Rochester, the drunken lech

The release next November, 25 of the film "The Libertine" in the UK (other release dates here) is the main reason behind this article trying to vindicate the figure of John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester. The title of the article grabbed our attention: "Tennyson and Brontë loved his poetry. So why is the Earl of Rochester remembered only as a drunken lech?".
The article's author Barry Diddock tries to answer and refute that question:

He scandalised polite society by partying hard with actresses and prostitutes and yet he has won many fans, among them feminist critic Germaine Greer. He was implicated in at least one murder, was an early practitioner of “dogging” and had a number of alter egos, including Dr Bendo. He could regularly be found quaffing claret in city nightspots and among his many affectations was a pet monkey. Predictably, he died young. And now Johnny Depp is going to play him in the movie biopic.

But this is no rapper with an itchy trigger finger, no rock star with a death wish. Instead it’s a description of John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, the most notorious rake and libertine of the 17th century. He was also a poet and playwright but despite being championed by Defoe, Voltaire and Tennyson, his verse had been all but excised from the canon of English literature when Graham Greene picked up the mantle in the early 1930s. Greene wrote a biography called Lord Rochester’s Monkey, but even it was deemed too fruity for his publishers, Heinemann, who feared prosecution under the obscenity laws. Only in 1974 did it finally see the light of day.

(...) Marking his passing, the playwright Aphra Behn wrote of “the great, the godlike Rochester”, while Samuel Johnson remembered him as a man who “blazed out his youth and health in lavish voluptousness”. Tennyson could quote huge tracts of his verse, as could Goethe (and in English too). William Hazlitt thought his poems “cut and sparkled like diamonds”, while Voltaire took the trouble to translate them into French. Even Charlotte Brontë is thought to have had Wilmot in mind when she created the smouldering Rochester in Jane Eyre.

If you are interested in this last statement, you can check the article "The Real Rochester" by Stacey Lemaux and the references therein (specially "John Wilmot and Mr. Rochester" Murray G. H. Pittock Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Mar., 1987) , pp. 462-469 ).
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Update: More interesting information in this brontëana post.

Categories: In_the_News, Movies-DVD-TV, Jane_Eyre, Charlotte_Brontë