in the manner of Kipling,
Galsworthy, Hardy, Arnold Bennett, Edmund Gosse and others, is generally agreed
to have set a standard which may never be surpassed.