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Rochester<br />

151<br />

The Theatres Licensing Act remained in force, with the Lord<br />

Chamberlain as official government censor, until 1968.<br />

ROCHESTER<br />

Whoreing and Drinking, but with good Intent<br />

(What, Timon?)<br />

The one individual who epitomises the spirit of the early Restoration is<br />

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. His life-style was more notorious than his<br />

writing: drunk ‘for five years together’, with sexual liaisons of every possible<br />

variety, Rochester represented the kind of scandalous extremes of behaviour<br />

which both titillate and shock ‘proper’ society. In any age, if such a figure<br />

did not exist, it would be almost necessary to invent him – and his deathbed<br />

repentance, and conversion to religion, makes the story complete. Although<br />

it may be part of a myth-making process by a career chaplain, who was<br />

later to become an adviser to the Protestant King William of Orange and<br />

who is the only authority for the conversion, it also underscores the polarities<br />

of the age: excess of amorality as against excess of religiosity.<br />

The range of Rochester’s poetry is considerable. He is a clear link between<br />

the later Metaphysical poets, the Cavalier writers of love lyrics, and the<br />

Augustans, with their taste for satire. Rochester wrote in all these veins.<br />

All my past life is mine no more,<br />

The flying hours are gone;<br />

Like transitory Dreams given o’er,<br />

Whose Images are kept in store<br />

By Memory alone.<br />

(Love and Life)<br />

He is a sexually explicit poet, capable of treating a subject with both delicacy<br />

and bawdy humour. His satires are self-mocking (as in The Maimed<br />

Debauchee) as well as scurrilous about others. His observation of human<br />

folly is tinged both with a kind of world-weary tolerance and with vivid, if<br />

shocking, imagery, notably in A Satire against Reason and Mankind:<br />

Were I, who to my cost already am

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