. . . Samuel Butler, the seventeenth-century author of the burlesque satire Hudibras, declared, ‘So much Power has Malice above all other Passions, to highten Wit and Fancy, for malice is Restles, and never finde’s ease untill it has vented it self.’ Butler’s conceit of ‘venting’ strikingly anticipates Ibsen’s own: ‘While I was writing Brand I had standing on my desk an empty beer glass with a scorpion in it. From time to time the creature became sickly; then I used to throw a piece of soft fruit to it, which it would then furiously attack and empty its poison into; then it grew well again. Is there not something similar to that about us poets?’