John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: The Poems and “Lucina’s Rape,” (review)

The late Mr. Walker’s edition of Rochester’s poems (1984) served as a useful, old-spelling alternative to David M. Vieth’s dated Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1968). Yale reissued the Vieth edition in 2002, so it is not surprising that a newly revised and updated version of Mr. Walker’s edition has now appeared as well. Mr. Fisher, who has remained true to the spirit of Mr. Walker’s edition, hopes to make “Rochester available to students and scholars in versions that were read in his lifetime.”

He has retained the general shape and organization of Mr. Walker’s original introduction, updating it with new information. In the section on editing the texts of Rochester’s poetry, for example, Mr. Fisher incorporates the discoveries of Harold Love’s recent, authoritative The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1999). Where Mr. Love chose to use the “Hart-well” manuscript of the “politer” poems, now at Yale, Mr. Fisher has chosen to use the lesser known of these two new collections, the “Harbin” manuscript at the British Library, as the foundation of this edition “in order to bring an equally significant manuscript into the wider domain.” Mr. Fisher has added a very helpful chronology of Rochester’s life that usefully places his biography in historical context using a two-column method: the left-hand column delineates events in Rochester’s life—such as his birth, travel, marriage, court appointments, children’s births; the right-hand column lists major historical events such as the Interregnum, the Restoration, Charles II’s major declarations and political activities, and the production of other writers’ major works. Like Mr. Walker’s original edition, two Indexes are organized, one by proper names, and the other by titles and first lines of poems.

Although Mr. Fisher has retained the titles of Mr. Walker’s original “genres”—”Juvenilia,” “Love Poems,” “Translations,” “Prologues and Epilogues,” “Satires and Lampoons,” “Poems to Mulgrave and Scroope,” and “Epigrams, Impromptus, Jeux d’esprit“—he has reordered many of the poems within these sections to reflect the current thinking on their chronological order. He has also extensively updated Mr. Walker’s section on “Poems Possibly by Rochester” and renamed it “Poems Less Certainly Attributed to Rochester.” Following the computational analysis of John Burrows, Mr. Fisher has moved “Tunbridge Wells” from “Satires and Lampoons” to this section, for example. “Seigneur Dildoe” also appears in this section, as do “Timon. A Satyr,” “An Allusion to Tacitus,” and “Verses put into a Lady’s Prayer-Book.” Mr. Fisher has omitted all of the poems originally included by Mr. Walker in the “possible” category.

The inclusion of Rochester’s adaptation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s early seventeenth-century tragedy is the most significant addition this edition makes to the teaching of the earl’s works. Of particular note is Mr. Fisher’s boldfacing of Rochester’s additions to and revisions of his source, an editorial device that successfully makes Rochester’s contributions readily apparent. While early scholarship on The Rape of Lucina, or The Tragedy of Valentinian dismissed Rochester’s revisions as insignificant, Mr. Fisher accurately notes that a closer look at the text confirms that “Rochester’s originality extends well beyond straightforward imitation and replication” of the source. Highlighting Rochester’s additions enables the reader to see at a glance where the Earl lightly revised and where he has added pages of dialogue. The result is an edition readable and scholarly. Mr. Fisher has also provided clarifications and short glosses that might trip up undergraduate readers.

The helpful placement of glosses at the bottom of each page is also used throughout the poetry section, which reproduces the text of Mr. Walker’s original edition along with his original notes. Each poem is also followed by a summary of evidence for its attribution to Rochester, its estimated date of authorship, the copy-text...