Rochester: Selected Poems ed. by Paul Davis, and: Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester ed. by Alexander Larman (review)

That three of the four books reviewed in this issue of Restoration are an Oxford World’s Classics edition of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s poems, a biography of his life, and a collection of scholarly essays on his work, life, and legacy (see above) suggests that it is an exciting time in Rochester studies. The two books reviewed here seek to make Rochester and his works more accessible to wider audiences. Davis’s edition of Rochester’s poems aims “to transmit the fruits of [Harold Love’s] textual scholarship beyond the narrow coterie of specialists to general readers of Rochester’s work” (xliii). Larman’s biography of the Earl’s life and times is written for a general readership and attempts to show how “he is a man who speaks to our own time as much as he did to his” (xii). Both succeed in fulfilling these goals.

Rochester: Selected Poems is heavily indebted to Love’s editorial and scholarly efforts, which culminated in the 1999 Oxford English Texts edition The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. That authoritative edition was priced primarily for library purchase and featured an editorial apparatus aimed at aiding the Rochester scholar. Presenting modernized versions only of the poems now “confidently assigned to Rochester” (xlv), Davis’s mass market paperback is organized by genre, beginning with songs and love lyrics followed by stage orations and dramatic monologues, translations and imitations, and, finally, satires and epistles. While these categories have become fairly standard ones in describing Rochester’s oeuvre, especially since evidence for the chronology of his poems’ production is largely non-existent, Davis’s placement of some works is innovative. One example is his classification of “The Disabled Debauchee” as a dramatic monologue, a decision he convincingly defends in the notes for the poem. Davis also bases his text on manuscript sources that were in circulation in London during Rochester’s lifetime rather than on posthumously published print texts. An index of manuscripts at the end of the volume lists and very helpfully describes the seven manuscript sources Davis consulted.

Most importantly, this edition succeeds in presenting students with an accessible, useful edition of Rochester’s poems. He uses modernized spelling and punctuation. For example, the lines, “With Armes, Leggs, Lipps, close clinging to embrase / She clipps me to her Breast and sucks me to her face,” from Love’s edition of “The Imperfect Enjoyment” are rendered as “With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace / She clips me to her breast and sucks me to her face.” This modernization allows readers to focus on the poems’ meanings rather than on developing a facility with variable seventeenth-century orthography. Similarly, Davis provides just enough historical and cultural context in his notes to illuminate the poems and help readers understand their possible dates of production. Love’s edition, for example, includes two pages of explanatory notes for “The Imperfect Enjoyment,” which explain the meanings of words, literary allusions in the poem, and its generic tradition, along with two pages of textual notes, which collate the edition’s sources and explain emendations. In contrast, Davis’s edition provides less than a page of notes for this poem, focusing on explaining the poem’s genre, date of first publication, probable date of authorship, and manuscript sources and glossing key terms in the poem. This less intrusive editorial apparatus allows students to understand the poems and find useful information without getting lost in notes.

On the whole, the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Rochester’s poetry is a welcome addition to the classroom. The introduction introduces readers to several useful topics for understanding Rochester’s literary output: the concept of “scribal publication,” ways in which the court serves as an important context for Rochester’s poems, Rochester’s...