A Martyr for Sin: Rochester's Critique of Polity, Sexuality, and SocietyUnlike so many critics, Kirk Combe does not see the writings of John Wilmot, the second earl of Rochester, as being "curiously apolitical" (to use Dustin Griffin's phrase). In this study, he instead sees Rochester's poems, prose, and plays during the early modern period as pursuing an agenda of exposing the relationship between truth and power, in Michel Foucault's sense of those terms. With subtlety and finesse, Rochester's writings enmesh their reader in the power structure of Restoration patrician society and Charles II's libertine court. Within this very specific locality, the works potentially lead Rochester's contemporary readership to a realization of "historically how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false" (Foucault). In other words, many if not all of Rochester's writings work to debunk particular truth-producing mechanisms of Charles's court, unmask certain affectations of the luminaries of Whitehall, and expose to ridicule a range of patrician social and literary practices. Combe takes all such activities to be political in nature. At the same time, the study extends an examination of Rochester's texts in their historical setting to a consideration of what our current critical reaction to them might indicate about us. |
Contents
| 11 | |
| 15 | |
Contemporary Idiom | 26 |
Narrative Angst | 45 |
Linguistic Iconoclasm | 70 |
Political Sexuality | 110 |
Concluding Thoughts | 140 |
Notes | 149 |
Select Bibliography | 177 |
Index | 183 |
Common terms and phrases
adversarius Andrew Marvell Artemisa asserts believe Bendo Boileau Cambridge century chaos chapter characterization Charles Charles II Chernaik Chloe Christopher Hill Cloris Complete Poems contemporary Corinna critical culture D. M. Vieth deconstruction Democritean Dryden Earl of Rochester English Essays ester's exemplum existence fact Farley-Hills fool Foucault Friedrich Nietzsche Heritage Horace host human Ibid Imperfect Enjoyment intellectual J. H. Wilson John Dryden John Wilmot Juvenal king Kroll lady lady's language libertine linguistic literary London male Maximus narrator's nature Nietzsche obscene oppression Oxford perhaps play Poems in Context poetry politician portrait reader reading regime of truth Restoration Literature rhetorical right reason Roches Rochester's narrator Rochester's poem Rochester's satire Rochester's verse Rochester's writings Ronald Hutton Satire Against Mankind satirists Satyr Savile seems sense sexual politics social society speculative reason target fop textual Thormählen Timon tion Treglown truth and power Tunbridge University Press Valentinian whore women words
Popular passages
Page 72 - Then old age and experience, hand in hand, Lead him to death, make him to understand, After a search so painful, and so long, That all his life he has been in the wrong: Huddled in dirt the reasoning engine lies, Who was so proud, so witty, and so wise.
Page 33 - the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center.
Page 151 - Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination" (Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. DF Bouchard [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977],
Page 50 - tune quoque materiam risus invenit ad omnis occursus hominum, cuius prudentia monstrat summos posse viros et magna exempla daturos vervecum in patria crassoque sub aere nasci. ridebat curas nee non et gaudia vulgi, interdum et lacrimas, cum Fortunae ipse minaci mandaret laqueum mediumque ostenderet unguem.
Page 17 - are implemented by the relations of power in the production of discourses of truth: "We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.
Page 94 - The softest refuge innocence can find, The safe director of unguided youth, Fraught with kind wishes, and secured by truth, That cordial drop heaven in our cup has thrown, To make the nauseous draught of life go down, This only joy, for which poor we
Page 122 - Is or Is Not, the two great ends of fate, And true or false, the subject of debate That perfect or destroy the vast designs of State— When they have racked the politician's breast, Within thy bosom most securely rest, And when reduced to thee are least unsafe and
Page 82 - Thus sir, you see what human nature craves. Most men are cowards, all men should be knaves; The difference lies, as far as I can see, Not in the thing itself, but the degree; And all the subject matter of debate Is only, who's a knave of the first rate?
Page 23 - in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we have the production of an important phenomenon, the emergence, or rather the invention, of a new mechanism of power possessed of highly specific procedural techniques, completely novel instruments, quite different apparatuses, and which is also, I believe, absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty.
Page 34 - The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play.