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"The texts of 'Signior Dildo'," writes Keith Walker, "differ widely, not to say wildly. There is general agreement on the title, but upon little else."[1] This challenge has been impossible to pass up. What follows is a report on an attempt to establish the relationship of the texts, together with a reconsideration of the question of authorship. A full collation of the known early texts is included as none has so far been published.[2]
"Signior Dildo" is a lampoon directed at ladies of the court of Charles II on the excuse of their supposed passion for the "Italian" device: as far as is known it is the only poem in the English language wholly devoted to the advocacy of masturbation. It belongs to a tradition of mysogynistic dildo satires which reaches back as far as the sixth mimiamb of Herondas (first or second century A.D.), and was represented in English as early as Nashe's "A Choice of Valentines" (1592). In 1671 a consignment of dildos, in this case French, had been seized on arrival in England and burned, inspiring the widely copied burlesque "Dildoides," which accompanies "Signior Dildoe" in the anthologies of the well-known "Cameron" scriptorium.[3]
The occasion of the poem was the arrival in London of Mary of Modena on 26 November 1673 as the bride-to-be of James, Duke of York—indeed it may even have been written as a set of fescennine verses for some celebration connected with the royal wedding. On 26 January following, a letter from Walter Overbury to Sir Joseph Williamson mentions the sending of "a song of a certain senior that came in with the Dutchesse of Modena," adding that "it reaches and touches most of the ladys from Westminster to Wapping."[4] Its first appearance in print was not to be until 1703, transmission up to that time being exclusively in sung or manuscript form. The currently accepted
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