Rochester, Earl of

John Wilmot, the second Earl Rochester (1647–1680), remains unsurpassed in the history of English poetry and drama for his astonishingly explicit use of obscenity and his unflinching depiction of an ambience of riotous decadence. Having spent part of his childhood in Paris, where his father had been exiled as a Royalist general, he was sufficiently precocious to enter Wadham College, Oxford, at the age of twelve. Rochester epitomized the licentiousness of the Restoration, which was as extreme as the Puritanism to which it was a reaction (Walker 1984, ix-x). Briefly imprisoned for kidnapping his intended wife, the heiress Elizabeth Malet, he nevertheless remained a royal favorite. Described as “tall, thin and beautiful,” qualities that are endorsed by the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery in London, he was regarded as the most brilliant wit and the most accomplished “rake” or decadent roué in the court of Charles II. The portrait shows Rochester ironically crowning a monkey, a traditional symbol of lust, with a laurel wreath, the symbol of poetic excellence, while the animal tears out pages from his book of poems.

Rochester follows Ben Jonson (1572–1637) in having extremely cynical assumptions about human behavior and sexuality, showing decadence stripped of pretense. However, he goes even further, since this world is seen almost entirely from crotch level and its multifarious participants are reduced to and dominated solely by frantic sexual energy. In “A Ramble in St James’s Park” he juxtaposes sacred, profane, animalistic, and taboo language with a casual insouciance:

Much wine had past in grave discourse
Of who Fucks who and who does worse….

But though St. James has the Honor on’t
‘Tis consecrate to Prick and Cunt.

And nightly now beneath their shade
Are Buggeries, Rapes and Incests made;
Unto this all-sin-sheltering Grove
Whores of the Bulk [shop window] and Alcove [fashionable brothel]
Great Ladies, Chamber Mayds, and Drudges,
The Ragg picker, and Heiress Trudges Carrmen [carriage drivers], Divines, Great Lords and Taylors,
Prentices, Poets, Pimps and Gaolers,
Footmen, Fine Fopps, doe here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive [fuck].
(ll. 1-2; 9-10; 23-32)

In this sexual circus he caustically juxtaposes “Some stiff-prickt Clown and well-hung Parson.” No one escapes Rochester’s biting wit. His “Satire on Charles II” begins with an odd chauvinist compliment:

I’ th’ Isle of Britaine long since famous growne
For breeding the best cunts in Christendome

ruled over by “A merry Monarch, scandalous and poor,” so virile that “His Scepter and his Prick are of a Length.” Nevertheless he needs “poor laborious Nelly” (Nell Gwyn, one of the royal mistresses) who “employes hands, fingers, mouth, and thighs / E’re she can raise the member she enjoys” (ll. 15; 11; 29-31). In “On Mistress Willis,” a whore loosely connected with Court, Rochester wryly admits that “our Ballox [testicles] can make a Man a slave / To such a Bitch as Willis,” who is

Bawdy in thoughts, precise in Words,
Ill natur’d though a Whore
Her Belly is a Bagg of Turds
And her Cunt a Common shore [sewer].
(ll. 17-20)

Rochester never excludes himself from his satirical barbs. “The Imperfect Enjoyment” is a comic, poignant, but frank account of premature ejaculation: the poet launches his epic “All-dissolving Thunderbolt” but has the mortification of leaving his unsatisfied lover crying “Is there then no more?” (ll. 10, 22). “Regime d’viver” presents his life as a rake as a horrific cycle of unfulfilled hedonism:

I rise at Eleven, I Dine about Two
I get drunk before Seven, and the next thing I do,
I send for my Whore , when for fear of a Clap [syphilis],
I spend [come] in her hand, and I spew in her lap …
(ll. 1-4)

So the sad roundelay proceeds, until

And in Bed I lye Yawning, till Eleven again.
(l. 14)

A sense of energetic sexual comedy abounds. Thus the arrival of a “Noble Italian call’d Signior Dildo” brings both joy and consternation to the sexual scene as he is vigorously embraced but also mercilessly hunted down. Like Horner in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Rochester knowingly adopts the role of a sexual therapist to the ladies:

This Signior is sound, safe, ready and Dumb,
As ever was Candel, Carret, or Thumb;
Then away with these nasty devices, and Show
How you rate the just merits of Signior Dildo.
(ll. 73-76)

Rochester reputedly took the role further, setting up as a quack doctor specializing in problems of fertility, apparently with some success. Always involved in the theater, he very possibly collaborated in the obscene farce Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery (1668), with dramatic personœ uniquely named Prince Buggeranthus, Bolloxinian, Cuntigratia, Prickett, Fuckadilla, Cunticula, Clytoris, and Virtuose, the maker of merkins (pubic wigs) and dildos for the royal court. But his involvement remains an area of critical dispute, as does the question of his deathbed repentance. In his funeral address Robert Parsons announced that Rochester had “ordered all his profane and lewd Writings … and all his filthy Pictures to be burned” (28-29). The vocabulary is interestingly modern.

Rochester’s reputation has oscillated considerably since his demise at the age of thirty-four, probably accelerated by syphilis. His poems, which still have power to shock jaded modern sensibilities, were published in pirated and inadequate texts “merely for lucre’s sake” when he died in 1680 (Walker 1984, xii). Contemporary assessments tended to criticize his life more severely than his vocabulary. Andrew Marvell, according to John Aubrey’s Brief Lives , “was wont to say that he was the best English satirist and had the right veyne” (Farley-Hills 1972, 178). By 1703 the comment could be made that “One man reads Milton , forty Rochester ,” a clear indication of a change of taste (Walker 1984, xi). Voltaire, the rationalist philosopher who detected melodramatic excesses in Shakespeare, commented in his Lettres Philosophiques (1729): “I would willingly describe in him the man of genius, the great poet” (Farley-Hills 1972, 194). Recent critics have claimed that Rochester’s “obscenities are no worse than those of his court-satirist colleagues” (Thormählen 1993, 286). Perhaps so, but “Signior Dildo” is nearly one hundred lines long, and actually names many society ladies who “fart,” “belch,” and “swallow pricks.” The collection Rochester: The Critical Heritage (ed. D. Farley-Hills 1972) charts the ebb and flow of the tide of critical opinion.