Making Monkeys of Important Men: Performance Satire and Rochester's Alexander Bendo's Brochure

This essay explores a unique and undervalued text by Rochester, Alexander Bendo's Brochure (1676). More exactly, it focuses on a wholly unconsidered element of this satire: its live enactment. Rochester not only wrote using the persona of Dr. Alexander Bendo, an Italian Mountebank, but for several weeks in the City of London he played the part of Bendo as well. I argue that the theatrical presentation must take precedence over the textual presentation in our assessment of this work, and that Rochester's piece is best studied as a performance satire. Rochester's staging of Bendo is a striking example of seventeenth-century libertine culture combining political and social critique with the sensuous experience of baroque theatricality. Moreover, in their condemnation of the politics of Charles II, Rochester's dramatic and printed texts enact important innovations in the practice of early modern satire as a means to comment on the emerging modern state. In substance and mood, Rochester's innovations anticipate certain kinds of political satire seen on television today.