John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
Once again the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, is proving to be a jolt to my students. I always start my course “Couples Comedy in the Restoration and 18th Century” with this 17th century libertine, and the poetry does not hold back. Rochester freely uses the “f” word, the “c” word, and a whole host of other objectionable words. He regularly boasts of his sexual prowess, launches diatribes against women, advocates a range of deviant sexual activities. At one point he proudly claims that he himself is the fastest way to hell.
I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by Rochester since we have virtually nothing in common. Male posturing has always made me uncomfortable, and Rochester postures. I party very little whereas Rochester once claimed to have been non-stop drunk for a period of five years. I’m offended by Rochester’s aristocratic elitism and regret the fact that he wasted his great talent, dying of various sex and alcohol related diseases at 33. And yet…
And yet there is something that draws me to him. I think it may be in part his sensitivity and his vulnerability. For all his posturing, he reveals his doubts and insecurities. Sometimes he even uses his poetry to flagellate himself.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Rochester was jester to Charles. He therefore took out after hypocrisy and pretense, but whether he himself believed in anything is unclear. His truth-telling got him into trouble with Charles on numerous occasions, incidentally. He did get away with the following brilliant quatrain, supposedly improvised, that was an apt description of a monarch who often seemed more style than substance:
God bless our good and gracious king
Whose promise none relies on,
Who never said a foolish thing
And never did a wise one.
Okay, so that’s somewhat mild. His “Satyr on Charles II,” on the other hand, got him temporarily banished from court. It ends with him declaring his equal dislike for Louis XIV and Charles: “All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,/From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.” “Hector” means bully, “cully” means dupe. Court jesters are always walking a tightrope—that ‘s what gives them an edge—and Rochester, who owed his estate and pension to Charles, went too far regularly.
But the poems that draw me are those that focus on the battle of the sexes. Here’s one that is appropriately scandalous.
Love a woman? You’re an ass.
‘Tis a most insipid passion
To choose out for your happiness
The idlest part of God’s creation.
Let the porter and the groom,
Things designed for dirty slaves,
Drudge in fair Aurelia’s womb
To get supplies for age and graves.
Farewell, woman! I intend
Henceforth every night to sit
With my lewd, well-natured friend,
Drinking to engender wit.
Then give me health, wealth, mirth, and wine,
And if busy Love intrenches,
There’s a sweet, soft page of mine
Does the trick worth forty wenches.
The poem is intended to shock and perhaps shock it does. “I’ve got other options,” the speaker tells a buddy of his, maybe one who has been rejected. “What does one need more that buddies to drink with?” The final stanza–I can turn to my page boy to satisfy my lust–comes with the force of a comic punch line.
In some ways, the poem hearkens back to Plato’s symposium and the ancient Greek belief that higher love could only occur between men. Love with a woman was merely pragmatic, men becoming mere functionaries to get supplies for age and graves (offspring). Of course, any aspirations to a higher calling is undercut by the images of drinking with”lewd well-natured friends.”
But does Wilmot believe what he says? I find myself thinking of a conversation from the movie Say Anything by John Hughes (which gives me also a chance to tip my cap to this recently deceased pioneer of the teenpic genre). Lloyd Dobbs (John Cusack) is being consoled by his friends after having been rejected by Claire. They tell him that he can do better, to which he counters, “I got a question. If you guys know so much about women, how come you’re here at like the Gas ‘n’ Sip on a Saturday night completely alone drinking beers with no women anywhere?” There is a stunned silence and then the tentative and not very convincing reply, “By choice, man.”
The speaker in the poem insists too much. He’s like the little boy jumping up and down shouting “I don’t need you, I don’t need anyone.” But the poet recognizes this in the speaker. It’s as though he’s saying to the audience, “Men don’t believe this when they say it, and I know that you, lady readers, can see through it. There’s a scared individual underneath all this bluster who needs someone to prop up his manhood.”
I wouldn’t call this the healthiest way to enter into a relationship, but it certainly gives us insights into male bluster. The value of the poem may lie in this.
Some of that bluster comes from a terrified suspicions that absolute nothingness underlies existence. I will write on this in a future post.
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My friend Rachel Kranz e-mailed me about this post, asking about Rochester’s sexuality and questioning whether I was correct in saying that Rochester didn’t really mean the last stanza of “Love a woman,you’re an ass.” If Rochester were bisexual–or more accurately, if the speaker in Rochester’s poem were bisexual–then it would seem that he really does have a trump card to play against women–as in, “I can have sex with a man that is as good or even better than with a woman and without the intergender complications.” Rachel notes that Shakespeare was bisexual and Marlowe so it’s certainly possible with Rochester.
But in fact we don’t know. With all the references to sodomy that there are in Rochester’s poems, many have assumed that he was bisexual, but he might just be seeking to shock. In The Country Wife, a Wycherley play of the time period, there is a scene in which Harcourt’s fellow rakes try to persuade him to prefer their company over that of women. “Good fellowship and friendship are lasting, rational, and manly pleasures,” Horner says, to which Harcourt responds, “For all that, give me some of those pleasures you call effeminate too; they help to relish one another.” And he concludes that love will always be uppermost. And even Horner doesn’t believe what he is saying but is just using his words to cover up the fact that he is secretly seeking out women. As I think about it, I believe I read Rochester’s poem through the light of this conversation.
The way I as shorthand for decadence. , than it would appear that he reallyhad a trump card to play: sex without complications with this page Robin, isn’t he saying he’d rather bugger the “sweet, soft page” than have to deal with a woman? The homoerotic subtext may be there in “Say Anything,” but it’s not exactly SUBtext in the poem you quoted…? WAS he bisexual, like Shakespeare? Or outright gay, like Marlowe (though you say he was with a lot of women)? Or maybe he didn’t mean it, but he is certainly saying it! Isn’t he? Otherwise, why “sweet,” “sort,” & “page,” as opposed to a staunch true friend or something like that (not someone so much lower than he, that he can do what he wants with him)?
I can well believe the Rochester didn’t mean what he wrote–but it does seem to me that he wrote “I have a friend whose wit I enjoy & a page I can bugger, who will satisfy my sexual needs more than 20 women,” rather than that he was ONLY saying, “I hang out with guys because I like their company.”
And the reason I think that’s important–besides not covering up evidence of gay relationships or references as a way of marginalizing them, etc. etc.–is because I think so many straight guys are genuinely puzzled as to why they are more comfortable spending all their time hanging out with men, & why they so do not enjoy the company of the women whom they’re having sex with. Some of these guys probably are gay or at least bisexual; but I’m sure the vast majority of straight guys don’t understand why they’re supposed to want to spend time with women (as their wives & girlfriends often insist) when hanging out with men is so much more fun…and then they worry that maybe they’re gay…and then they often act out those fears in various homophobic & anti-female ways. The fear that preferring to spend time with men makes you gay seems like a huge thing in our culture–and so interesting that Rochester’s version of that was, “Yeah, in fact, why not–he can take what I want to do sexually better than 20 women (and then I have my witty friend to talk to)…so in what sense are women NOT a waste of time?”
Of course, as a straight women who enjoys the company of men and who, especially lately (as I’ve been playing poker) is often in all-male or almost all-male settings, I’m fascinated and saddened by all the reasons why straight men find women’s company so boring at best and oppressive at worst. (“Here we are in Vegas and I COULD be having a great time playing poker, but oh, no! My boring, scolding wife insists that I spend time with HER.”) It might be posturing–but a lot of it seems very disaffected, sad, and real. “Say Anything,” chick-flick that it is, is the girl’s wish that guys really feel lonely and lost without them, and maybe they do…but the other side of things seems real, too, or at last very present in the culture.
But Rochester at least is explicit about the sexual part of it. He’s said that the one remaining reason that men can’t do without women doesn’t apply–because you can always find a soft, sweet page…I once saw a sitcom in which the lead character and his best friend actively fantasize about being a gay couple (they could watch sports all the time & never have to talk about their feelings), but what the man would miss, he realized, is a woman pushing him to talk about his feelings…!
This is a really, really interesting question and one that I think my women students are going to be very interested in. (And I very much regret that I don’t have any male students in this Restoration class.) I don’t know if I have much to contribute to it as a man since many of my closest friends are women (like Rachel)–and many of the men I like the best are like me (i.e., many of their closest friends are women). For me, my female friendships are like constantly entering another world–even after 28 years of marriage I’m still learning things. I tried out one of those men’s circles back in the 90′s and it just didn’t do anything for me. I like playing tennis with my male friends, but if there were women around of comparable skill, we’d invite them in (as we have when there were).
This doesn’t answer the question about those men in Rachel’s poker circles, but in Renaissance and Restoration literature, this kind of male bonding is seen as a form of adolescence that needs to be grown out of. Shakespeare’s speaker in the sonnets is advising his young friend to grow beyond their same-sex relationship and marry and have children. The Restoration comedies usually start with a group of rakes but end with their breaking up and getting married. And while we’re talking of movies, in Knocked Up there is a husband who is sneaking around behind his wife’s back to–no, not have an affair, as she thinks, but to play fantasy baseball. And then he gets chewed out by the protagonist, who hasn’t exactly been a model of responsibility heretofore, for neglecting his wife.
So again, why do certain men find the company of men so much more satisfying than the company of women? I’d love to hear from some men on this. Women want honest answers, no matter how uncomfortable.
I, er, have a slight crush on Rochester
This has more to do with the fact that a fellow author on a writers forum I belong to is writing a history of Charles II and Rochester, and… to make a long story short, we had a Writers Houseparty back in the summer and the heroine from my novel ended up having an affair with Rochester [bg]
I mention all this as I’ve just linked your post to my latest post that mentions His Lordship. Hope you don’t mind!
For what it’s worth to the topic at hand, my husband always talks about this, how he prefers the company of men overall.
Reader Robin Margolis e-mailed in the following response:
I would respectfully offer an additional thought — there was no way to enter this as a comment on the WordPress site, which seems closed for comments — so I am sending it directly to you — you note that there is no way to determine what Rochester actually believed and his outlook on various topics, etc.
Actually, there is a memoir of the last year of his life, written by his close friend and spiritual adviser, Bishop Burnet, in which Rochester goes into his beliefs — and changes he hoped to make in his life — at great length:
http://www.archive.org/stream/somepassagesof00burnuoft#page/n11/mode/2up ” rel=”nofollow”>http://www.archive.org/stream/somepassagesof00burnuoft#page/n11/mode/2up
I have always had a soft spot for Rochester — he was a very charming person — and admire him as one of pioneers of GLBT literature and erotic literature in general — it took courage to publish poems about being bisexual –
but the memoir indicates that Rochester felt keenly at the end of his life that he had destroyed his health through drink and sex addiction, and neglected his devoted wife and four children for pleasures which proved ephemeral, encouraged others in destructive beliefs and lifestyles, and advocated for a belief system that he ultimately rejected in favor of more traditional Church of England Christianity.
Or as Rochester himself put it, pointing out his three young daughters and son to Bishop Burnet during the last month of his life — “See how good God has been to me in giving me so many blessings, and I have carried myself to him like an ungracious and an unthankful dog.”
I guess what I am saying is that there was another side of Rochester, which he did not live long enough to act on. Sadly, it might have involved renouncing his past poetry and prose — which would have been much against my personal wishes — but we also might have seen some great spiritual poetry produced by him, just as John Donne produced excellent spiritual poetry after a wild youth.
Thanks again for an excellent essay. I am always happy to see Rochester’s work and memory studied.
I sent Robin the following reply:
I love the ideas here, Robin. I’d never thought of Rochester as following the trajectory of Jack Donne to Dr. Donne but it makes a lot of sense. I’ve always found even his materialism to be a kind of spiritual quest—almost as though, by trying to find transcendence through the senses and failing, he found himself thrown back on spirit in spite of himself. So his deathbed conversion (or whenever it happened) has always struck me as sincere and not (as many of his critics have claimed) mere panic. I read somewhere once (maybe in relation to Richard Gere but I don’t know for sure) that people who have all the material goods they could want sometimes find themselves particularly hungry for spiritual experiences because they see the limitations of materiality. It sounds somewhat suspect to me but I’m willing to buy a version of that for Rochester because he strikes me as someone who was always in search for meaning and prepared to be as honest and uncompromising about that search as he could be. His playing with identities, for instance, I see as a search into the meaning of self. I’ll definitely go look at the memoir.