J. W. JOHNSON

Did Lord Rochester Write Sodom?

THE question of whether or not John Wilmot the Second Earl of Rochester was the author of Sodom has sharply divided scholars over the years. Using various combinations of evidence, true and false, commentators have usually succeeded in proving their precedent prejudices by begging the question. Those who have believed Rochester to be the author include Henry Spencer Ashbee, Edmund Gosse, Montague Summers, Johannes Prinz, and Sidney Lee. Those who believe he was not include John Hayward, Vivian de Sola Pinto, J. H. Wilson, Graham Greene, James Thorpe, and David Vieth.
     Recent discoveries—notably that John Oldham was the real author of "Upon the Author of a Play called Sodom"—have invalidated much of the previous reasoning, pro and con, about who wrote the playlet. Any effort to summarize or recapitulate the various arguments and refute or support them is unnecessary. A re-examination of four relevant bodies of evidence—the publication history of the play, the extant manuscript texts, the testimony of Rochester's contemporaries, and internal

J. W. Johnson (Professor of English at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627) has completed a biography of the Earl of Rochester and, in collaboration, a study of the Earl and the Restoration stage.

evidence—demonstrates as fully as it is epistemologically possible that John Wilmot was the writer responsible for Sodom as it has come down to us. Prima facie, with the exception of an otherwise obscure "Fishbourn," no one else but Rochester has been directly considered a possible author of the work. From his own day to ours, evidence has been clear that nobody else was as likely to have written Sodom as Rochester was.

I. The Early History of "Sodom"

When Rochester was on his deathbed in the throes of a terrified recantation of his former lasciviousness, he vowed in a letter to the Dean of Salisbury, Dr. Thomas Pierce of Magdalen Oxford, dated July 1680, to burn his erotic compositions. The penitent Earl declared his hope that "ye smoak of my death-bed offering may not be unsavoury to [God's] nostrils." Rochester's chaplain, Dr. Robert Parsons, gave evidence in his funeral sermon that "His strict charge to those persons, in whose custody his Papers were, to burn all his profane and lewd Writ- ngs as being fit only to promote Vice and Immorality ... and all his obscene and filthy Pictures, which were so notoriously scandalous." John Aubrey knew of the pictures which hung on the walls of Woodstock Lodge, the Postures of Aretine; and Rochester's executors—his mother, Anne St. John Wilmot the Dowager Countess of Rochester, and his uncle Walter St. John—obeyed readily his instructions to burn the papers, as Walter's grandson, Lord Bolingbroke, affirmed to Horace Walpole.¹
     Despite the eagerness of his family to carry out his orders, copies of Rochester's lewd compositions existed in numbers. Some of these fell into the hands of an unknown printer, who in October 1680 published Poems on Several Occasions, By the Right Honourable the E. of R——. Printed at Antwerp, 1680.² This anonymous and disguised volume con-

2. The 1680 Poems have been reproduced in two facsimile editions: one by the Scolar Press (1971); the other by Princeton University Press (1950) with Preface and Notes by

tained many poems genuinely by Rochester, but there were other works by Scroop, Ashton, Behn, Alexander Radcliffe, and others identified by David Vieth. Among these are a dialogue between "Tarsander" and "Swiveanthe" beginning "For standing tarses we kind nature thank" and titled "Actus Primus Scena Prima". On the basis of evidence in the Oxford All Souls MS Codrington 174 (inscribed "Tarsander. in imitation of the L^d. Orreryes Poetry" and signed "Buckhurst"), Vieth tentatively ascribes the fragment to Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and Earl of Dorset. As several scholars have noted, the text of "Upon the Author of a Play call'd Sodom" appears in the Bodleian MS Rawl. Poet- 123, p. 8, in the holograph of John Oldham. Since the manuscript clearly shows the process of composition, Odham's authorship is certain. Inclusion of the verse in Rochester's Poems of 1680 suggests that the printer, if not Oldham himself, associated the play with Lord Rochester in some way.
     In November 1680, the NOV. 22-25 issue of the London Gazette carried an advertisement:

Whereas there is a Libel of lewd scandalous Poems, lately Printed, under the name of Earl of Rochesters, Whoever shall discover the Printer to Mr. Thom L. Cary, at the Sign of the Blew Bore in Cheap-Side, London, or to Mr. Will Richards at his house in Bow-Street Covent-Garden, shall have 5 1 reward.³

     Both Cary, a merchant, and Richards, a printer, had ties with Rochester and his family; Philip Gray was surely correct in positing that the two were acting at the behest of the family in trying to identify and prosecute the illicit printer.⁴ Rochester's wife, mother, and Uncle Walter simply would have been carrying out the dead man's request in wanting to suppress the "lewd scandalous Poems" issued in his name. Whether the family believed the poems to be authentic, whether they knew some to be authentic and others not so, or whether they merely wanted to protect the Earl's name, is matter for conjecture. Since the

4. The Library, 4th ser., 19 (1938-39), 185-97. Cf. V. de S. Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit (London, 1962), 230.

title page ascribed the poems to "the E. of R——" and since there were other Earls (Roscommon, Ranelagh, Rivers, Rothes, Roxburgh, Rumney) who might have been the author, the reasons for the Wilmot family's openly linking the name of Rochester to the Poems and thus breaking anonymity in the London Gazette would seem to constitute a deliberate acknowledgment of Rochester's authorship. Because Rochester's wife and mother authorized Robert Parsons' Sermon Preached at the Funeral of ... Rochester (168o) and Rochester himself authorized Gilbert Burnet's Some Passages ... on Rochester (168o), both of which openly admitted Rochester's authorship of "lewd and lascivious" writings and detailed his instructions that they be destroyed, we may conclude that the Wilmot family were in effect acknowledging Rochester's probable authorship of the Poems.⁵
     The continued vengeance of Rochester's friends on those who assailed his saintly death was evidenced in January 1683, when John Crowne was beaten for satirizing the penitent in The City Politiques. It was with family approval that the Earl's Valentinian was brought out from his preserved papers and prepared for stage presentation at Court in 1684. Evidently, Rochester's favorite niece, Anne Lee Wharton, acted as literary executrix. The editor of the printed Valentinlan (1685) was Robert Wolseley, a former companion and admirer of the Earl's, who wrote a funeral ode for him in 168o and then engaged in a collaboration with Aphra Behn and Anne Wharton in arranging for Valentinian to be acted.⁶ Wolseley's Preface to Valentinian was primarily intended as a rebuttal to the Earl of Mulgrave's attacks on Rochester in his Essay Upon Satyr (1679), an ad hominem assault, and the Essay Upon Poetry (1682), which accused Rochester's verse of "bare-faced bawdry" and called his songs "nauseous". Yet Wolseley provided interesting information about Rochester's "other obscene writings" as well.
     Perhaps because of the interest generated in Rochesterian drama by the acting of Valentinian in 1684, some anonymous printer following the format of the Poems published Sodom A Play by the E of R... Antwerp Printed in the Year 1684. No known printed copy of this edition exists, though Henry Spencer Ashbee (Pisanus Fraxi) reported that executors of the Richard Heber estate destroyed a copy in the 1830s, and

6. Cf. Farley-Hills, 109, 137ff., 160.

Edmund Gosse told Montague Summers he had seen a "simulacrum" of the edition. Two extant manuscripts are simulacra of printed texts; since the versions of the text in the two manuscripts (the Hamburg and Bibliothèque Nationale) are extremely like, it is probable that they were derived from the same printed-text edition, which each identifies as Antwerp 1684.⁷
     Robert Wolseley's 1685 Preface obliquely points to Sodom in several places. In refuting Mulgrave, Wolseley defends the "wit" possible in making "obscene representations" both aesthetically pleasing and morally improving. His excerpted reasoning is this:

raise Appetite? Does he not know that obscene Satyre (of which nature are most of my Lord Rochester's obscene Writings, and particularly several of his Songs) has a quite different end, and is so far from being intended to raise, that the whole force of it is generally turn'd to restrain Appetite, and keep it within due Bounds, to reprove the unjust Designs, and check the Excesses of that lawlesse Tyrant?⁸

Wolseley then invites Mulgrave to test the comparative effects of reading Rochester's "obscene Satyres" with two contemporary pornographic works: the Aloisia Sigea by Nicholas Chorier (?) and LEscole des Filles (published in 1655).⁹
     Wolseley's careful and continuous distinction between the "songs," "satires," and "other obscene writings" clearly implies that Rochester was the author of more than lyric and satiric poetry. Wolseley's use of Civerse" also applies aptly to Sodom in many instances, since Sodom was written in heroic couplets. The reference to obscene Postures in art (Aretine's Postures, which were closely linked to the reputation of Rochester and referred to in Sodom); the private diversions of Rochester's close friends (the Ballers?); the reference to the abuse of the obscene writings for public amusement and public reading (the publication of Sodom as well as the Poems)—all these clues point to Wolseley's knowledge of Rochester's authorship. Even Wolseley's reference to Rochester's authorial intention—to check sexual appetite through obscene satire—is applicable to Sodom.
     Wolseley's hints that Rochester was the author of Sodom were made explicit by events a few years later, in 1689-90. The Stationer's company instructed their messenger to prosecute at their expense the printers Benjamin Crayle and Joseph Streater for publishing Sodom under the name of the Earl of Rochester; Crayle was summoned before the Earl of Shrewsbury on 11 February 1690, as R. A Baine has shown.¹⁰ What motivated the Stationers to this action is uncertain; but it is plain that

10. Review of English Studies, 22 (1946), 201-206. Cf. Foxon, 11-13. Baine's findings were updated by D. S. Thomas in The Library, 5th ser., 24 (1969), 51-55. Printed texts of Sodom were widespread at the turn of the century; see Richard Elias, "Political Satire in Sodom," SEL, 18 (1978), 424-25.

Rochester's surviving relatives continued to guard his posthumous reputation. In 1691, Gerard Langbaine published the first edition of An Account of the English Dramatic Poets and dedicated it to James Bertie, the Earl of Abingdon and husband of Rochester's niece, Ellen Lee (Dryden's "Eleonora"). Though Langbaine recorded Rochester's patronage of various playwrights in scrupulous detail and constantly cited An Allusion to Horace, he made but a bare reference to Valentinian ("a Tragedy reviv'd not long ago by that Great Wit, the Earl of Rochester . . .") (p. 215).¹¹ And the omission of any reference whatsoever to Sodom is glaring. The play had been circulating in print for seven years; it had attained notoriety just two years before Langbaine's Account appeared; he certainly knew of it and, had he wished, he could have included it under his section of "Unknown Authors" (pp. 524-56).¹² Lang baine's curiously brief reference to Valentinian suggests that his patron Abingdon desired the Earl's own dramatic works to be downplayed; the omission of Sodom would best be explained as the consequence of this desire.
     Those who make the case against Rochester as author of Sodom have traditionally depended on the words of Anthony á Wood, the Oxford antiquarian who was in residence when the Earl was matriculated there and who was a longtime associate of Rochester's mentor in vice, Dr. Robert Whitehall. In the 1692 Athenae Oxoniensis, Wood wrote:

The Reader is to know also that a most wretched and obscene and scandalously infamous Play, not wholly completed [my italics], passed some hands privately in MS., under the name of Sodom, and fathered upon the Earl (as most of this kind were, right or wrong, which came out at any time, after he had once obtained the name of an excellent smooth, but withall a most lewd Poet) as the true author of it,¹³

Though he lived near the scenes of Rochester's country life (Woodstock, Ditchley) and heard the local gossip, Wood was unaware in 1692 that Sodom not only was completed but also had been printed twice

(1684, 1689). Apparently he was aware of an early version of the play, very probably that preserved in the Princeton MS AM 14401. There is evidence that this earliest version was circulating in Rochester's lifetime before 1676 when Sodom was completed. It is significant that Wood does not deny the Earl's authorship: "right or wrong." Wood's information in any case was inaccurate.¹⁴
     It is significant that when Charles Gildon revised Langbaine's Account in the 1698 Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets, most of Rochester's closest relatives were dead or dispersed. His wife died in 1681; Anne Wharton died in 1685; his other niece Ellen Lady Abingdon died in 1692; and Rochester's mother, the Dowager Countess, died in 1696. By 1698, Rochester's daughters were living in Wales or France. Thus the force of family censorship was lessened. Gildon was therefore emboldened to include Sodom in the Lives but he carefully covered himself by saying that Crayle the printer wanted "to have it pass for one of the works of the Earl of Rochester, as it had been formerly imputed to him." Gildon went even further, designating the author of Sodom: "one who was, as I'm very well assured, one Mr. Fishbourn, an Inns of Court Gentleman." Gildon, like Wood, apparently was ready to believe what he was told with little suspicion.¹⁵
     For some time, the obscure Fishbourn was thought to be "John Fishbourne," a nephew of Sir Christopher Wren; but then R. M. Baine, nominating him as a serious contender for Apollo's laurels as author of Sodom, proposed instead John's brother, Christopher Fishbourne, who attended Gray's Inn, entered a Foot-Regiment in Flanders in 1678, was ostensibly known to Otway and John Oldham, wrote a St. Cecilia's Day ode and a half-dozen other songs, and authored a risqué song preserved in the Harvard MS. Eng. 636 F, p. 76: "Why should soe much beauty dread." The song was presumably written sometime between 1675 and 1682; other poems in the same manuscript are by Rochester. This is the factual substance of Baine's argument for the plausibility of Fishbourne's authorship of Sodom.¹⁶

16. The Library, 4th ser., 19 (1938-39), 185-97.

While the few facts suggest a possible association between the circle of Rochester proteges and Fishbourne which may or may not connect with contemporary testimony about who authored Sodom, the case for Fishbourne is a very frail one. At best he might have been a minor contributor to an early joint effort at writing a parody of Heroic Drama in general and Dryden in particular ca. 1671-72, when Rochester was living at Lincoln's Inn and mingling with Inns of Court as well as Court wits. Several such efforts at heroic parody can be dated at the approximate period when Buckingham, Sprat, Clifford, and Butler were working on The Rehearsal (acted in December 1671): Butler's "A Caterwauling" and Dildoides, Dorset's ( ?) "Tarsander", the first version of Sodom—all derive from the era of Dryden's Tyrannic Love and The Conquest of Granada (1669-1671). Existing verse satires claim that some twenty-odd men had a hand in The Rehearsal.¹⁷ Fishbourne may have been one of these; and Gildon, searching for someone to father Sodom upon, may have singled him out as a safety measure in 1698; after all, Rochester's daughters Lady Sandwich and Lady Lisburne might return to London at any time, or Lord Abingdon might take offense at Gildon's temerity in naming Sodom at all, much less linking it to the name of his beloved wife's uncle.
     So long as any of Rochester's relatives posed a threat of retribution, printers and editors were careful not to name him directly as the author of Sodom. But by 1715, fear of punitive consequences had ceased. Two of Rochester's daughters—Lady Greville and Lady Lisburne—had died and Lady Sandwich had left England permanently for France, though she kept guard over her father's reputation. After 1715, printers were bold in naming Rochester more or less openly: Abel Boyer's translation of Grammont's Memoires (1713), like Alexander Smith's The School of Venus (1716), explicitly showed Rochester as the composer of scandalously lascivious works. For whatever it is worth, Sniith's School cited Rochester specifically as the author of Sodom and told the anecdote of "Handsome" Fielding quoting the two opening lines of the play to characterize himself. Fielding was the husband of Lady Castlemain, Rochester's nymphomaniac cousin and the inspiration for Fuckadilla.
     Thus, it may be seen that the year 1715 was a sort of watershed date when, after thirty-five years of family extirpations and monitoring of

the Earl's canon, Sodom was openly proclaimed his work. This was true in France as well as England. Prinz has traced the French history of Sodom in his 1927 biography of Rochester.¹⁸ The Solleine Catalogue listed three manuscripts of Sodom translated into French but later destroyed: Le Roi de Sodom ... par le Comte de Rochester en 1658 (probably an error for 1685) which was translated from the English in 1744; L'Embrasement de Sodome, from a seventeenth-century manuscript translated into French in 1740; and Sodome, comedie en 5 actes par le Comte de Rochester, traduite de Panglais, 1682. Since all three manuscripts were reportedly destroyed, Prinz's assessment of the Solleine Catalogue must stand as limited proof of Rochester's authorship. Two pieces of information, however, may be added to Prinz's data. Gay's Bibliographie des Ouvrages relatifs a I'Amour linked Sodom to Rochester as author and identified Bussy-Rabutin as translator of the 1685 [sic] Rot de Sodome. Bussy-Rabutin was a close associate of the Count de Grammont, who considered using him as amanuensis for the Memoires before settling on Anthony Hamilton. Circumstantial evidence indicates a close relationship between Grammont and Rochester before 1675: Grammont was a member of the French Order of Sodomites; he knew the secrets of Rochester's various escapades before 1676 and recorded them in the Memoires; in 1676 he escorted Lady Castlemain and her bastard daughter the Countess of Sussex to exile in Paris. One may conjecture that Grammont was responsible for carrying at least one manuscript of Sodom into France, where Bussy-Rabutin undertook to translate it.¹⁹
    The only known English manuscript of Sodom in France today is the Bibliothè- que Nationale MS Anglais 101, a text in what appears to be an early eighteenth-century scribal hand. The title page is a simu-

19. Cf. The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David Vieth (New Haven, 1968), 130. Cited herein as Poems. Also Prinz, 397-98.

lacrum of the 1684 Antwerp edition; but MS Anglais 101 places the superscription ("Mentula cum vulva etc."), which is on the title page of the Hamburg manuscript, on the first page of the Prologue, which is headed: "Sodom, a Play by the Earle of Rochester." The Hamburg manuscript, apparently a copy made by the German scholar Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach from an unidentified source in England in October 1710, has inserted the full name to the title page identification of the author to make it read "Earl of Rochester." Similarly the Harleian MS 7312 identifies the author as "E R" and links him to the "Royall Company of Whoremasters," possibly a reference to the Ballers but more likely a reference to Rochester's joining Buckingham, William Chiffinch, Henry Bennet, and many others in pandering for Charles 11. Rochester referred to himself as a former Royal Pimp in a letter to Henry Savile written in June 1678.²⁰ Robert Harley, collector of the Harleian manuscripts and an avid Rochester-watcher, was amassing Rochesteriaria ca. 1700; the Harleian 7312 is an excellent scribal copy of Sodom and other Rochester works. Since it is the only extant manuscript to subtitle the play, "The Quintessence of Debauchery," which Crayle's 1689 edition used in contrast with the Antwerp 1684 edition, the Harleian 7312 probably derived from Crayle's printed-text edition. Thus, the Harleian, Hamburg, and Bibliothèque Nationale manuscripts—all dating from the early eighteenth century—attribute the play directly or by strong implication to Rochester. Also Harley and Grammont (putatively), who were responsible for various manuscripts of Sodom, were certifiable experts on Rochester and his canon. The Harleian and Solleine ascriptions to Rochester thus are evidence of authorship. Since the title pages of the Princeton and Portland manuscripts were torn out, only the fact that Sodom appears in each in company with other authentic (and some unauthentic) poems by the Earl can be used as admittedly weak evidence.

II. The Manuscripts

Eight known manuscripts of Sodom in English survive today, the earliest dating from Rochester's lifetime. Larry D. Carver has described

and compared these in some detail in an article for PBSA.²¹ As Carver shows, theorizing about any possible stemma for these manuscripts is bootless. To all appearances, although some manuscripts derive from a common, non-extant source, there is no real connection between the existing documents. They do, however, show compositional stages for the play, from the earliest Princeton 1 to the final Harleian 7312,which seems to be a copy of the 1689 printed text. Several scholars have published their surmises about these manuscripts, as well as the remaining six: Princeton 2 (bound with the Princeton 1 in Princeton MS AM 14400; MS Dyce 43 (Victoria and Albert Museum); Vienna MS 14090 (Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek); Portland MS PwV40 (University of Nottingham); MS Anglais 101 (Bibliothèque Nationale); and Hamburg Cod. 115 (Hamburg Staats- und Universitdtsbibliothek). The Harleian 7312 is in the British Library. For purposes of establishing possible authorship, the two versions of Sodom in Princeton MS AM 14401 (cited as Pi and P2) are the most significant documents.
     The composition dates of Sodom can be readily established by internal evidence. The opening lines are overt parodies of the first lines of The Conquest of Granada; therefore Sodom could not have been written before January 1671. Another first-act reference to Charles's Act for Freedom of Conscience in 1672 further limits the date.²² Pine's seduction of Fuckadilla is an obvious commentary on Jack Churchill's affair with Lady Castlemain, an event which Rochester also treated in his "Song: Quoth the Duchess of Cleveland to Counselor Knight." The birth of Churchill's daughter by Cleveland on 16 July 1672 is further confirmation of the date of Sodom. The response of Bolloximian to the news of the Pine-Fuckadilla liaison echoes the reported comment of Charles II to Churchill: I know thou dost it to get thy bread." The sycophant behavior of Pockanello is a reference to the assiduous courting of the monarch by John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, in 1672-73. Rochester referred to Mulgrave as "Punchinello" in "My Lord All-Pride," and the pompous, vain behavior of the opportunist Pockanello (a "pocky" Punchinello or "poxed" Punchinello) is appropriate to a satire on Mulgrave.²³ Other topical references in the first two acts confirm a compositional date in 1672-73.

23. Cf. Poems, 142-43.

     The text of the rough, three-act version of Sodom (Pi) suggests why the author stopped work at that stage and why the early version was carefully suppressed. The satire on Catherine of Braganza (Cuntagratia) and her newest rival—who became Charles's mistress at a mockwedding in October 1671—Louise de Kéroualle (Clytoris) is so viciously pointed and the rhetoric is so demotically blunt that had the parody ever come to the eyes of the King, it is doubtful he could have tolerated such libellous, even treasonous, verse. The "Scepter-Prick" satire which Charles saw in December 1673 was enough to banish Rochester from Whitehall for several months.²⁴ The treatment of Charles and Portsmouth in that satire is mild in comparison with its more raucous version in Sodom. In 1673-74, Rochester's family and personal fortunes were greatly dependent on the favor of the King; if he was the author of Sodom, the Earl certainly would have suspended further work on his obscene parody in apprehension of angering Charles even more.
     It is significant that the sole manuscript of the 1672-73 Sodom (Princeton MS AM 14401) includes also the final version of the play (1676); the conjunction of the two versions, Pi and P2, is invaluable in the data it provides about the play and its connection with Rochester. The Princeton MS AM 14401 is a bound volume consisting of manuscripts in several scribal hands.²⁵ The works are mostly erotic and/or satiric in nature: they include an English translation of the Satyra Sotatira dated Anno Domini 1676. Other dated poems include verses annis domini 1670, 1672, and 1673. Two poems satirizing the Cabal of advisers to Charles 11 are dated 1672 and 1673, the years in which the Cabal thrived. (It broke up in the wake of the Test Act in March 1673.) Apart from the two versions of Sodom, only one other poem authenticated as Rochester's by David Vieth is included; it is attributed to Rochester immediately after the verse, "A Copy of Verses presented to y^e K:" which is the Scepter-Prick satire of 1673. Significantly, the poem is abbreviated. Obviously, the incomplete Scepter-Prick satire and the incomplete Sodom derive from the same period (ca. 1673).
    Furthermore, MS AM 14401 includes two poems by Oldham associated with Sodom and dating from 676-77, "Against Vertue" and "De-

fense of Vertue." (See III below.) All the poems in the volume, including Oldham's, date no later than 1676 or 1677. Thus the contents of the Princeton volume were all written during Rochester's lifetime; their grouping implies his authorship of Sodom and demonstrates that the P2 version and one Epilogue (Fuckadilla's) and one Prologue (Bolloximian's) were finished by 1676, or 1677.
     The scribal hands and binding, both late-seventeenth century, constitute circumstantial evidence; but the paper of the Princeton volume has fascinating implications about the means of Sodom's circulation and preservation. All of the paper in MS AM 14401 is of the same manufacture, bearing the same watermark; thus all of the works in the volume, written between 1670 and 1676, are preserved on the same paper. This paper is distinctive though it was in fairly common use for a time. It is seven point foolscap, a type which C. M. Briquet has said was not found in England until 1659 and which was used thereafter for about twenty years.²⁶ Edward Heawood has confirmed that this paper was not among papers used after 1680.²⁷ Thus the paper of MS AM 14401—and the two versions of Sodom—may confidently be assigned to Rochester's lifetime, 1660-1680.
     In an article for The Library in 1927, R. W. Chapman printed in full a document with important implications for the provenance of the Princeton manuscript. This is a list of paper ordered by Bishop John Fell at Oxford in 1674.²⁸ Two paper merchants itemized the lots of paper, which was to be used for copying manuscripts for the Bodleian Library (e.g., the Rawlins D 398), where much of the listed paper has been preserved. Among the lots there are several kinds of foolscap: Dutch, Caen, and a third lot not specified but with the watermark described. There is an enigmatic fourth lot, listed as "Morlaix fooles Cap" and simply noted on the list as "A Fooles cap."²⁹ Chapman was able to describe the watermarks of other listed papers by finding them in existing Bodleian manuscripts—but not the Morlaix, which is similarly ignored by Briquet and Heawood. It appears that the twenty-three missing

29. Chapman, 407.

quires of Morlaix foolscap ordered by Bishop Fell in 1674 were not used for manuscripts now stored in the Bodleian Library. Were they instead appropriated by ribald Oxonians for the purpose of copying such delectables as Sodom and a 1676 English translation of continental Latin erotica.³⁰
     Lord Rochester, holder of an Oxford M.A., was a devoted alumnus who revisited Oxford constantly—it was near Woodstock Lodge—and maintained friendships there among the faculties. Rochester and Dr. Fell were friends; Dr. Fell rode over to Woodstock in 168o to console the Earl on his deathbed. Rochester's bawdy old tutor, Robert Whitehall, a fixture at Merton College from his student days there in 1649 until his death in 1685, kept close contact with the nobleman—as well as Dr. Fell, from whom Whitehall secured supplies for Merton. Anthony Wood, who was regularly in Whitehall's company at Oxford for thirty years, knew that Whitehall doted on the Earl and pretended to have taught him to write poetry.³¹ Wood also saw an incomplete version of Sodom and knew it was fathered on the Earl. He knew that Rochester was delighted with the debauched verses of John Oldham, whose friendship with the Earl began in 1677 and whose Sodom-related poems conjoin with Sodom in its early and late versions in Princeton MS AM 14401.³² Rochester visited Oxford in September 1676; he wrote a letter to Henry Savile there.³³ The next year, 1677, Robert Whitehall published his lavish work, the Hexasticon, a pictorial history of the Bible with descriptive verses by Whitehall. Wood sniffishly recorded Whitehall's claim that the work was "chiefly composed" for Rochester's young son, Charles.³⁴
     Whitehall's doggerel verses accompanying two illustrations deserve quoting. For Icon 20, "LOT entertaining two Angels," he wrote:

Lot entertains two Angels, and next morn
Unnatural Sodom and Gomorrah burn,
As soon as he (in haste) was got to Zoar

34, Wood, IV, 178.

And for Icon 21, "LOT and his two Daughters":

Corn, Wine, and Oyl, choice gifts; yet Lot's beguil'd,
By whom both of his Daughters prove with Child
Out of incestuous loyns the Moabites
Have their extraction, and the Ammonites:
     They tempted at a time when he was not
     As yesterday, the good, old, sober Lot.

Clearly, Robert Whitehall, like Rochester, was not a man so awed by religion as to forego humor and titillation when treating Biblical topics.³⁵
     Given the likely provenance of the Princeton MS AM 14401 and documented facts about Rochester, his Oxford friends and acquaintances during the 1670s, it is tempting to construct the compositional history of Sodom as follows:
     Rochester's prohibitive introduction to the Sodom story as a part of a boyhood indoctrination into a hellfire and brimstone religion underwent a series of revisions in his adolescence and youth. As a pubescent scholar at Wadham ("Sodom") College, Oxford with Robert Whitehall as Silenus; as a young man frequenting the brothels of "Little Sodom," the redlight area of London; and as a sometime exile in Paris, where the Order of Sodornites held sway, Lord Rochester came to practice the very Priapic experiments that he had been taught would result in eternal burning torments. Even the Grand Tour in 1661-1663 was a part of his stay in Sodom; English Protestants—and Rochester himself—saw Catholic France and Italy as satrapies to Sodom (Rome), linking the Jesuits and buggery, Popery and sodomy in their scandalized imaginations.³⁶ During the 1660s and 70s, Parliament was constantly trying to prohibit travel to Italy by young Englishmen out of fears graphically set down in a 1688 tract: Sodom Fair: or, the Market of the Man of Sin, A Treatise very Useful and Necessary for all Young English Papists who intend to take Holy Orders, or Travel through Italy....
     Even as the hedonistic young Earl conducted his erotic experiments from 1665 to 1669, plagues and war were raising apprehensions among

36. Cf. Poems, 130-31.

the pious that London was the new Sodom; the Great Fire of 1666 seemed to prove their identity.³⁷ It was natural that the more John Dryden and other Stuart apologists tried to "heroicize" the King and his concubines with literary exercises, the more pronounced the disparity between Charles Stuart's idealized and real selves appeared to Gentlemen of the Royal Bedchamber and participants in the monarch's sexual pleasures. One of these, Rochester's close friend Sackville, future Earl of Dorset, declared of the Whitehall crowd in his verse "A faithful Catalogue of our most Eminent NINNIES" (pub. 1683):

When Dryden's inflated dramas about St. Catherine and Almanzor were proclaimed by their author to mirror the nobility at Court (who were busy dancing in ballets and playing musical beds), an invitation to parody was irresistible: Buckingham's Rehearsal, the Tarsander fragment, and Sodom were the tangible results.
     Having worked on the early version of Sodom during his country seclusion in 1672 and 1673, Rochester began to turn his interest to other projects. But he showed the incomplete playlet to his old mentor Robert Whitehall during an Oxford visit sometime in 1674, and Whitehall made shift to get it copied—on foolscap from a supply ordered by Dr. Fell. The copy was made in haste—to prevent detection or because the Earl was not willing to have so potentially explosive a satire out of his hands for long. Nevertheless, the sharp-nosed Anthony Wood managed to glimpse the copy at some point.
     It is important to notice that this early Sodom did not end with a holocaust, as the Biblical story had done. The satire concentrates on the physical torments of syphilis suffered by the promiscuous, a matter of vital interest to Rochester, who was being treated late in 1671 for that malady and who continued to recuperate for another year. Bolloximian, the satyr-figure representing Charles 11, is a commentary on insatiable womanizing and sexual boredom arising from jaded appetites and decreased prowess. Rochester used the lustful Maximin of Tyrannic Love grown

38. Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714, ed. Galbraith M. Crump (New Haven, 1968), vol. 4 (1685-1688), 191.

into the flagging lecher of the Scepter-Prick satire ("dull, graceless ballocks") to simulate his royal master: "Ballocks-imin" or "Bolloximian." The sex-deprived Catherine of Braganza he changed from a virtuous saint into a deranged Cuntagratia suffering a new species of martyrdom. The Queen's old rival Castlemain became the nymphomaniac Fuckadilla; the new rival Kéroualle was the scheming, treacherous Clytoris; William Chiffinch was the Buggermaster General Borastus; Pine was Churchill; Tuley (perhaps) signalized Jermyn; Mulgrave was the pocky Punchinello. These satiric targets peopled Rochester's other verses before 1674.³⁹
      In 1674-75, Rochester set Sodom aside, working on his full-scale verse satires instead; but subliminally he continued to prepare for the final version of the play. During his banishment from Court in January and February 1674, he disguised himself as a "cit" and amused himself by gossiping with the London merchants and their wives, as Grammont reported: "He wonder'd Whitehall was not yet destroy'd by Fire and Brimstone from Heaven, like Sodom and Gomorrah of old, since there was such Rakes as Rochester, Killegrew, and Sedley…."⁴⁰ He became interested in a surrogate version of the sex-mad, self-destroying ruler, collaborating with Nat Lee on Nero. He engaged in a bout of playgoing and a cheerful exchange of squibs with Thomas Shadwell about theatrical effects involving flaming conclusions.⁴¹ Through Lee and Shadwell, as well as his re-reading of Seneca's Troades, Rochester was inclining toward a dramatic finale in which a maddened hedonist, burning with disease, defies Heaven and is punished by hellfire after being warned by supernatural spirits. With the publication of George Lesly's Fire and Brimstone in 1676, Rochester was amused and stimulated to the point of resuming work on his play parody during his winter exile of 1675-76.
     His personal situation was much like that which originally provoked him in 1671-72. He was in very bad health because of his old diseases; he was infuriated with Charles 11 and La Keroualle; and John Dryden had once more provoked his contempt.⁴² The "heroic" plays made popu-

42. Dryden's long-standing annoyance with Rochester for the nobleman's parsimony and satiric thrusts erupted when All For Love was published in 1678. See The Works of John Dryden, ed. Alan Roper (Berkeley, Calif., 1956). vols. 13, 16 & 17.

lar by Orrery, the Howards, and Dryden had transformed into plays even more absurd in many ways to Rochester: Lee's fustian and bombast, Crowne's nonsense, Settle's purple rhetoric, Dryden's pompous flatulencies,⁴³ And some new political developments offered apt subject matter for further parodic treatment: Monmouth's amorous and political stupidities, York's military impotence, Louis XIV's bribery of Charles.
     The last three acts of Sodom, P2 version, add episodes satirizing Monmouth (Pricket), York (Buggeranthos), and Louis XIV (Tarsehole, King of Gomorrah). Rochester's literary satire expands to include detailed parody of Lee's Nero and possibly Lesly's Fire and Brimstone. As a later written Prologue boasts, "It (Sodom) is the most debauched heroic piece/That e'er was wrote. What can compare with this?" With more adroit pentameter lines at his command, and the same targets of meretricious "heroic" drama and depraved moral judgements among the aristocracy, Rochester found he could vent his spleen best by finishing his attack on "The Quintessence of Debauchery." In a letter written on 15 August 1676, Henry Savile deplored his own inability to write satire, then commented:

... but beeing soe full of natural impediments [I gladly sen]d all these matters to your Lp whose Genius [is as fitted to s]hew the world theire follyes as your leasure [serves you to] shew your abilities, for God's sake, my most [dear Lord make] this use of your retreat....⁴⁴

Savile's plea did not go unheeded. Rochester composed busily so that by December 1676, Sodom was finished and ready to begin circulating in manuscript among the rakes.
     Robert Whitehall saw and copied the full version, using the rest of his supply of foolscap. When early in T677 John Oldham, another "old boy" who kept his ties close with Oxford, penned his verses on "Vertue" with a Rochester persona, Whitehall secured copies of them also. Once more, the keen-scented Anthony Wood caught wind of Lord Rochester's delight in the ranting, debauched specimens of verse by Oldham, and left hints to posterity of the nexus of people and events at Oxford that supplies missing pieces in the puzzle of Sodom.

44. Letters, 136.

III. Evidence by Rochester's Contemporaries

If this hypothetical history of the composition of Sodom is true, and if Robert Wolseley's mention of Rochester's "other obscene writings" refers to Sodom, would not those "happy few" graced by the Earl's company have given some hint of his authorship? Such hints may be found in the words of Wolseley and Robert Whitehall. But what about Rochester's closest friends: Savile, Dorset, Sedley, Buckingham, and the rest that John Wilmot praised in 1675-76 at the time he supposedly was finishing Sodom? Do they furnish any data that support the case for Rochester's authorship?
     There is no simple answer to this question. The writings of John Wilmot's aristocratic friends have never been completely gathered and edited. The Court Wits wrote anonymously, and their works were often pirated and published anonymously or with erroneous attributions of authorship as in the 168o Poems on Several Occasions. Many of the published works underwent moralistic suppression and extermination in later times to the extent that, like the printed Sodom, they totally vanished. With their names offensive to modest ears, the noble libertines, personal writings —journals, diaries, letters, or whatever—were destroyed by their embarrassed heirs or hidden away in family archives. There is not enough material in the public realm as yet to state conclusively that Dorset, Savile, and the rest knew certainly that Rochester did, or did not, write Sodom.
     Even had they known that he fathered Sodom, Rochester's aristocratic friends were not likely to have recorded the fact in writing. In 1677, Buckingham indicated in a letter to Wilmot the perils of being accused or merely suspected of penning libels on the King and his ministers.⁴⁵ In the hysterical time of Titus Oates, no prudent man put his name to anything written or printed.⁴⁶ Rochester stopped signing letters to his wife if they hinted of politics.⁴⁷ Thus, it is not likely that, even should all of the writings of the Court Wits be miraculously discovered, the lot would add to the case for or against the Earl's responsibility for Sodom.

47. Letters, 220, 241-42.

     But what about Rochester's aristocratic enemies, men like John Sheffield the Earl of Mulgrave and Sir Carr Scroop, who wrote personal libels against him and did everything possible to disgrace him or lower him in the King's eyes? Scroop's In Defense of Satire (1677) mustered all of the common grounds for attacking Rochester and composed them into the Bête noir of the Earl's satiric persona.⁴⁸ Would not his opponents have utilized Sodom against Rochester if they knew—or suspected—his authorship?
     Certainly there is innuendo to Sheffield's accusations of "bare-faced bawdry" in the Essay on Poetry (1682): Wolseley recognized and responded to it in terms that evoke Sodom (see I above). Even Bishop Gilbert Burnet told Rochester's niece, Anne Wharton, that he was angered by Sheffield's "two lines that relate to your uncle." Rochester remained a popular figure after his death, even more because of his deathbed penitence; it was perilous to strike at him in print, as John Crowne and Elkanah Settle both learned. Even Mulgrave found himself berated by Rochester's daughter Lady Sandwich as late as 1723 for remarks construed as critical of her father in Mulgrave's Memoirs.⁴⁹ Thus, Rochester's aristocratic foes are no more probable sources for ascribing Sodom to his canon than his friends are.
     Who, then, among Rochester's contemporaries can provide evidence concerning his relationship to Sodom ? It is logical to assume they would come from a more remote group than Rochester's immediate circle or the Court Wits at large and thus not be subject to the same scruples or pressures as those men were. The men who inhabited the London theatrical scene and heard theatrical gossip are the most promising sources. Rochester was the Petronius Arbiter of the London stage during the 1670s; his proteges, his sometime sycophants, his auxiliaries—John Crowne, Thomas Otway, Thomas Shadwell, John Oldham—were all in positions to have known (or strongly suspected) that Rochester wrote Sodom. Their evidence is highly significant; and, in fact, these are the very men who attest that Rochester fathered Sodom and who did so during his lifetime.
     Sodom began to circulate in November or December, 1676, at a time

when theatrical feelings had been wounded by the appearance of another anonymously authored satire, A Session of the Poets. This libel was attributed to Rochester and Buckingham by some, although Elkanah Settle was targeted by Thomas Otway as author.⁵⁰ Otway was in a state of high irritability just then: he had written Titus and Berenice as a compliment to Lord Rochester, and the play was mounted in December 1676 starring Rochester's mistress Elizabeth Barry. The same subject, taken from Roman history of the Flavian Era, was being simultaneously exploited by John Crowne. It did not assuage Otway's injured authorial pride after his play failed that Crowne's The Destruction of Jerusalem was a great success in January ( ?) 1677.⁵¹
     Crowne's Epilogue to his drama was particularly admired for its assault on London taste, which Crowne asserted to prefer a play about Sodom rather than Jerusalem. Lady Chaworth told Lord Roos about the Sodom reference in a subsequent letter; and when Crowne published The Destruction of Jerusalem, he tied the play to Otway and Otway's patron Rochester with sneering references in his Preface to the failure of Titus and Berenice.⁵² Thus, Crowne connected Rochester to the writing of Sodom indirectly. Ironically, the public rumor spread that Rochester himself had written the wittiest speeches in Crowne's play and the Epilogue in particular was singled out as too clever to be Crowne's and so was imputed to Rochester.⁵³ Crowne had been at odds with the Earl since 1675-76 or earlier. When Crowne impudently dedicated Charles VIII to Rochester in 1671-72 with almost no personal acquaintance, the Earl's response was minimal. Rochester's Timon (1674) directly criticized the play and, by implication, the Notes on The Empress of Morocco, for which Crowne was chiefly responsible.⁵⁴ Rochester's Allusion slurred Crowne at length; and the Session poem (which Crowne always believed to be Rochester's) was a final blow. In his latterly Preface to Caligula (1692) in a Dedication to Mulgrave, Crowne exhumed all his past resentment against Rochester and made it plain

54. Cf. Poems, 70-71f.

he intended to denigrate the dead Earl whenever possible. This he did to John Dennis.⁵⁵ Crowne's barbed reference to Sodom in his 1677 Epilogue and its subsequent attribution to Rochester thus constitute strong evidence that Rochester was suspected of being connected with the play—by Crowne among others.
     Subsequently, Thomas Otway repudiated his patron of 1675-76 and in retribution made him the author of Sodom in a work that has been widely misread. Otway's reasons for turning on the Earl were many: the playwright had been an unsuccessful rival to the nobleman for Mrs. Barry's favors; Captain Otway's allegiance to the Tory cause after 1678 conflicted with Rochester's growing interest in the Whigs; and, most of all, the impecunious Earl did not personally reward his sycophantic admirer for the praise lavished upon him in the Prefaces to Don Carlos and Titus and Berenice.⁵⁶ In Friendship in Fashion (1678), Otway drew a savage portrait of Rochester in the figure of Malagene, who was satirized for his atheism, Whiggery, Janus-faced friendship, and especially his stinginess. Rochester was susceptible to all these charges; they had been made by Scroop in 1677, and the manuscript Essay on Satire, evolving at the same time, made further use of the satirical qualities of the Rochester-persona. Early in 1680, a few months before Rochester's death, Otway slily berated him.
     On 22 January 1680, Otway's The Poet's Complaint of his Muse; or, A Satyr Against Libells was published. An autobiographical "confession" in part, the Complaint reflected Otway's discouragement with Mrs. Barry, who refused him still even after her break with Rochester in 1679. By correlating Otway's letters to her with the events in his Complaint'it is possible to see that Otway's account of his entry into London, his unsuccessful career as an actor, and his meeting with Barry are geared to the date 11673. His description of the "horrid Train/Then ever yet to Satvr lent a Tale,/Or haunted Chloris in the Mall"—those who followed the "rampant, tawdry Quean" Success—immediately summons the image of Rochester and A Ramble in St. James's Park.⁵⁷ Otway then itemized and characterized the men he first met who were "successful" poets:

     Next him appear'd that blundring Sot
Who a late Session of the Poets wrote....
Then next there follow'd, to make up the Throng,
     Lord Lampoon and Monsieur Song,
     Who sought [the Muse's] love, and promis'd for't
     To make her famous at the Court.
     The City Poet too was there,
In a black Sattin Cap and his own Hair....⁵⁸

The identification of these "poets" has perplexed commentators for some time. Otway's editor, J. C. Ghosh, following tradition, identified Lord Lampoon and Monsieur Song as a single man and that man as Lord Rochester. In fact, the passage syntactically suggests that Lord Lampoon (a nobleman) and M. Song (a commoner) must be two people, probably two men closely associated with each other and both having contacts at Court. The most likely candidate for Lord Lampoon was not Rochester but Dorset. After Friendship in Fashion (1678), Otway feared Dorset would have him beaten for satirizing him and Lady Dorset in the leading characters; Otway apologized profusely in the published Dedication to Dorset.⁵⁹ Dorset remained unappeased; in the Prologue to Caius Marius (1679) Otway ostentatiously longed for some 64 new Maecaenus or Augustus." Dorset's lampoons had become notorious by 1680; even Rochester called him "the best good Man, with the worst natur'd Muse."⁶⁰ Like Rochester and Buckingham, Dorset was gravitating toward the Whigs in 1679-80; and like them he was not overly impressed with the Duke of York, Otway's sponsor. Dorset is a far better candidate for Lord Lampoon than Rochester; indeed if Rochester is Lampoon, nobody would fit very well the title of M. Song. With Dorset as Lampoon, however, M. Song must be George Etherege. James

60. Thorpe, 42.