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Authorship
"Signior Dildo" has been accepted by all editors of Rochester without demur, but the evidence for his authorship is not particularly strong. The major considerations against it are as follows:
- (1) A vast mass of satirical verse not by Rochester was attributed to him by scribes and printers. (This problem has been exhaustively treated by Vieth in his Attribution in Restoration poetry [New Haven, 1963].)
- (2) Neither of our witnesses from 1673-74, Walter Overbury and Sir William Haward, appear to have thought the poem was his work. Verse by Rochester was eagerly sought at this period and there can be no doubt that the possibility of his authorship would have been mentioned if it had been suspected.
- (3) The poem does not appear in any of the manuscript and printed collections of Rochester's verse and Rochesteriana that appeared in 1680, the year of his death, and for some time following. The manuscripts containing the attribution were all written at least a decade after that date.
- (4)BLh19 attributes it to him in the "Catalogue" at the end of the volume (p. 762) but not in the text proper, suggesting a degree of uncertainty about the matter. The scribe of BLh17 copying circa 1695 was not aware of the attribution.
- (5) The fact that the Cameron scriptorium archive copy's attribution is repeated in its descendants Of15, OSe15, Pt2, V90, and VAd43 does nothing to strengthen that attribution. Vieth's argument that the numerical weight of the attributions to Rochester "outweighs the single ascription" to Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset and Fleetwood Sheppard only betrays his imperfect understanding of the textual relationships involved, despite their being made clear by Cameron's article (Complete Poems, p. 192).
- (6) The attribution to Dorset and Sheppard, found in Np42, a fairly late production from the scriptorium, presumably reflects an emendation made to the archive copy subsequent to the writing of the texts with the Rochester attribution. There would seem to be no reason for doing this apart from the controller of the archive having become persuaded that the poem was not by Rochester.
- (7) The victims of the poem include the Countess of Shrewsbury (ll. 45-48), who was the mistress of Rochester's patron and close friend, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, and the Countess of Falmouth (ll. 25-28), who was on the point of marriage with another close friend, Dorset (who must himself, for this reason, be regarded as unlikely to have written it). There can be no doubt that the relationship between these three peers was a very close one during the mid-1680s.[11] (However, this objection would not apply to Od8/1, which contains neither of the stanzas.)
Against this, the only piece of external evidence that might link Rochester with the poem is two lines from a satire of 1680, "The visitt": "There was obscene Rotchesters Choise storys | Of matrix Glances Dildo and Clittoris."[12] But a reference to dildos does not mean a reference to "Signior Dildoe": it could easily have been inspired by "Tunbridge Wells," ll. 29-34, The Destruction of Sodom, one of whose characters is a dildo-maker, "Upon Cary Frazer," or whatever lost work was the source of the puzzling "matrix glances." The story of the Countess of Northumberland hiding her dildo under the pillow (l. 31) seems to be alluded to in "Timon," ll. 80-82; but this information would also have been available to Rochester's companions in riot, who included Dorset and Sheppard. If, indeed, the attribution to Rochester depends on no more than an annotation made to a single manuscript possibly as much as ten years after his death, and subsequently deleted in one of the descendants of that text in favor of another attribution, it cannot be regarded very seriously. This is not to say that Rochester was not capable of writing the poem, or would not have enjoyed reading it, simply that the existing attributions cannot in any way be regarded as conclusive.
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