Selected Poems by John Wilmot, and: The Beggar’s Opera and Polly by John Gay

Abstract

Reviewed by: Selected Poems by John Wilmot, and: The Beggar’s Opera and Polly by John Gay Nicholas Fisher John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Selected Poems, ed. Paul Davis. Oxford, 2013. Pp. lv + 136. $13.95; £7.99. John Gay. The Beggar’s Opera and Polly, ed. Hal Gladfelder. Oxford, 2013. Pp. xlvii + 207. $11.95; £7.99. The publication of these new, accessible editions in the World’s Classics series is welcome and will bring to a new audience two writers with rising literary reputations. While the common format—introduction, note on the text, select bibliography and author chronology—is useful, it especially contributes to an appreciation of Rochester’s verse, where the editor faces the unique challenges caused by the survival in holograph of just nine poems and the anonymous circulation of most of the remainder in scribal separates or manuscript assemblies that generally defy dating even to a year. Mr. Davis derives his selection of two-thirds of the Rochester canon from Harold Love’s 1999 edition for Oxford English Texts. The full range of the verse is represented, although, regrettably, space has not been found for the quatrain “God bless our good and gracious king”—the verses most widely associated with Rochester—and the song beginning “My dear Mistress,” which has been Rochester’s most frequently set lyric from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The poems are reproduced using modern spelling, which although understandable in terms of general accessibility, reduces the nuanced linguistic information the words are still capable of conveying. Less than ideal, too, is the arrangement of the texts, which Mr. Davis declares is intentionally “debatable, if not frankly provocative.” Editors have adopted different ordering principles ever since the first “authorized” edition of Rochester’s work appeared in 1691, and Mr. Davis, following the recent example of his distinguished predecessors, Love and Keith Walker (1984), organizes the poems by genre. But by halving their number of groupings to “Songs and Love Lyrics,” “Stage Orations and Dramatic Monologues,” “Translations and Imitations,” and “Satires and Epistles,” he forces poems with huge differences in form and scope into an unhelpful association that emphasizes disparity rather than similarity: less sophisticated verses such as “Of Marriage,” “On Mrs Willis,” and “To the Post Boy,” for example, sit uncomfortably with the major satires “A Letter from Artemiza [End Page 101] in the Town to Chloe in the Country” and “A Satire against Reason and Mankind.” Mr. Davis’s admission that “all my categorizations are to some degree provisional, and I hope readers will contemplate alternatives” sounds like a cop-out. Despite the stated intention not to add “a further layer of eclecticism to Love’s reconstructed texts,” several of his readings have been silently revised: in The Disabled Debauchee, some “hopeful youths,” rather than the “cold-complexioned sot” indicated in the major manuscripts, are made to “long some ancient church to fire”; in The Imperfect Enjoyment, the subject of “dyed” is altered from a “dart of love” to “ten thousand maids.” The quality of Rochester’s poetic ear and rhythmic sense, evidenced by his autograph variants of “To a Lady, in a Letter,” is obscured by the replacement of Love’s text, without explanation, with arrhythmic readings, such as “Th’rough-paced ill actors perhaps may be cured” for “Through pac’d ill Actors, may perhaps be cured” in the epilogue to Fane’s Love in the Dark (1675); and “Did I ever refuse to bear” for “Did ever I refuse to bear” in A Ramble in St. James’s Park. And for the text of A Satire on Charles II, which begins “I’th’isle of Britain long since famous grown,” Mr. Davis not only selects a version in which the pentameter of the opening line has been spoiled by the addition of “Great” before “Britain,” but chooses not to reproduce the couplet “With a damn’d crue to whores he joggs / Of Bastards, Pimps, Buffoones, and Dogs.” Although, therefore, the texts need to be treated with caution—Love’s edition remains indispensable for the scholar—Mr. Davis’s introduction deftly covers the necessary ground, enthusiastically conveying the impact of Rochester...