1 - Introduction

Summary

In his famous study of the volume that appeared within weeks of the death of the poet John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, under the title Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honourable, the E. of R—, David Vieth attributed fifteen of the poems in it to Rochester and eighteen poems to someone called ‘Probably Rochester’. Different editors have different ways of distinguishing between Rochester and ‘Probably Rochester’ or ‘Possibly Rochester’, none of them scientific or rigorous. Poems that are less than impressive are assumed to be unworthy of Rochester; Homer might nod, but not he, no matter how drunk or how ill he might have been. If Rochester could not have written all of a poem it is assumed that he must have written none of it.

Nowadays we assume that poems are written by individuals, usually lone individuals, and that if a poem is not by one single person it must be by another. Our scholarship and methods of discussion and recension cannot cope with the possibility that poems of merit could be by more than one person. We know from a contemporary satire that Rochester had disciples, and it seems likely that Rochester had been a disciple in his turn; certainly he had imitators. To distinguish real Rochester from proto-Rochester or sub-Rochester is by now impossible, but all scholars, whether compiling concordances to Rochester or bibliographies of Rochester or discussing single poems, have no option but to assume a canon if they are to embark upon their self-imposed tasks at all. Twentieth-century literary study is more interested in poets than in poems and so, rather than seek Rochesterian poems, constructs a personage, Rochester.

In November 1679 Rochester is supposed to have written to Savile: ‘I have sent you a libel in which my own share is not the least.’ The source for the letter is not unimpeachable, and the dating is unlikely, but there is nothing unlikely in the idea of Rochester and the other court wits whiling away the long hours in the Whitehall withdrawing rooms by extemporizing – or pretending to extemporize – on themes or genres, or dittying together on familiar tunes.