Evelyn’s contemptuous comment of 24 November 1670 that Rochester was ‘a very profane wit’ was typical of wider society’s judgement on him. The Mulgrave affair might have been trivial, but it had damaged his reputation for being gallant and courageous, and now he was little more than another vapid man about town. Burnet later recounted that it was around this time that he was driven ‘deeper and deeper into intemperance’ and that ‘he had broke the firm constitution of his health’. Burnet’s famous saying that ‘for five years together he was continually drunk’ may refer to this point in time, and the ‘violent love of pleasure and disposition to extravagant mirth’ would become prominent in his imagination and life.
Up until late 1670, the poetry that he had sent to Elizabeth and passed around court in manuscript maintained a seemly decorum, influenced by Donne and the metaphysical; he constructed classical dialogues between Strephon and Daphne and wrote tender romantic lyrics. No wider audience yet had any inking of the emergence of Rochester as a writer. However, after this, his verse began to toughen and coarsen in its combination of witty exuberance and scatological bawdiness. The conflict between the world, the flesh and the devil both fascinated and overwhelmed Rochester, resulting in poetry that went beyond mere obscenity into sublime muck, where under every rutting body lay an already rotting corpse.
Two typical examples of this new style of poetry come in the shape of his Chloris songs, which date from around this time. In the first, a pastoral scene is soon interrupted by an ‘amorous swain’, with violence on his mind. The hallmarks that typified Rochester’s later, more obviously bawdy work are found here in miniature. Even the choice of the name ‘Chloris’, the nymph of spring and flowers, is a knowing one; ‘flowers’ was Restoration slang for menstrual discharge. It comes as little surprise, then, that this apparently bucolic scene is soon undercut, with the amorous swain given to violent, possessive action. Worse is to come:
She faintly spoke, and trembling lay,
For fear he should comply,
But virgins’ eyes their hearts betray
And give their tongues the lie.
Thus she, who princes had denied
With all their pompous train,
Was in the lucky minute tried
And yielded to the swain.
As an example of the carpe diem tradition, this is interesting in that the female carnal drive is given its due, with the ‘comely shepherd’ a passive figure who, unlike Chloris, is not allowed an interior voice. Men in general are ridiculed, with the ‘pompous train’ of princes—perhaps Rochester had the frippery of Whitehall in mind—held up against the ‘lucky minute’ of Chloris’s sexual awakening. The poem might begin with ‘harmless thought’, but it contains some unusually subversive ideas, a mile away from the more blatant libertine writing of such contemporary poets as Buckingham.
What the song is not is especially bawdy—something that was soon corrected by a closely related poem by Rochester, ‘Fair Chloris in a pigsty lay’. The pastoral idea has now been ridiculed to such an extent that Chloris is found amongst a ‘tender herd’ of pigs, ‘murmuring gruntlings’ as they sleep. This is contrasted with her dreams, when one of her ‘love-convicted swains’ comes to her, with a truly tragic vision:
Fly, nymph! Oh fly ere ’tis too late
A dear, loved life to save;
Rescue your bosom pig from fate
Who now expires, hung in the gate
That leads to Flora’s cave.
As with much of his later social satire, the unexpected use of bathos skilfully undercuts the pastoral idyll. As with the other song, the swain has thoughts beyond animal husbandry on his mind:
This plot, it seems, the lustful slave
Had laid against her honour,
Which not one god took care to save,
For he pursues her to the cave,
And throws himself upon her.
Now pierced is her virgin zone;
She feels the foe within it.
She hears a broken amorous groan,
The panting lover’s fainting moan,
Just in the happy minute.
The use of the ironic term ‘the happy minute’, implying a lack of success on the swain’s part, adds to the weird half-horror, half-hilarity of the poem, and looks forward to Rochester’s subsequent poem about premature ejaculation, ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’. There remains a final twist:
Frighted she wakes, and waking frigs.
Nature thus kindly eased
In dreams raised by her murmuring pigs
And her own thumb between her legs,
She’s innocent and pleased.
Taking away the shock value engendered by this being the first significant work of Rochester’s that moves into an explicitly bawdy register, the closing verse again renders the male figure redundant. Chloris is able to take her satisfaction into her own hands, and rejects the world of artifice and mankind in favour of ‘nature thus kindly eased’. The temptation with much of Rochester’s poetry is to take his words as constantly ironic, but if the closing statement that Chloris is ‘innocent and pleased’ is taken at face value, then he makes the bold claim that male sexual prowess is a frightening yet ultimately irksome irrelevance.
This statement stands at odds with Rochester’s public behaviour, not least his whoring and membership of the Ballers. However, as a letter of Savile’s of 26 January 1671 attests, Rochester was making as much use of ‘those leather instruments’, his dildoes, as he was his own penis, perhaps indicating impotence or incapability, as Savile makes explicit reference to the dildoes ‘your Lordship carried down [a box] of’. It is unclear where Rochester obtained these dildoes; they might have been a remnant of his French sojourn the previous year, or especially imported at his request. Even as Savile was promising, mock-heroically, that ‘your Lordship is chosen general in this war between the Ballers and the farmers’—the custom officers who had confiscated the dildoes in a fit of righteous disgust—and claiming that he and Rochester’s other cronies were ‘perpetually drinking [his] health, no man oftener nor in greater glasses’, a sense was creeping into Rochester’s world that the time for carefree jokes and jests of previous years had passed. From this point onwards, his wit grew bleaker and more pointed and his antics more obscene, even as his health declined irreversibly. The brilliant young man had given way to a prematurely aged and suffering cynic. Yet, though down, he was far from out.
*1 This was credited to Rochester in 1758 by the eighteenth-century publication The Literary Magazine, which noted that Elizabeth ‘sent a servant on purpose desiring to hear from him being very uneasy at his long silence’.
*2 A typical Mulgrave couplet: ‘Defects of witty men deserve a cure/And those who are so, will the worst endure.’
Rochester had many unlikely acquaintances at court, but one of the unlikeliest was the Poet Laureate John Dryden. If any word sums up Dryden, it is ‘stolid’. His writing was stolid; his appearance, flabby, self-assured and soft, was stolid; even his sexual intrigues were stolid. He was said to have remained faithful to his wife Anne, possibly out of incompetence at philandering rather than on principle, with his only mistress being rhyme itself. Dryden was hugely influential on his contemporaries, and upon such later writers as Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, but his overarching stolidity, especially in comparison with writers such as Rochester, Marvell and Milton, has proved to be his undoing for some modern readers. Dryden’s verbosity seldom disguised an intellectual poverty that was expressed both in verse and, more unfortunately, in drama.
His magnum opus was The Conquest of Granada, which was staged in two parts, each of five acts, in 1670 and 1671. A tragic-heroic drama revolving around a tormented love affair taking place at the height of the Battle of Granada in 1492, it featured a protagonist, Almanzor, who was much given to speeches of turgid, hilariously self-regarding bombast. Dryden professed himself delighted with his hero, claiming that he was responsible for ‘a perfect pattern
of heroic virtue’. He was also pleased that he had created the antithesis of the standard philandering rake-protagonist of Restoration comedy; Almanzor’s love for Boabdelin, the virtuous fiancée of the Moorish king, remains pure and honourable throughout.
The play’s pomposity and ridiculous length led the Restoration wits to guy it with glee. Buckingham and others came up with a straightforward parody, The Rehearsal, which was performed later in 1671 and then published in 1672. It saw a talentless, egotistical playwright Bayes—the Dryden figure—construct a hyper-heroic drama entirely drawn from other heroic dramas, with ridiculous and nonsensical plot developments and absurd characters, such as Prince Pretty-man and Drawcansir, the latter an imbecilic figure who kills whoever he can, ‘sparing neither friend nor foe’. The cutting depiction of Bayes shows one whose absurdly convoluted plotting cannot fail to convey a lack of imagination. Dryden, stung, later guyed Buckingham in his satire Absalom and Achitopel, but it was a mark of The Rehearsal’s success that Restoration theatre continued to be synonymous with bawdy satire and farcical comedy rather than overblown tragedy.
Rochester and Dryden themselves were on friendly enough terms in 1671, having met at court after Dryden was created Poet Laureate in 1668 and Historiographer Royal in 1670. Initially, Rochester acted as a supporter of the older man’s play Marriage-à-la-Mode by bringing it to Charles’s attention, and possibly rewriting some of the comic dialogue; a lengthy section of the comic subplot contains a disquisition on the perils of impotence and premature ejaculation, subjects closer to Rochester’s interests than Dryden’s. Dryden’s 1672 dedication to Rochester claimed, in gushing tones, that ‘you have not forgot either the ties of friendship or the practice of generosity’. Yet Dryden, despite his Laureateship, was not one of the Whitehall set. He was gauche and given to embarrassing faux pas, such as the incident in June 1671, reported in the poet Thomas Shadwell’s 1682 anti-Dryden diatribe The Medal Of John Bayes, when—in front of Rochester, Charles and others who were debating how best to spend the afternoon—he blurted out, in an apparent attempt to keep up with the wittily lewd conversation he was privy to, ‘Let’s bugger one another now, by God.’ Whether true or not, this summed up Dryden, a man who, as Shadwell sneers, ‘boasts of vice / which he did ne’er commit’. It was little wonder that he referred to court as having ‘much of interest but more of detraction’.
Though he might have had a hand in The Rehearsal, Rochester did not write his own direct parody of The Conquest of Granada at the time, but he was certainly aware of its failings, which stemmed as much from unseemly haste as literary incompetence (when informed that Dryden had written a new play in three weeks, he asked, ‘Three weeks? How the devil could he have been so long about it?’). Instead, he was more preoccupied with following his wayward poetic muse, although he parodied a famous line from The Conquest in his poem ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’. The description of the heroine Boabdelin—‘Her tears, her smiles, her very look’s a net’—becomes, in Rochester’s version, a reference to a comely whore: ‘Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.’ If we assume that the poem’s precise textual satire indicates that The Rehearsal was performed shortly before ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ was written, it offers a valuable insight into the mock heroic-tragic account of premature ejaculation and subsequent impotence that Rochester depicts. Whether or not it is a biographical account drawn from experience matters less than its evocation of masculine frailty and sexual frustration, which was becoming a central feature of his poetry.
The poem shares many interesting similarities with the Chloris works that pre-dated it. Taking the masculine rather than feminine perspective, it again ridicules the idea of male sexual prowess, referring mock-heroically in its first verse to the narrator’s phallus as ‘the all-dissolving thunderbolt’ which then dissolves into ‘liquid raptures’. Tellingly, the female is not named or identified other than as ‘she’ or ‘her’; instead, her ‘balmy brinks of bliss’ or ‘nimble tongue’ act as her character—indeed, her ‘very look’ is sexually attractive, although the results are unsuccessful:
But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dead cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
The narrator describes himself as ‘trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry’, the last word surely a self-regarding term about his poetic ability as much as it is about his sexual prowess:
Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame,
False to my passion, fatal to my fame,
Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove
So true to lewdness, so untrue to love?
What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore
Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before?
When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way,
With what officious haste dost thou obey!
Although poetry had many purposes and functions in Restoration England, poems were not generally written by a syphilis-haunted young man who was moaning about his, or his avatar’s, inability to maintain an erection. There had been earlier verse that discussed impotence, such as Ovid’s Amores 3.7, although this had been censored before and since Rochester’s time and was regarded as little more than filth prior to the Restoration, much as ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ would later be. Yet it is this incongruity that leads to the poem’s wonderfully baroque language—it is hard not to pronounce the stuttering mini-aria of ‘oyster-cinder-beggar-common-whore’ without an imagined stress on the last word—with its knowingly fanciful comparisons of the imprecise organ to ‘a rude, roaring hector’ and ‘a rakehell villain’.
Rochester’s attention to detail is such that some of the smaller nuances could easily be missed. A patriotic allusion to ‘king and country’ is amusingly juxtaposed with the observation that ‘vice, disease, and scandal lead the way’, implying that ‘king and country’ are hardly worth bothering with. ‘Brutal valour’ might be a wry comment on his own much-garlanded activities in the Anglo-Dutch war, but it might also refer to the casual street violence in which the merry gang took such delight. Finally, the image of the penis as nothing but ‘a common fucking-post’ reduces it to something cheap and insubstantial, likening it to a gate that hogs might relieve themselves on, grunting. An allusion to Chloris and her fantasy-inducing pigsty is never too far away. Finally, Rochester adopts a profane quasi-liturgical register to curse the unfortunate member:
May’st thou to ravenous chancres be a prey,
Or in consuming weepings waste away;
May strangury and stone thy days attend;
May’st thou ne’er piss, who did refuse to spend
When all my joys did on false thee depend.
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.
A ‘chancre’ was an ulcerous sore on the penis occasioned by venereal disease, probably something Rochester had first-hand experience of by then, and ‘strangury’ and ‘stone’ were similarly vile complaints, being slow and painful urination and kidney stone illnesses. Brilliant and hilarious though ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ is, a work that was enjoyed in manuscript copies by court wits such as Savile and Buckhurst who probably had their own experience of unfinished pleasure, there is also something depressing about its unflinching look at the skull beneath the skin, with Rochester’s firework-like wit set against the omnipresent background of decay and corporeal failure.
Illness was something that virtually everyone who led the licentious and decadent existence of court now experienced. Sy
philis, or ‘the great pox’ as it was known, was a problem for both sexes. Probably originating in the New World and transmitted to Europe by the crew of Columbus’s ships, the disease reached England in the sixteenth century. Its coming was first announced by the chancre Rochester refers to, followed by heavy sweating, rashes and open sores, for which treatments tended to be mercury-based. The results were normally unpleasant, involving mental illness, rotting teeth and noses, and loosened hair. This, however, was not fatal. It was the final, tertiary stage that resulted in madness, paralysis and even death.
The unsavoury impact of syphilis stretched over every part of society, from the lowest street whore to the aristocracy and, it was rumoured, to Charles himself. Rochester was particularly badly afflicted. A letter from the courtier John Muddiman to him in September 1671, when he was resting at Adderbury, expresses regret that his ‘eyes could endure neither wine nor water’, and also makes reference to his ‘sudden start’, implying that his departure from London was triggered by a nasty bout of syphilitic illness.
It is, of course, equally possible that his indisposition was the result of heavy drinking; an earlier letter that Rochester wrote to Henry Savile from Bath in June 1671 muses on their alcohol intake, in remarkably candid and sincere fashion, without regret but with prematurely elegiac wistfulness. The friendship between Rochester and Savile had developed during their time in the Ballers, and while Rochester still looked to Buckingham as a mentor and inspiration, Savile was, at twenty-nine, closer to his own age and place at court. His letter claims that:
that second bottle, Harry, is the sincerest, wisest and most impartial downright friend we have, tells us truth of ourselves, and forces us to speak truths of others, banishes flattery from our tongues and distrust from our hearts, sets us above the mean policy of court prudence, which makes us lie to one another all day, for fear of being betrayed by each other at night.
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