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Reviewed by:
  • Lord Rochester in the Restoration World ed. by Matthew C. Augustine, and Steven N. Zwicker
  • Nicholas D. Nace
Augustine, Matthew C., and Steven N. Zwicker, eds. Lord Rochester in the Restoration World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. X + 293 pp.

The late Renaissance scholar Paul Alpers once told me that when he was in graduate school, back in the 1950s, and at Harvard, “Everyone read Rochester, but nobody talked about it.” This was a time when the entity one meant to invoke by “Rochester” was to a significant degree based on erroneous attributions and distorted further by the reluctant censorship of editors like Vivian de Sola Pinto. Rochester was only just on his way to becoming our more plausible, though less prolific, construct built largely by heroic efforts of de-attribution performed by David M. Veith and Harold Love. However, as scholars began to tune out the attributional static and our “Rochester” came into higher resolution, the situation Alpers described at some point reversed itself. Rochester’s most scandalous poems began to appear on syllabi—despite the fact that “The Imperfect Enjoyment” did not finally make its way into The Norton Anthology of English Literature until 2000, at which point it joined what had been the lone poem by which Rochester was known to millions, “The Disabled Debauchee.” While there are now as many as four Rochester poems in the Norton, throughout the 1990s, it seems, we more often talked about Rochester than read him.

The year 2000 offered a forking path in Rochester studies, with textual scholars going largely in one direction, and writers of interpretative criticism and biography going off in another. Rochester had finally received, with Love’s edition, the greatest editorial compliment that the poet—any poet—is likely to get. Specialists could be surer about attribution, or at least surer in their knowledge of how thorny attribution continues to be in many cases. Yet, despite efforts to scrape centuries of barnacle-like accretions of anonymous writings from the Rochester canon, the ensuing decade demonstrated that historical accuracy was merely a nuisance in perpetuating the Rochester myth that many still wanted. The old image of Rochester was fervently maintained by the culture at large, but also by many who write about the Earl. We got one cinematic treatment and as many as four biographies of Rochester, each recklessly vivifying the life with a faulty or opportunistic sense of the works. [End Page 87]

Now, a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, the divergent paths may be bending back toward one another, but they are still frustratingly separate. Cambridge University Press’s Lord Rochester in the Restoration World, a new collection of essays edited and introduced by Matthew C. Augustine and Steven N. Zwicker raises the Earl’s profile. But at which audience is this collection aimed? It is not the Cambridge Companion to Rochester that younger scholars so urgently need to bridge the gap between Rochester’s refined oeuvre and the valuable scholarship that has emerged over the past fifty years. Nonetheless, it will offer more to an audience of early career scholars and period outsiders than to the Rochester specialist, though it will help these various audiences focus on the same version of Rochester. Essays in the first third of the collection in particular—by Jonathan Sawday (on the trademarking capacity of the Rochester name as “signifier”) and Paul Davis (on the “marketing” of the poet)—bring the mythic Rochester into line with the actual poet via our modern-day understanding of a writer as orchestrator of public relations.

Each of the three essay collections preceding Augustine and Zwicker’s has come to seem as much a reflection of its own moment as an attempt to put Rochester into his context. First was Jeremy Treglown’s Spirit of Wit (1982), at which point work on Rochester was surging forward because he was then “undervalued and under-represented” (vi). By the time of Edward Burns’s Reading Rochester, in 1995, Rochester had become, or was thought, a “major” English poet, and as such was compared directly with Pope and Dryden. Five years later, Nicholas Fisher’s collection, That Second Bottle, offered fifteen...

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