SOURCE: "Hudibras Considered as Satiric Allegory," in The Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. XVI, No. 2, February, 1953, pp. 141-60.

In the following essay, Leyburn argues that scholars have been sidetracked by investigating possible models for Butler's characters in Hudibras and have, therefore, overlooked the ways in which the poem demands to be considered a satiric allegory.

I

The Game of identifying particular individuals in Hudibras has exercised such fascination for scholars that their investigation of the poem has largely been an exploring of possible models for Butler's characters.¹ Literary critics, on the other hand, have been so bewitched by the brilliance of the couplets that one even suggests discarding the bulk of the poem in order to display its units,² feeling apparently that the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Professor Ricardo Quintana has the distinction of presenting the large philosophic perspective from which the poem is...