Mock-heroic, mock-epic or heroi-comic works are typically satires or 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.
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, 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 Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, English authors began to imitate the inflated language of Romance poetry and narrative to describe misguided or common characters. The most likely genesis for the mock-heroic, as distinct from the picaresque, 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 "Hudibrastic". The Hudibrastic is poetry in closed rhyming couplets in iambic tetrameter, where the rhymes are often 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.