parody

parody, in literature, an imitation of the style and manner of a particular writer or school of writers. Parody is typically negative in intent: it calls attention to a writer’s perceived weaknesses or a school’s overused conventions and seeks to ridicule them. Parody can, however, serve a constructive purpose, or it can be an expression of admiration. It may also simply be a comic exercise. The word parody is derived from the Greek parōidía, “a song sung alongside another.”

One of the earliest examples of parody comes from ancient Greece: Batrachomyomachia (The Battle of the Frogs and Mice), in which an anonymous poet imitated the epic style of Homer. Aristophanes parodied the dramatic styles of Aeschylus and Euripides in his play Frogs (produced 405 bce). In medieval England, Geoffrey Chaucer parodied the chivalric romance with “The Tale of Sir Thopas” in The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400). European writers produced numerous examples of parodies during the Renaissance era: Miguel de Cervantes also took the romance as his target in Don Quixote (1605, 1615), while François Rabelais parodied the Scholastics in Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–64). William Shakespeare mimicked Christopher Marlowe’s high dramatic style in the players’ scene in Hamlet (c. 1599–1601) and was himself parodied by John Marston, who skewered Shakespeare’s poem Venus and Adonis with his The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (1598).

George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, in The Rehearsal (1671) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan in The Critic (1779) both parodied the heroic drama, especially John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada (1670, 1671). John Phillips in The Splendid Shilling (1705) caught all the superficial epic mannerisms of John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), while Jean Racine used Les Plaideurs (1668; The Litigants) to parody Pierre Corneille’s lofty dramatic style. During the 18th century the novel began to flourish as a means of delivering parody, particularly in Britain. Henry Fielding was notably effective as a parodist: he used both Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742) to pillory what was, arguably, England’s first novel, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740).

Rejected Addresses (1812) by Horace and James Smith was the first collection of parodies in verse to become a popular success in England. It consisted of a series of dedicatory odes on the reopening of the Drury Lane Theatre in the manner of such contemporary poets as Walter Scott, Lord Byron, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Unique among the Victorians is Lewis Carroll, whose parodies preserve verses that might otherwise not have survived—e.g., Southey’s “Old Man’s Comforts” (the basis for “You Are Old, Father William”) and the verses of Isaac Watts that gave rise to “How Doth the Little Crocodile” and “The Voice of the Lobster.” In the United States the 19th-century poems of Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Bret Harte were mimicked by their contemporaries, particularly by the poet and translator Bayard Taylor. Because of the variety of accents of 19th-century immigrants, American parody often played on dialect, though sometimes to such an extent that the parody became merely an expression of anti-immigration sentiment.

The art of parody was encouraged in the 20th century by such periodicals as Punch and The New Yorker. One of the most successful examples of parody in prose from the early 20th century is Sir Max Beerbohm’s Christmas Garland (1912), a series of Christmas stories in the style and spirit of various contemporary writers, most notably Henry James. Sir John Squire has been credited with creating “double parody” in the period between World Wars I and II. This type of parody renders the sense of one poet in the style of another—e.g., Squire’s version of Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” written in the style of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology resulted in “If Gray Had Had to Write His Elegy in the Cemetery of Spoon River Instead of in That of Stoke Poges.” Other parodists working in English during the first half of the 20th century were Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch and Stephen Leacock; E.B. White’s career extended well beyond the middle of the century. Vladimir Nabokov, Flann O’Brien, and Donald Barthelme also deployed parody in their writings. By the turn of the 21st century, literary parody had become, arguably, more difficult to identify, as the broad skepticism that underlies the most effective parody (and is a defining feature of what has been called postmodernism) had become a sort of default mode for Western writers who produced “literature,” such that much of what they published might be considered parodic.

Still, the boundaries between the literary senses of parody, burlesque, travesty, and pastiche are debatable. So too the relationship between these terms and satire and comedy can be murky. It could be claimed, for instance, that parody seeking to satirize differs from burlesque by the depth of the parody’s technical penetration. Likewise, where travesty treats dignified subjects as trivial, parody may be distinguished by its more merciless exposure of its victim’s shortcomings of manner and thought. As a form of literature, parody can also be understood as a form of literary criticism, in that it represents a considered response to a literary text or texts. Successful parody cannot be written without a thorough appreciation of the work that it mimics, regardless of the parodist’s intent.