[In the following essay, Hammond and Kewes examine the impact of A Satire Against Mankind upon Restoration dramatists and claims that the poem should be understood in the context of the contemporary theater, especially considering its importance for the libertine debates of the 1670s, which were conducted through the medium of drama.]

Rochester's A Satyre against Reason and Mankind, written in the earlier 1670s, is widely recognised as one of the formative poems of its decade and period.¹ By and large, interest in the poem has centred on its ideas. Editors and critics of Against Reason and Mankind have been concerned with establishing the philosophical, intellectual and religious contexts of the poem's inception and reception, and have situated it against native and continental, particularly French, poetic traditions.² Our contention is that the Restoration theatre is a context of at least equal importance for the understanding of the poem's literary influences in terms of both subject-matter and language. The broad affinity between Rochester's poetic oeuvre and the drama of its time has long been recognised: Dustin Griffin's Satires against Man, for example, includes a chapter on ‘Rochester and Restoration Drama’. However, Griffin is chiefly interested in the common settings (the park, the watering-places), characters (the rake, the railer, the coquette) and ethical assumptions which Rochester's poetry shares with contemporary plays, both heroic and comedic, and he does not see any one poem as having uniquely strong intertextual links with the drama. We believe that Against Reason and Mankind is such a poem. In the decade following its composition, the satire generated several vigorous responses from dramatists, notably John Crowne in Calisto: or, The Chaste Nimph and Thomas Shadwell in The Libertine and The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater. Those reactions have gone largely unnoticed in the critical literature. It is almost as if the flamboyant stage portrayals of Rochester ‘the man’—as the glamorous and suave Dorimant in Etherege's The Man of Mode (1676), as the viciously immoral Nemours in Lee's The Princess of Cleve (c. 1681-2), and as the contemptibly hypocritical libertine Florio (and to an extent Artall) in Crowne's City Politiques (1682)³—have prevented scholars from perceiving the more specific reprises of the ideas and vocabulary of Against Reason and Mankind in contemporary plays, Rochester's own adaptation of John Fletcher's Valentinian (c. 1675-6) among them.

That neglect, admittedly, is understandable. First, although remarkable for its handling of the dialogue form, and its games with the persona of the author-speaker, Against Reason and Mankind appears an abstract work, distant from the hustle and bustle of the theatre. In that respect it contrasts sharply with ‘An Allusion to Horace’ and Satyr. [‘Timon’], two poems brimming with references to plays and playwrights. Second and more important, the dramatic redactions by Crowne and Shadwell of the scandalous creed of Against Reason and Mankind may at times appear scarcely distinct from the quite commonplace use of Hobbesian cliches in contemporary plays. Indeed it would be fatuous to deny that the decade's libertinism was steeped in a post-Restoration reading of Hobbes's Leviathan (1651).⁴ Hobbes's insistence on the subjectivity of judgments about good and evil, for example, has its effect on Against Reason and Mankind and resounds through the libertine drama of the time:

whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which for his part he calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill; And of his Contempt, Vile and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so.⁵

What Hobbes has to say about future punishments and rewards, and in general terms his materialist account of human psychology and motivation, could be used to underpin the iconoclastic creed that stage libertines represented. And Hobbes's account of the human race's savage and self-regarding behaviour in the state of nature could be adapted to convey the ferocity of social relations in the modern world.⁶ Rochester's poem, however, gave memorable formulation to a complex of ideas drawn from many sources, Montaigne and Boileau as prominent as Hobbes, that were particularly charismatic because they carried the authority of the Earl's own manner of living. As we shall see, specific verbal echoes and borrowings indicate that it was often to Against Reason and Mankind rather than to Hobbes that Crowne and Shadwell directly applied. If at times it does seem as if they are writing with a copy of Leviathan open on the desk, Rochester's poem has sent them back to the book.

That the impact of Against Reason and Mankind—Rochester's best-known and most widely circulated longer poem—upon the plays of the mid- to late 1670s should have been considerable need not surprise us, for in those years the Earl's involvement in theatrical affairs was at its peak; he was an eagerly sought-after patron of the drama, as many as five plays having been dedicated to him between 1672 and 1677.⁷ It was his intervention that secured Crowne the commission to supply a masque—Calisto—for performance at Court in 1675;⁸ it was also the Earl's praise and support that gained Otway's Don Carlos a favourable (and bounteous) reception from the king and the Duke of York in 1676.⁹ He wrote prologues and epilogues for new plays by Elkanah Settle, Sir Francis Fane and Charles Davenant, and for a revival by an all-female cast of an old play, most likely Beaumont and Fletcher's The Bloody Brother.¹⁰ Rochester was not only a sometime patron of a number of professional playwrights (Settle, Lee, Dryden, Crowne, Otway)—even though he ridiculed former favourites in his satires—and a friend of aristocratic amateurs and Court Wits (the Duke of Buckingham, Sir Robert Howard, Sir George Etherege, Sir Francis Fane). He himself tried his hand at playwriting and issued influential versified criticism of recent theatrical offerings (for instance in ‘An Allusion to Horace’ and Satyr. [‘Timon’]). Besides his revision of Fletcher's Valentinian (for which he invited Fane to supply a masque),¹¹ we have a fragment of a dramatic lament intended for a never-written tragedy, a draft of a comic scene intended for a never-written comedy, and a heroic scene he contributed to Howard's unfinished The Conquest of China.¹² And though the story of his coaching Elizabeth Barry to become the period's greatest tragic actress is most likely apocryphal, his long-term liaison with the rising star of the London stage would have brought him into close contact with playhouse affairs.¹³

Rochester's contribution to the Restoration theatrical enterprise in his capacity as patron, critic and amateur playwright, and the fact that several of his satiric verses were inspired by, and responded to, others' plays, ensured that any new poem of his—and especially one so substantial as Against Reason and Mankind—would be read with keen interest and attention by his protégés, former protégés and other aspiring dramatists. It is the dramatised polemic to which the poem gave rise that we wish to explore in this discussion. What was the impact of Against Reason and Mankind upon the drama in the years immediately following its composition and circulation? How were ideas voiced by Rochester in the poem, and the vocabulary in which he couched them, appropriated, countered or re-formulated in the plays of the 1670s? And how did he render them in his version of Fletcher's Valentinian? First, however, we need to read the poem, to emphasise those parts that were most suggestive to contemporary dramatists, those ideas that could be most effectively embodied in stage character and action.

In his rage, misanthropy and condescension toward other mortals, the speaker of Against Reason and Mankind resembles a Thersites or an Apemantus (and in 1678 and 1679 respectively, both Apemantus and Thersites would again be on stage, in Shadwell's version of Timon of Athens and Dryden's of Troilus and Cressida). That rhetorical stance is underlined by the opening of the ‘Addition’ written sometime between 1675 and 1676:

All this with Indignation have I hurl'd
At the pretending part of the proud World,
Who swoln with selfish Vanity, devise
False Freedomes, Holy Cheats and formal Lyes,
Over their fellow Slaves to tyrannize.

(lines 174-8)

The persona's excoriation of the pretentious and the vain—of those philosophers, clerics and courtier-lawyers who terrify the less able with their intellectual bugbears—seems to derive from an ongoing discussion, a continuation perhaps, of one of the ‘Genial Nights’ amongst the Wits that Dryden describes in his dedication to The Assignation; or, Love in a Nunnery (1673), ‘where our discourse is neither too serious, nor too light; but alwayes pleasant, and for the most part instructive’.¹⁴ The poem's opening statement is a self-consciously sensational adaptation of the theriophilic tradition as expounded, for instance, in Montaigne's Apologie de Raymond de Sebonde. Rochester establishes his basic position—that in conjuring up the ‘Ignis fatuus’ of deceptive Reason rather than following their ‘certain’ instincts, humans are inferior to beasts—by means of an impertinent paradox: ‘Were I a spirit free to choose’. What would that ‘I’ be that is doing the choosing, and what kind of a ‘Dog, a Monky, or a Bear’ would result from the exercise of this election? Would it not be to real dogs, monkeys and bears as Swift's Gulliver is to the Yahoos? Is not the act of choosing a supremely human one—indeed, in the Protestant tradition, the defining act of being human? Being witty in the construction of an argument that leads to the abandoning of one's wits is a pervasive feature of this period's wit, upon which John Sitter's comment is illuminating:

The paradoxical process of asserting a bodily norm by conspicuously intellectual or ‘artful’ means is part of the game of parody and burlesque, which work only if an author manages to display mastery of the modes ‘contained’ by the representation. Is a rational argument against rationality, for instance, simply an argument for better rationality?¹⁵

The question whether Rochester does master the modes contained by his poem is certainly one that the reader will pose; and a ‘better rationality’ is exactly what Rochester's poem will propose.

Meanwhile back in the poem, the ‘sixth Sense’ Reason is being stacked up against the other five; and is pursuing a journey that, through a suppressed allusion to Satan's journey in Paradise Lost, is represented as a diabolical departure from the one true path:

Pathless and dangerous wandring wayes it takes,
Through Errours fenny boggs and thorny brakes:
Whilst the misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of whimseys heapt in his own brain;
Stumbling from thought to thought, falls headlong down
Into doubts boundless Sea.

(lines 14-19)

Freedom of choice, the exercise of the free will, is surely in the standard Christian account the product of rationality and the evidence of the Godhead in us. Here, free choice is pitted against rationality, and the latter is redefined as a satanic illusion, a faculty external to its possessor, leading him on schizophrenically to darkness and a disillusioned death. Book learning, strikingly rendered in the image of buoyancy bladders, can provide only temporary relief from the ‘Sea’ of scepticism that debilitates and deluges the rationalist. The satirist's position from line 20 onwards is almost that of a cruel, mocking deity as he looks down upon the ‘reasoning Engine’, once so animated—albeit by pride, wit and wisdom—now measuring out its length of earth ‘hudled in dirt’. If contemporary readers did not take this sneering Olympian voice to be a badge of atheistical libertinism, they would surely hear such a creed announced in lines 33-4: ‘His Wisedome did his Happiness destroy, / Ayming to know that World he should enjoy’. ‘Wit’ consists in the vain attempt to know the world rather than experiencing it directly through the pleasure to be gained from sense impressions. It is, at least at this point in the poem, allied to wisdom or knowledge of a Faustian kind. But in the very moment of defining ‘wit’ as a wasted, prideful attempt to gain an epistemological purchase on the created world, Rochester moves sideways into a socially defined account of the wit, of the kind of person who tries to possess such knowledge. This in turn sets up the comparison between wits and whores, and the dialectic between pleasure in them and hatred of them, that brings the world of Restoration comedy into focus but does little to focus the poem itself.

That such a hedonist philosophy caught the attention of Latitudinarians such as Stillingfleet, Barrow and Martin Clifford, whose A Treatise of Humane Reason (1674) was the first tract to respond to Rochester in print, is not surprising and is by now well-established.¹⁶ And as Roger Lund suggestively argues, it was as much the witty form in which the argument was cast as the subversive content that drew their attention.¹⁷ The path leading to Jeremy Collier starts out in the reactions of such as Barrow and Glanvill to the Hobbesian account of ridicule and laughter. Rochester's poem inoculates itself against the Latitudinarian cast of mind by embodying it in a ‘formal band and beard’ (lines 46-71). This adversarius figure, who may be Isaac Barrow, is thoroughly sent up, initially by his catching the fag-end of the previous passage (lines 37-44) in which something (he wots not exactly what) is said against ‘men of Witt’ that provokes him to a Sparkish-like self-advertisement: ‘For, I profess, I can be very smart / On witt, which I abhor with all my heart’ (lines 52-3). Clearly this foppish, formalistic understanding of wit as a ‘gibeing, gingling knack’ is not at all what the satirist has been discussing, and the brief alliance of the ‘Rev. Formal’ with the satirist against wit is rapidly succeeded by a scandalised reaction to the latter's misanthropy. In response to this, the ‘formal band and beard’ relies upon Reason to take what Pope in The Dunciad will call ‘the high Priori road’, a prideful, speculative journey into the secrets of futurity that human beings are never meant to fathom. The clerical adversarius is used by Rochester to line up the distinction between rationality and a better rationality that the poem goes on to draw.

The object of the next verse paragraph (lines 72-111) is to ‘right reason’, in the punning senses of ‘to put reason to rights’, to define reason properly, and to demonstrate how to reason properly (or, as one of his real-life adversaries put it, ‘To reason Reason out of Countenance’).¹⁸ Here, Rochester has in his sights the activities of the group that Louis Althusser once referred to as ‘the intellectually semi-retired’:¹⁹ those who are in the luxurious position of being paid to think in the abstract, ‘modern Cloystred Coxcombs, who / Retire to think,’cause they have nought to do’. Caveat lector! Rochester champions a form of reason that we might more adequately term ‘common sense’, a form that co-operates with sensory information and appetite, that above all is geared to practical action in the world. What the reader is invited to consider, however, is the relationship between this form of rationality and ethical conduct:

That Reason which distinguishes by Sense,
And gives us Rules of Good and Ill from thence:
That bounds Desires with a reforming Will,
To keep them more in vigour, not to kill.
Your Reason hinders, mine helps to enjoy,
Renewing appetites yours would destroy.

(lines 100-5)

This definition of ‘Good and Ill’ is prudential rather than moral, in that ‘good’ and ‘ill’ is whatever conduces towards, or compromises, the continuing health of the organism. If desires are to be restrained at all, they are to be so only to avoid cloying, not because they may be harmful to the self and others. And it was to this ambiguous issue, more than to any other, that several contemporary dramatists responded, most notably Crowne, Shadwell and Lee, and which Rochester himself took up in his adaptation of Fletcher's Valentinian. The second half of Against Reason and Mankind reprises the theriophilic arguments of the opening, and it bears upon the crucial central argument in so far as it denies that any altruistic account of human action can be given. For Rochester, any account of moral action is inevitably tinged by altruism, and the effort he makes to banish such an account leads him into the realm of behavioural psychology. Fear is the key to the human psyche: ‘virtuous’ conduct is simply hypocritical. Recognising this leads to paradoxical formulations worthy of Shaw and Brecht: ‘all men would be Cowards if they durst’ (line 158). One thinks of Mother Courage boxing her son Schweitzerkäse's ears because he was stupid enough to behave heroically in war. It is this sonorous paradox that Rochester stakes on the bet that no ‘just man’ can be found to contradict it. The final section describes the types of the just statesman and clergyman who, in the very unlikely event that they could be found, would force him to ‘recant [his] paradox to them’ and adopt the orthodox morality of the rabble. The concession made in the final couplet, that maybe such exemplars do exist, is one indication of the poem's rhetoricity—and it is partially rescinded by the sceptical inference that, if they do, they are scarcely recognisable as belonging to the human species.

The dramatic responses to Against Reason and Mankind fall basically into two categories. To the first category belong those plays which echo, or allude to, particular lines and ideas but which do not purport to offer either a comprehensive endorsement or a rebuttal of the poem's argument. At times a character—for example that of the stage libertine—cites or near-paraphrases a snippet from the satire the same way one would recycle a bon mot heard in another company as does Ramble, ‘a wild young Gentleman of the Town’, in Crowne's The Countrey Wit (1675):

The order of Nature? the order of Coxcombs; the order of Nature is to follow my appetite: am I to eat at Noon, because it is Noon, or because I am hungry? to eat because a Clock strikes, were to feed a Clock, or the Sun, and not my self.²⁰

True, Ramble is a professed libertine and uses the appropriated lines to bolster up his rakish credentials but there is little philosophical depth in his hedonist ejaculations and he is more than happy to recant, reform and embrace monogamy and matrimony at the end of the play. Other local resonances from Against Reason and Mankind can be found in such plays as Dryden's Aureng-Zebe (1676) and Oedipus (1678), the latter written in collaboration with Nathaniel Lee.²¹ By contrast, John Crowne's masque Calisto and Thomas Shadwell's tragedies The Libertine and Timon of Athens provide more spirited and more sustained retorts to Rochester's Against Reason and Mankind, which go beyond mere verbal allusions or repetition of libertine commonplaces.

Calisto: or, The Chaste Nimph, written in the autumn of 1674 and produced at Court in the early months of 1675, was the first answer to, or comment on, Rochester's poem in dramatic form. Crowne was asked to provide the masque on the strength of Rochester's recommendation even though it was Dryden, the then Poet Laureate, who would have been the obvious choice for such a commission. As he tells us in the preface to the printed text of the masque, Crowne had little time allowed him to choose a subject for the piece, and having lighted in the second Book of Ovid's Metamorphoses on the story of Calisto—the Arcadian nymph raped and impregnated by Jupiter, transformed into a bear by his jealous wife Juno and later stellified by her lover—he had difficulty in fitting it for the occasion, for the chief roles were to be taken by two teenage daughters of the Duke of York, Princesses Mary and Anne. Forced drastically to alter the Ovidian narrative so as ‘to write a clean, decent, and inoffensive Play, on the Story of a Rape’,²² Crowne turned the rape into would-be rape thus fortuitously saving Calisto's chastity. Yet if Jupiter's assault on the nymph's virtue fails, his rhetoric of arbitrary power and appetitive lust prevails, introducing a curious disjunction between the action of the play and its impact upon the audience.²³

In his characterisation of the God of Gods as a tyrant and a libertine—‘I will be controul'd in no amour; / My Love is arbitrary as my power’ (III, p. 36)—who envies mortals their sexual felicity, and who, in order to satisfy his lust, does not shrink from adopting shapes of sundry deities (including female ones such as Diana), men and beasts, Crowne enters into a clever dialogue with his patron's recent pronouncement on the morality (and rationality) of the unrestrained gratification of the senses. He specifically takes up and modifies the Rochesterian account of the relative standing of man and beast, with its theriophilic emphasis on the superiority of animal existence, by introducing a new factor into the equation, a lustful god who easily traverses the ‘vertical’ scale of creation. For Jupiter, ever catholic in his tastes, both animal and human existence hold irresistible sensual attractions:

JUP.
[I]f to Mortals I present Delight,
I to the Feast will still my self invite.
MER.
—Yes Yes, we know Joves Appetite; [Aside.
E're quite abstain from Loves sweet Feasts,
Hee'l humbly dine with Birds and Beasts.
JUP.
—I still provide with care,
We Gods in all Delights should share;
Besides the loves by us embrac'd
Would kill a poor weak Mortal, but to tast,
We know what pleasure Love affords,
To Heavy Beasts and Mettled Birds;
Here and there at will we fly,
Each step of Natures Perch we try;
Down to the Beast, and up again
To the more fine delights of Man:
We every sort of pleasure try;
So much advantage has a Deity.
MER.
Nay, if Jove Rents the World to Man and Beast,
He may preserve the Royalty at least,
And freedom take to Hunt in any Grounds;
The Pleasures of great Jove should have no Bounds.

(I, pp. 3-4)

Safely sheltered from criticism of the religious who targeted the iconoclasm of Against Reason and Mankind, Crowne flaunts the libertine ethics and political despotism of the supreme classical deity. In an inspired parody of the rants of villains in heroic plays, he has Jupiter declare himself a fount of morality to which, however, he himself is superior:

I cannot erre, what e're my Actions be;
There's no such thing as good or ill to me.
No Action is by Nature good or ill;
All things derive their Natures from my will.
If Vertue from my will distinct could be,
Vertue would be a Power Supream to me.
What no dependency on me will own,
Makes me a Vassal, and usurps my Throne.
If so I can revenge me in a Trice,
Turn all the Ballance, and make Vertue Vice.

(II, pp. 15-16)

While Jupiter's doctrine of absolute sovereignty, which overrides both ethics and law, ultimately derives from Hobbes,²⁴ his demagogic deployment of it to rationalise his ruthless quest for sexual fulfilment has its source in Rochester's poem.

If amusing in the mouth of a Greek god played by a teenage girl in a Court masque, such moral relativism becomes chilling when professed by a Roman tyrant in a tragedy designed for production at Whitehall by leading professionals.²⁵ Rochester's Valentinian considers himself above laws human and divine, as he imperiously tells his victim: ‘Know I am farre above the faults I doe / And those I doe I'me able to forgive’ (IV.iv.87-8). Here the rape is real, Lucina's off-stage shrieks being audible to both other characters and the audience. Yet, like Jupiter's unrelenting pursuit of Calisto, the Emperor's sexual violence is eminently reasonable: he merely seeks to satisfy his appetite in accordance with the dictates of nature:

Tis nobler like a Lion to invade
Where appetite directs, and seize my prey
Than to wait tamely like a begging Dogg
Till dull consent throws out the scraps of Love.
I scorne those Gods who seek to cross my wishes
And will in spite of them be happy—Force
Of all powers is the most Generous
For what that gives it freely does bestow
Without the after Bribe of Gratitude.
I'le plunge into a Sea of my desires
And quench my Fever though I drowne my Fame
And tear up pleasure by the roots—no matter
Though it never grow againe—what shall ensue
Let Gods and fates look to it; 'tis their business.

(IV.ii.197-210)

Valentinian's of course is an extreme interpretation of the dictate to follow that ‘Reason which distinguishes by Sense, / And gives us Rules of Good and Ill from thence’ (Against Reason and Mankind, lines 100-1) and we instinctively condemn him as a despot and a reprobate. Yet a powerful reinforcement of his natural creed has already been made much less controversially in III.iii, a scene which, except for the first four lines, radically departs from Fletcher's original.

Rochester rewrites Fletcher's punning and clenching exchange between Lucina's two maidservants, Marcellina and Claudia, in the process staging a contention between artificial virtue (Honour) and natural or rational propensity to fulfil one's sexual appetites (Pleasure). The virtuous Claudia is ‘sway'd by Rules not naturall but affected’ (III.iii.50)—that is, human-derived—and ‘thinke[s] the World / A Dreadfull wildernesse of Savage Beasts’ (lines 47-8)—that is, men as bad as, or worse than, beasts—thereby adopting a misanthropic posture (‘I hate Mankind for feare of beeing Lov'd’ (line 51)). She also launches an attack upon ‘cheating witt’ which, by ‘false wisdome’ (lines 71ff), serves to justify vice (note the habitual association of wit and moral corruption). By contrast the frail Marcellina follows the dictates of nature seconded by reason (the better rationality familiar from Against Reason and Mankind): ‘what Nature prompts us to / And reason seconds why should wee avoyd?’ (lines 54-5). Though neither as pompous nor as easily discredited as the ‘formal band and beard’, Claudia seems to lose the argument. Or, rather, her highly moralistic stance is undermined by the very terms she uses to defend it, for example styling herself ‘Honours Martyr’ (line 19) and ‘the Slave of Vertue’ (line 46). For should virtue and honour breed fear and misanthropy? And, if they do, are they worth adhering to?

There are no moral absolutes in the world of Rochester's Valentinian. Even Lucina, the victim of rape, is far less obviously ‘good’ than in Fletcher. And the tyrant's ‘poetically just’ death at the hands of his rebellious subjects hardly brings about reinstatement of a divinely ordained moral order. Though momentarily overawed by Lucina's husband Maximus who upbraids him for his innumerable sins, treacheries and transgressions—‘Reason noe more, thou troublest mee with Reason’ (V.v.163)—Valentinian soon repents of his near-repentance, his end being not only defiant but mischievously sadistic. ‘Would the Gods raise Lucina from the grave / And fetter thee but while I might enjoy her / Before thy face’, he exclaims, ‘I'de ravish her againe’ (V.v.240-2). Harold Love's contribution to this collection suggests that the rape scene was identifiably located in Rochester's own lodgings in Whitehall, very close to the Court Theatre where the play itself was designed to be performed.²⁶ Had it been performed, we can imagine the thrill of recognition in the audience. We can imagine, too, that the numerous architectural allusions to Charles's royal palace would have made the fate of the late Roman tyrant appear topical, if not directly applicable to the political situation in England in the mid-1670s. That topicality, as Love points out, would have vanished by the time of the play's eventual production at Court nearly a decade later, in February 1684.

We encounter another unrepentant villain, Don John, in Thomas Shadwell's The Libertine, a satirical tragedy which constitutes the most substantial dramatised reply to Against Reason and Mankind.²⁷ The play was premièred in June 1675 at the Dorset Garden Theatre. Though it draws plot elements from various European sources, and in deploying the Don Juan legend is working with very old material, The Libertine derives its contemporary energy from an implicit debate with Rochester's stance in the satire. Rochester's poem, as we have seen, recommends a form of rationality that, eschewing recondite subjects favoured by the pseudo-intellectual, directs our practical actions in the world. What is good and what is ill are to be determined entirely by what gratifies and renews our appetites; we are to live according to the immediate dictates of our senses, not according to ethical prescriptions that false rationality abstracts from the flux of everyday living. Rochester's Against Reason and Mankind has argued that supposed human ‘virtues’ are in fact the hypocritical outcomes of a base passion, fear. Animal behaviour is determined by an instinctual need to survive. Reason merely enables humans to devise refined forms of vice beyond the ken of the animal kingdom. Shadwell's The Libertine deploys the Don Juan legend to imagine what might be the consequences of trying to live according to his understanding of the Rochesterian code proposed in Against Reason and Mankind.

What is at issue is how to define the term ‘Nature’ and its cognates. The action of Shadwell's play will take the form of a series of situations in which characters act ‘naturally’ or ‘according to Nature’; and it will become apparent that a set of ethical prescriptions not derivable from ‘nature’ in any simple way, but derivable from religious authority, is absolutely necessary to regulate human conduct. Don John's philosophy expounded in the opening scene carries unmistakably Rochesterian echoes:

D. Anto.
By thee, we have got loose from Education,
And the dull slavery of Pupillage,
Recover'd all the liberty of Nature,
Our own strong Reason now can go alone,
Without the feeble props of splenatick Fools,
Who contradict our common Mother, Nature.
D. John.
Nature gave us our Senses, which we please:
Nor does Reason war against our Sense.
By Natures order, Sense should guide our Reason,
Since to the mind all objects Sense conveys.(28)

In dramatic context there are, however, immediate challenges to the complacency of this position. As the cronies recount their recent conquests, the emphasis on acts that would be widely considered ‘unnatural’ is hard to miss: Don Lopez has murdered his elder brother for his estate; Don Antonio has impregnated both his sisters; and Don John has plotted the murder of his own father, has murdered Don Pedro for trying to preserve his own sister's chastity, and has ravished scores of women, nuns prominent among them. ‘Nature’ has therefore prompted these men to act directly contrary to what is ‘natural’. All of these crimes are enumerated by Don John's valet, Jacomo, whose dramatic function throughout is to represent a conception of ordinary, unheroic humanity that operates as some kind of a touchstone for ‘human nature’. In the opening scene, the jilted Leonora has come in search of Don John, and is apprised by Jacomo of his real nature: ‘He owns no Deity, but his voluptuous appetite, whose satisfaction he will compass by Murders, Rapes, Treasons, or ought else’ (I, pp. 29-30). Thus brusquely informed, Leonora swoons; and Jacomo considers taking advantage of her while she is unconscious. This crude fantasy is interrupted by her revival, but the point is made that Jacomo is no angel, that he would not let a decent opportunity go to waste—and perhaps many males in the audience would empathise with this. However, Jacomo is subjected to a regime of terror by his master, one of whose pleasures is to make him act against his natural predisposition—to fight, when he is a poltroon, and to assist in the commission of crimes that flout the conventional morality to which he subscribes. A dynamic so pronounced as to become almost obsessive in the final act, John's goading of Jacomo goes beyond the comic master-servant stereotype and all the jokes about Jacomo's ‘antipathy to Hemp’ (II, p. 38), just as Don John himself is well beyond the classification ‘rake’.

Female characters in the play also operate to test out the limits of what is ‘natural’. In Act II, Leonora's reckoning with Don John makes the point familiar from many of the 1670s sex plays, that ‘nature’ appears to have invested differently in the two genders. Where she speaks the language of love, vows and constancy, Don John speaks of obeying his constitution and of loving only as long as his natural desires will last. What is in the biological interest of men is not, apparently, in the interest of women. When, in Shadwell's later Timon of Athens (1678), Timon is taxed by the equally pathologically constant Evandra with breach of the vows he made to her, he responds that:

                    [W]e cannot create our own affections;
They're mov'd by some invisible active Pow'r,
And we are only passive, and whatsoever
Of imperfection follows from th' obedience
To our desires, we suffer, not commit.

(I, p. 212)

The pop-up appearance to Don John of six women all claiming to be his wives (a device later imitated by Gay in The Beggar's Opera) leads to a climax of cartoonish vice in which one of his ‘wives’ kills herself, an old woman is raped and a sacramental view of marriage is further burlesqued by a mock ‘Epithalamium’:

Since Liberty, Nature for all has design'd,
A pox on the Fool who to one is confin'd.
All Creatures besides,
When they please change their Brides.
All Females they get when they can,
Whilst they nothing but Nature obey,
How happy, how happy are they?
But the silly fond Animal, Man,
Makes laws 'gainst himself, which his Appetites sway;
Poor Fools, how unhappy are they?

(II, pp. 43-4)

By the end of Act II, the libertine's conception of the natural has been subjected to further pressure. Maria—a woman whose lover Octavio has been killed in Act I and impersonated by Don John—enters cross-dressed. In contrast to Don John's programmatic promiscuity, her commitment to monogamy is so extreme that it has turned her into a bloodthirsty revenger. Arguably, the audience is not much more comfortable with this than with Don John's polygamous permissiveness; and we are to see its effects again later, when Leonora continues to be in thrall to Don John no matter how much she comes to know about his nature and actions. At this point in Act II, Maria's function is further to vex the conception of human nature by introducing the country-city dichotomy, contending that ‘barbarous Art’ has debauched the innocent natures of all urban dwellers: ‘More savage cruelty reigns in Cities, / Than ever yet in Desarts among the / Most venemous Serpents’ (II, p. 48). In Act IV this thread is taken up in a pastoral masque, the point of which is to suggest that ‘uncorrupted Nature’ exists only in the improbable setting of nymphs and shepherds—though their intention to ‘geld’ Jacomo (the shepherds apprehend him after he has been forced to take part in his master's rape of the nymphs; apparently he lacks Don John's aristocratic fleetness of foot) suggests that these shepherds are not entirely idealised. They also possess some ‘georgic’ skills! Before Act II ends, the appearance of the Ghost of Don John's father threatening Divine vengeance upon the whole pack of them throws the conception of what is natural into the melting-pot. A legend in which, famously, a stone statue of the murdered Governor of Seville accepts an invitation to supper is one in which, at the very least, what is ‘natural’ cannot be taken for granted: and in Shadwell's play the supernatural is deployed to interrogate this worldly philosophies of experience.

Act III is the philosophical heart of the play, where the action responds most directly to Rochester's poem. Fleeing from a Seville that has become too hot for them, our heroes are caught in a storm at sea and later precipitated upon a seemingly strange coast—which is in fact their native land—where they meet with a religious hermit, who is horrified by their demand for whores and is provoked into this discussion:

HERM.
Oh Monsters of impiety! are you so lately scap'd the wrath of Heaven, thus to provoke it?
D. Ant.
How! by following the Dictates of Nature, who can do otherwise?
D. Lop.
All our actions are necessitated, none command their own wills.
HERM.
Oh horrid blasphemy! would you lay your dreadful and unheard of Vices upon Heaven? No, ill men, that has given you free-will to do good.
D. Joh.
I find thou retir'st here, and never read'st or think'st.
Can that blind faculty the Will be free
When it depends upon the Understanding?
Which argues first before the Will can chuse;
And the last Dictate of the Judgment sways
The Will, as in a Balance, the last Weight
Put in the scale, lifts up the other end,
And with the same Necessity.

(III, p. 55)

Don John argues that the understanding is programmed by the sense impressions conveyed to it, and thus we do not have free will. So if we are evil, we are so by ‘nature’, acting as we must according to the sharpness with which sensory imperatives are conveyed to the understanding. To some extent, the irrational behaviour of Leonora and of two local women, Flavia and Clara, appears to bear out Don John's view. The girls are to be married the following day, but they have heard that English women have much more liberty than Spanish, that in England anything goes in sexual mores—and they desire a taste of such ‘natural’ freedom. The song they sing sets out to vindicate female libertinism:

Woman who is by Nature wild,
Dull bearded man incloses;
Of Nature's freedom we're beguil'd
By Laws which man imposes:
Who still himself continues free,
Yet we poor Slaves must fetter'd be.

(III, p. 60)

But their attempt to follow through on this desire for sexual liberation provokes an orgy of crime culminating in the murder of their father, the death of Maria, and the wounding of their two bridegrooms, such that they are brought to a religious recognition—‘'Twas our vile disobedience / Caus'd our poor Fathers death, which Heaven / Will revenge on us’ (IV, pp. 73-4)—and they determine to expiate their sins in a religious sanctuary. In the event, they do not spend long enough in the cloister to achieve this because they are smoked out of it like bees in a hive by Don John's gang intent upon their rape. Significantly again in view of this play's attempt to combat vice with pastoral, it is the shepherds who foil the attempt. In what remains of the play, the supernatural machinery of the legend takes over, as Don John's gang are made by the ghost and the statue to celebrate a ritual black mass in the company of the ghosts of all those they have murdered. In the Faustian finale, Don John is haled off to hell still refusing to repent, meeting his death with all the bravado of the villain in a Jacobean tragedy.

Rochester not only recognised The Libertine as a reply to Against Reason and Mankind but effectively gave it his imprimatur: his self-mocking poetic riposte, To the Post Boy, figures the Earl's own imminent damnation in terms that unmistakably recall Don John's brazen end, complete with the prospect of hell, fire and brimstone.²⁹ Shadwell, however, was not finished yet. In The Libertine, he was primarily concerned with staging (and rebutting) the sexual ethics embodied in Against Reason and Mankind; in his adaptation of Shakespeare's Timon of Athens, which he claimed to have ‘Made into a Play’, his interest is in the corruption of human nature and the supposed inferiority of men to beasts.

Written at the suggestion of Rochester's friend and political ally, the Duke of Buckingham, to whom it was dedicated, The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater (1678) targets the section of Against Reason and Mankind in which the speaker renews his onslaught on mankind in rejoinder to the adversarius's vindication of ‘Blest glorious Man’ (lines 112-73). This is not to say that the poem's libertine creed embodied in the speaker's apology for ‘right reason’ (lines 72-111) has been forgotten: indeed, Shadwell's most striking alteration of the Shakespearian original is the introduction of Evandra, Timon's loyal and loving mistress, who is abandoned by him for Melissa, a mercenary coquette, but who, in spite of his faithlessness and perjured vows, is the only person to offer support and help when bankruptcy looms by returning the gifts he had bestowed upon her. (Melissa immediately gives him up for Alcibiades whose fortune is now in the ascendant.) One could even argue—perversely—that if Timon had remained true to Evandra, the effect on him of the financial disaster would not have been half so dire. As it is, this good-natured if thoughtless spendthrift and would-be libertine is shocked to discover not only that the erstwhile beneficiaries of his bounty have abandoned him but also that the only person genuinely eager to help him is the woman he had wronged and to whom he had callously expounded his rationale for male sexual freedom:

TIM.
Man is not master of his appetites,
Heav'n swayes our mind to Love. (I, p. 210)

.....

Why are not our desires within our power?
Or why should we be punisht for obeying them?(30)

Evandra's retort to this torrent of ingenious self-justification is telling: ‘Your Philosophy is too subtle’ (I, p. 212). It certainly is: later on in the play Timon assures her with disarming candour: ‘I can love two at once, trust me I can’ (II, p. 227).

Shadwell uses Evandra to expose and castigate Timon's libertinism; he uses Apemantus and Timon himself to carry out a scorching attack on human treachery, pride and dishonesty.³¹ As in Shakespeare, both Apemantus's and Timon's misanthropic diatribes are pervaded by animal imagery, but Apemantus's speeches have been adjusted to underline thematic correspondence to specific passages in Against Reason and Mankind. It is as if the poem's persona had an on-stage deputy:

APEM.
When I can find a man that's better than
A beast, I will fall down and worship him.

(II, p. 222)

Compare Against Reason and Mankind:

If upon Earth there dwell such God-like men,
I'le here Recant my Paradox to them;
Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay,
And with the rabble World, their Laws obey.
          If such there be, yet grant me this at least,
Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast.

(lines 220-5)

And later,

I fear not man no more than I can love him.
'Twere better for us that wild beasts possest
The Empire of the Earth, they'd use men better,
Than they do one another. They'd ne're prey
On man but for necessity of Nature.
Man undoes man in wantonness and sport,
Bruits are much honester than he; my dog
When he fawns on me is no Courtier,
He is in earnest; but a man shall smile,
And wish my throat cut.

(III, pp. 231-2)

compared with Against Reason and Mankind:

Be Judge your self, I'le bring it to the test,
Which is the Basest Creature, Man or Beast.
Birds feed on birds, Beasts on each other prey,
But savage Man alone does man betray:
Prest by necessity they kill for food,
Man undoes Man to do himself no good.
With teeth and claws by nature arm'd, they hunt
Natures allowance to supply their want.
But Man with smiles, embraces, friendship, praise,
Inhumanly his fellows life betrayes;
With voluntary pains works his distress,
Not through Necessity, but Wantonness.
For hunger or for Love they fight and teare,
Whilst wretched man is still in arms for Feare:
For feare he Arms, and is of arms afraid,
By fear to fear successively betray'd.

(lines 127-42)

Timon too denounces the ‘wicked humane race’ (‘all such Animals’ as ‘walk … upon two legs’), for ‘they are not honest, / Those Creatures that are so, walk on all four’ (IV, pp. 251-2). Yet in contrast to the persona of Against Reason and Mankind (and to Apemantus), Timon, who claims to be as ‘savage as a Satyr’ (IV, p. 253), is compelled, by Evandra's unceasing solicitude, loyalty and generosity, to recant his paradox and acknowledge that among two-legged beasts ‘there is / One woman honest; if they ask me more / I will not grant it’ (Act IV, p. 253).

Crowne undercuts the ostensible moral idealism of Calisto by imbuing both the masque proper (the story of Jupiter's abortive rape of Calisto) and the pastoral intermezzi of nymphs and shepherds with elements of libertine philosophy and rhetoric extrapolated from Against Reason and Mankind; in The Libertine and Timon, Shadwell grafts elements of libertine comedy (again traceable to Rochester's poem) on to essentially tragic structures,³² again with a view to literalising and demolishing the precepts put forward by the persona of Against Reason and Mankind. The result is a satirical masque and two satirical tragedies respectively. By engaging with its language and topics, all three plays, but especially the two of Shadwell's, strive to question and counter the libertine and misanthropic ethos of Against Reason and Mankind. In that attempt they are only partially successful. For although the outcomes of their plots toe the morally correct (and poetically just) line—Jupiter's assault on the nymph is prevented, Don John and his confederates are hauled off to hell, Timon dies a broken man—the imperative to create a figure (or figures) who will embody the satire's creed, and will then be exposed and duly chastised, leads, paradoxically, not to edifying catharsis but to moral ambivalence and generic corruption. To this fact the original audiences were fully alive. The mixed reception of the English Don Juan is a case in point. John Downes, the Duke's Company prompter, recalled that ‘it got the Company great Reputation’ and that ‘The Libertine perform'd by Mr. Betterton Crown'd the Play’;³³ Robert Hooke who saw a performance during the first run was outraged by this ‘Atheistical wicked play’;³⁴ Charles Gildon classed it as a ‘Comedy’, which, he thought, was ‘diverting enough’;³⁵ and John Dryden damned it as a ‘Farce’.³⁶

Our discussion confirms the importance of Rochester's Against Reason and Mankind for the libertine debates of the 1670s, especially as they were conducted through the medium of drama. The biographical episodes in which the Earl tried to put libertine beliefs into practice are amongst the best known in Restoration lore: those episodes were strikingly immortalised in the portrayals of Rochester in plays by Etherege, Crowne and Lee. We hope to have demonstrated that Against Reason and Mankind prompted Shadwell and Crowne to represent on stage forms of behaviour even more excessive than Rochester's real-life scrapes (if that is an adequate word), searching for a point at which his ethical naturalism would break down, testing it to destruction. Audiences watching representations of behaviour sanctioned by Rochester's arguments would surely reject the premises, though, as we have hinted, the generic complexities that result from such stage experiments do not make it easy to pass moral verdicts. To this extent, the poem is of its time and formative in its time.

The impact of Rochester's Against Reason and Mankind (and of his colourful lifestyle) upon the drama did not extend beyond the 1680s. Written as it was for a Court occasion, Crowne's masque was never performed after 1675; by contrast, Shadwell's The Libertine and Timon proved immensely popular and were regularly revived well into the eighteenth century.³⁷ It is unlikely, however, that by then many people would have associated the figurations of libertinism in those plays with the person of the Earl or indeed with Against Reason and Mankind.³⁸ Even so, by the eighteenth century the poem seems to have become something of a definitive, if also—paradoxically—a dangerously fluid, statement on ‘Man’ and ‘Reason’. Against Reason and Mankind was not only reprinted as a matter of course in successive editions of Rochester's works,³⁹ but substantial excerpts from it were routinely anthologised under those headings in poetry manuals and dictionaries of quotations such as Edward Bysshe's much-reprinted The Art of English Poetry (1702) and his The British Parnassus (1714) and Charles Gildon's The Complete Art of Poetry (1718). The Art of English Poetry prints as many as seventy-two lines from Against Reason and Mankind under the heading ‘MAN’, their tenor being unequivocally misanthropic and cynical.⁴⁰ In the Preface to The British Parnassus Bysshe professed to ‘have carefully avoided to insert any single Line, much less any whole Passage, in this Collection, that was in the former’.⁴¹ Accordingly, under the heading ‘MAN’, he included twelve lines of the adversarius's apology for ‘Bless'd glorious Man …’, which he had previously excluded from The Art of English Poetry (II, 536). But under the heading ‘REASON’, he now placed a further twenty-five lines from Against Reason and Mankind, comprising the persona's scathing debunking of the adversarius's speech (II, 749-50). The impact of such a combination upon the readers of Bysshe's anthologies could hardly have been more ambivalent and contradictory.

In the eighteenth century Rochester's Against Reason and Mankind (and his poetic output more generally) influenced verse and prose satire, not drama. In Rochester's poetry can be found some of the most important formal blueprints for eighteenth-century satirical verse; on the level of theme and content, too, he is a model for later writers: the Pope-Swift-Gay circle in particular. The sensational opening statement of Against Reason and Mankind, inspired by Montaigne and Plutarch, is echoed in several Scriblerian works. In Book IV of Gulliver's Travels, Gulliver's Houyhnhnm ‘master’ observes that his ability to survive and defend himself in the wild is considerably inferior to that of the average beast. By the end of the fourth voyage the point is thoroughly made that Gulliver is not only not an animal, he is less than one.⁴² Mortification of human pride is central to this poem's intention, as it is to Scriblerian satire generally. Other lines of Against Reason and Mankind bring irresistibly to mind John Gay's fable ‘The Man and the Flea’:

And tis this very Reason I despise.
This supernatural Gift, that makes a mite
Think hee's the Image of the Infinite;
Comparing his short life, voyd of all rest,
To the Eternall, and the ever blest.

(lines 75-9)

In Gay's fable a man, wrought to a pitch of self-congratulation by observing the universe created for his pleasure, is humbled by a flea on his nose.⁴³ The flea, not the man, is the capstone of the creation. Gay was also drawn to Rochester's Hobbesian account of human beings as the only species who destroy others without any advantage to themselves (lines 129 onwards). An exactly similar account is given by Lockit in The Beggar's Opera.⁴⁴ Preeminently, however, Rochester's poem is a source of inspiration for Alexander Pope.⁴⁵ Lines 14 onwards construct a bridge from Milton to his eighteenth-century successors: to Swift's Spider in the Battle of the Books, spinning his house out of his own entrails; or to Pope's King of the Dunces, trying to compose in surroundings created by the detritus of his own (de)composition. ‘Stumbling from thought to thought’ becomes in the Dunciad ‘Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound’, as Rochester's trip becomes a lead-weighted dive, and the sea changes from the sceptic's doubt to the poet's Sargasso of hopeless images. Joseph Spence records several instances of Pope's attention to Rochester, of his earnestness in comparing him to Oldham and Dorset and in assessing his strengths and weaknesses against those peers:

Oldham is too rough and coarse. Rochester is the medium between him and the
Earl of Dorset. Lord Dorset is the best of all those writers.
          ‘What, better than Lord Rochester?’
          Yes; Rochester has neither so much delicacy nor exactness as Dorset.

[Instance: his Satire on Man.]⁴⁶

If Pope is ambivalent in his verdict, he is no more so than contemporary playwrights were, or than modern readers of Rochester's most significant individual poem continue to be.⁴⁷ Stephen Jeffreys is the latest dramatist to put Rochester's life on the stage, in his play The Libertine, premièred in 1994. As the lights come up, Rochester walks front stage and, Restoration style, issues a direct challenge to the audience: ‘Allow me to be frank at the commencement: you will not like me’.⁴⁸ The events of his life unfold and the play closes with Rochester again in direct address to the audience: ‘Well. Do you like me now? Do you like me now?’ (p. 84). Do we?

Notes

1. That formative status is enhanced if we accept recently discovered evidence suggesting that the poem was composed in 1672 rather than 1674 as was previously supposed. See Harold Love and Stephen Parks, ‘A Reasonable Satyr’, Times Literary Supplement, 1 August 1997, p. 13.

2. The most comprehensive discussions of the context of Against Reason and Mankind are those in Griffin (pp. 156-96) and Thormählen (pp. 162-89); neither considers its impact upon the drama. For an account of verse responses see David M. Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's ‘Poems’ of 1680 (New Haven, 1963), pp. 178-80.

3. On Etherege's and Lee's portraits of Rochester see Robert D. Hume, ‘Reading and Misreading The Man of Mode’, Criticism, 14 (1972), 1-11, and his ‘The Satiric Design of Nat. Lee's The Princess of Cleve’, Journal of English and German Philology, 75 (1976), 117-38 respectively. Harold Weber discusses Rochester as a prototype of a Hobbesian libertine rake in the context of 1670s comedies in The Restoration Rake-hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-century England (Madison, 1986), pp. 49-90.

4. For a discussion of late seventeenth-century libertinage in the context of both drama and poetry see Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-century Comedy of Manners (New Haven, 1957), pp. 10-40.

5. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), Part I, ch. 6, p. 39.

6. Chernaik, p. 24.

7. David Farley-Hills's contribution to the present volume reinforces the points we make in our introduction.

8. ‘The Effect of this [a particular Pique to Dryden] was discover'd by his Lordship's setting up Crown in Opposition to Dryden; he recommended him to the King, ordering him to make a Masque for the Court, when it was the Business of the Poet Laureat’: ‘The Memoiers [sic] of the Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Written By Monsieur St Evremont, in a Letter to her Grace the Dutchess of Mazarine. Translated from the Original Manuscript’, in The Works of the Right Honourable the Late Earls of Rochester and Roscommon. With a Collection of Original Poems, Translations, Imitations, & c. by the most Eminent Hands (2nd edition, London, 1707), sig. b7v. To be the recipient of that commission was both a great boon and a great honour, for the production of the masque was an important cultural and political event. See Andrew R. Walkling, ‘Masque and Politics at the Restoration Court: John Crowne's Calisto’, Early Music (February 1996), 27-62.

9. In his preface to Don Carlos Prince of Spain (London, 1676), Otway writes, ‘I can never enough acknowledge the unspeakable Obligations I received from the Earl of R. who far above what I am ever able to deserve from him, seem'd almost to make it his business to establish it in the good opinion of the King, and his Royal Highness, from both of which I have since received Confirmations of their good liking of it, and Encouragement to proceed; and it is to him I must in all gratitude confess I owe the greatest part of my good success in this, and on whose Indulgency I extreamly build my hopes of a next’ (sig. A3v).

10. Some time between the winter of 1671-2 and the spring of 1673, he supplied the prologue for a Court performance of Settle's The Empress of Morocco, and in the spring of 1677 the epilogue for Charles Davenant's Circe. He contributed an epilogue for an all-female production of a revived play in 1672 (see Edward L. Saslow, ‘A “New” Epilogue by Rochester’, Restoration, 23.1 (1999), 1-9) and may also have written the epilogue for Fane's Love in the Dark which opened in the spring of 1675.

11. Fane's A Mask. Made at the Request of the late Earl of Rochester, for the Tragedy of Valentinian was published in Poems by Several Hands, and on Several Occasions (London, 1685), a poetical miscellany edited by Nahum Tate.

12. Howard thanked Rochester for ‘the screen you are pleased to write’ in a letter dated 7 April 1676. See Letters, p. 116.

13. See Robert D. Hume, ‘Elizabeth Barry's First Roles and the Cast of The Man of Mode’, Theatre History Studies, 5 (1985), 16-20.

14. The Assignation or Love in a Nunnery, in The Works of John Dryden, edited by Edward Niles Hooker et al., 20 vols (Berkeley, 1956-), XI, 320-1. All further references to Dryden's works are to this edition and given parenthetically in the text.

15. John Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit (Cambridge, 1991), p. 95.

16. Thormählen, p. 195; David Trotter, ‘Wanton Expressions’ in Spirit of Wit, pp. 111-32.

17. Roger D. Lund, ‘Irony as Subversion: Thomas Woolston and the Crime of Wit’ in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660-1750, edited by Lund (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 170-94 (p. 171).

18. ‘An Answer to the Satyr against Mankind. By the Reverend Mr. Griffith’, in The Works of John Earl of Rochester (London, 1714), pp. 59-65 (p. 64). On the authority of Anthony à Wood, Vieth ascribes this poem to Griffith (though he does not altogether reject its attribution to Edward Pococke made in some contemporary transcripts (Vieth, Attribution in Restoration Poetry, pp. 178-9)).

19. See his ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, first published in La pensée (1970), reprinted in Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London, 1984), p. 29.

20. John Crowne, The Countrey Wit (London, 1675), sig. A4v and II, p. 22 respectively. This echo of lines 105-9 has been noted by Love and earlier critics and editors.

21. In Aureng-Zebe (whose dedication to the Earl of Mulgrave contains two verbal echoes of the poem: see Paul Hammond's ‘Two Echoes of Rochester's Satire in Dryden’, Notes and Queries, 233 (1988), 171), the eponymous hero resists what he perceives as an unreasonable suggestion of his beloved Indamora—that they should part now that his jealousy makes him unable to trust her—in a vein reminiscent of the defence of ‘right reason’ by the persona of Against Reason and Mankind (lines 99ff):

    Must I new bars to my own joy create?
    Refuse, my self, what I had forc'd from Fate?
    What though I am not lov'd?
    Reason's nice taste does our delights destroy:
    Brutes are more bless'd, who grosly feed on joy.

    (V.i.553-7)

    In Oedipus, the blind prophet Tiresias condemns the insolence of Man's epistemological hankerings in words which recall the rebuttal of the ‘formal band and beard’ in Against Reason and Mankind (lines 76ff):

    But how can Finite measure Infinite?
    Reason! alas, it does not know it self!
    Yet Man, vain Man, wou'd with this short-lin'd Plummet,
    Fathom the vast Abysse of Heav'nly justice.

    (III.i.241ff)

    And Dryden's unperformed opera The State of Innocence (c. 1673-4) based on Milton's Paradise Lost rewrites Satan's seduction of Eve so as to emphasise the ‘rationality’ of the woman's aspirations to the godhead (IV.ii) in a way which resonates with the diabolical presentation of human pursuit of (false) reason in Rochester's poem.

22. Calisto: or, The Chaste Nimph. The Late Masque at Court, As it was frequently Presented there, By several Persons of Great Quality. With the Prologue, and the Songs betwixt the Acts. All Written by J. Crowne (London, 1675), ‘Epistle to the Reader’, sig. a1v.

23. Jupiter's ultimate victory is wittily brought home in the Epilogue: in the final scene of the masque the audience have witnessed Jupiter bestow upon Calisto (and upon her equally chaste sister Nyphe) ‘the small dominion of a Star’ (V, p. 79); now he revokes his decree and decides to keep the two beauties in ‘this inferiour World’ (p. 82).

24. See Louis Teeter, ‘The Dramatic Use of Hobbes's Political Ideas’ in John Dryden, edited by Earl Miner (London, 1972), pp. 27-57 (p. 36).

25. A manuscript cast list preserved in two scribal copies of Lucina's Rape (as Rochester called his revision of Valentinian) suggests that the play was produced, or intended to be produced, by the King's Company c. 1675-6. The first recorded performance of the play took place at Court on 11 February 1684. See John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, edited by Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume (London, 1987), p. 83n.

26. Harold Love, ‘Was Lucina Betrayed at Whitehall?’, pp. 179-90 above.

27. Raman Selden notes that ‘[t]he philosophy of the play's libertines has some general similarities to the views expressed in Rochester's A Satyr against Reason and Mankind’, though he does not explore them. We believe that those similarities are both more specific and more pervasive than Selden allows. See his ‘Rochester and Shadwell’ in Spirit of Wit, pp. 177-87 (p. 189).

28. All references are to The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, edited by Montague Summers, 5 vols (London, 1927; repr. New York, 1968), vol. III, I, 25-6.

29. The attribution of this poem to Rochester has been disputed. For a convenient summary of the debate see Rochester 1999, 367-8.

30. Compare also Timon's exclamation against human-derived rules which bound and unnecessarily restrict pleasure with the passage in Against Reason and Mankind (lines 105-9) appropriated by Crowne in The Countrey Wit:

    Alas, by Nature we are too much confin'd,
    Our Libertie's so narrow, that we need not
    Find fetters for our selves: No, we should seize
    On pleasure wheresoever we can find it,
    Lest at another time we miss it there.

    (II, pp. 215-16)

31. Shadwell apportions to Apemantus and to Evandra many of the lines of Shakespeare's steward Flavius who, renamed Demetrius, in his version proves as dishonest and hypocritical as the rest of Timon's hangers-on.

32. See Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976), pp. 312, 327.

33. Roscius Anglicanus, p. 78.

34. The entry for 25 July 1675, from The Diary of Robert Hooke, quoted in The London Stage, 1600-1800, Part I: 1660-1700, edited by William Van Lennep et al. (Carbondale, 1965), p. 234.

35. Charles Gildon, Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (London, [1699]), p. 124.

36. The Vindication of The Duke of Guise, in Dryden's Works, XIV, 319.

37. The latter, Charles Gildon noted in his Lives and Characters of 1699, was ‘for a few Years past, as often acted at the Theatre Royal, as any Tragedy I know’ (p. 129). For dates of eighteenth-century revivals of both of Shadwell's plays and Rochester's Valentinian see The London Stage, 1660-1800. Part II: 1700-1729, edited by Emmett L. Avery, 2 vols (Carbondale, 1960). Rochester's own Valentinian, though it commanded critical respect—John Dunton's The Athenian Mercury (vol. 5, no. 2, Saturday 5 December 1691) confidently pronounced that ‘Valentinian shall outlast, as it does outweigh whole Cartloads of theirs whose persons have survived him’—and though it was sometimes revived, was less a fixture of the repertory.

38. By contrast, the readers of Rochester's Works (London, 1707) were reminded, by St Evremond's ‘Memoirs of the Earl of Rochester's Life’, that ‘Sir George Etherege wrote Dorimant in Sir Fopling, in Compliment to him, as drawing his Lordship's Character, and burnishing all the Foibles of it, to make them shine like Perfections’ (sig. b8r).

39. Significantly, Against Reason and Mankind was accorded pride of place, being situated at the front of the volume, in the Works of 1707 published by Curll, and it was the one poem picked out for discussion in Rymer's preface to Rochester's Works of 1714 brought out by Tonson, which also prints Griffith's ‘Answer’. Rymer's preface appeared with an edition of Rochester's poems published by Jacob Tonson in 1691 ‘with no editor's name and an unsigned preface’, and was included in subsequent reprints of that edition in 1696, 1705, 1710, 1714 and 1732. It was only in the 1714 edition that the preface was attributed to Rymer. See The Critical Works of Thomas Rymer, edited by Curt A. Zimansky (New Haven, 1956), pp. 224-5.

40. See The Art of English Poetry, edited by Edward Bysshe, 2 vols (London, 1702), I, 223-5. Though he attributes these lines to Rochester, Bysshe does not specify the poem from which they derive. Gildon includes the very same extract from Against Reason and Mankind in his The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols (London, 1718), II, 227-9. Though there are minor differences of spelling and punctuation between his version and Bysshe's, it is clear that Gildon used the earlier compilation as his copy-text, for his version makes the same cuts to the original.

41. See The British Parnassus: Or, A Compleat Common-Place-Book of English Poetry: Containing The most genuine, instructive, diverting and sublime Thoughts, 2 vols (London, 1714), I, sig. A1v. Excerpts from Valentinian, too, appeared in contemporary anthologies: see Bysshe (ed.), The Art of English Poetry under headings ‘FATE’ and ‘RAPE’ respectively, I, 127, 296; and Thesaurus Dramaticus. Containing all the Celebrated Passages, Soliloquies, Similies, Descriptions, and Other Poetical Beauties in the Body of English Plays, Antient and Modern, Digested under Proper Topics; with the Names of the Plays, and their Authors, referr'd to in the Margin, 2 vols (London, 1724), I, 20, 240.

42. Gulliver's Travels, Book IV, chs 1-4.

43. John Gay, Fables (London, 1727), XLIX.

44. John Gay, The Beggar's Opera, III.ii.4ff: ‘Lions, Wolves, and Vulturs don't live together in Herds, Droves or Flocks.—Of all Animals of Prey, Man is the only sociable one. Every one of us preys upon his Neighbour, and yet we herd together’ (John Gay: Dramatic Works, edited by John Fuller, 2 vols (Oxford, 1983), II, 46).

45. The influence is more pervasive than is suggested by Paul Baines in his detailed study ‘From “nothing” to “silence”: Rochester and Pope’ in Reading Rochester, edited by Edward Burns (Liverpool, 1995), pp. 137-65. Julian Ferraro's contribution to the present volume is thus especially welcome in the attention it pays to the relationship between Rochester's ‘An Allusion to Horace’ and Satyr. [Timon] and Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot.

46. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men: Collected from Conversation, edited by James M. Osborn, 2 vols (Oxford, 1966), no. 472, I, 202.

47. The latest of these is Ferraro, who explores some of the reasons behind Pope's ambivalence, in showing how Pope the professional writer has appropriated, but must also transform, the ‘holiday writer's aristocratic self-presentation’.

48. Stephen Jeffreys, The Libertine (London, 1994), p. 3.