Content area
Full text
James William Johnson. A Profane Wit: The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2004. x + 467 pp. $34.95.
John Wilmot, second carl of Rochester, seems like a dream of a biographical subject He led a scandalous and colorful life, wrote verse that has every appearance of being confessional, and has left a tolerable swag of letters and documents. He is also an excellent subject for retrospective psychoanalysis and venereology-at-a-distance. Why is it then that all attempts to write this life, including the one under review, are so unsatisfactory? The answers are simple. Firstly, the purportedly confessional verse is conditioned at every stage by Rochester's role as a factional clown prince at the court of Charles II. The expectations of a primary readership with whom he was in daily, face-to-face contact influence every line. secondly, the authorship of several key poems is uncertain: 'Timon,' '' Tunbridge Wells,' '' 'Seigneur Dildoe,'' and "To the Postboy," to look no further, all stand under question, while the documentary evidence for his authorship of Sodom is about as convincing as that for Hamlet having been written by Marlowe. Thirdly, much of what we think we know about Rochester's life is based on utterly unreliable gossip and the fabrications of an early form of celebrity culture.
It is possible to imagine a biography of Rochester that would confront these difficulties and, where a stand needed to be taken, would do so on the basis of reasoned weighing of the options. Sadly this is not the present author's method. What we get instead is the repeated presentation of unsubstantiated hunches as if they were ascertained facts. Consider the following passage (one of many that could be cited):
The letter sent off, he went to the Woodstock races and then back to London. There he rejoined his mistress one (Elizabeth?) Foster. She had passed herself off as an innocent girl from the north, but she was the low-bom niece of a tavern-keeper in Knightsbridge; she had lost her virginity to one Butler, presumably a highwayman. Pretending faithfulness to Rochester, this "Corinna" as he called her, had sexual relations with others and reinfected...