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In "Sometimes a Scepter is Only a Scepter: Pornography and Politics in Restoration England," Rachel Weil analyzes the implications of the fact that the "manuscript books into which Restoration men and women copied items of current interest usually contained a mixture of sexual and 'purely' political material, with no effort being made to create a distinction between them" (141). According to Well, this lack of distinction "suggests that stories about royal or court sexuality were a legitimate part of political discourse, not cordoned off into a separate category" (142). Weil focuses her study of Restoration poetic satire on the ways in which these works use pornographic imagery to comment on Charles II's policies. As she writes, "Narratives about the king's body, its powers and vulnerabilities, its healthy and unhealthy states, and its relationship to the body politic, provided writers with a way of dramatizing their deepest political concerns" (142). The king's body, however, is not the only one that provided Restoration satirists with this opportunity. In this essay, I analyze another site of pornographic and political satire, the male Jew's body, in two Restoration poems that circulated in manuscript in 1680 and were quickly included in some of the poetic miscellanies that were compiled following the death of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in July of that year: "Tho' Wean'd from all Those Scandalous Delights" and "The Queen Street Ballad." (1) These poems depict a dinner party that turns into a sexual orgy when a Jewish character introduces the other guests to the joys of anal sex. My purpose here is to examine these satires' representational practices in associating Jews with sodomy. Borrowing Cameron McFarlane's strategy of analyzing "the nexus of ideas, relations, behaviors, discursive practices, and meanings that could be set in motion under [the] signs" "sodomy" and "sodomite" (20), I am interested in examining the cultural work the representation of the "Lustful Buggering Jew" ("Tho' Wean'd" 32) performed in Restoration political satire. (2) I argue that the "Lustful Buggering Jew" is a stereotype that uniquely expresses anxieties about the stability of English national identity during the Exclusion Crisis.
Harold Love notes that Restoration manuscript books and miscellanies "have usually been treated simply as quarries for texts of individual writers and as providers of dating evidence" (177). He argues, however, that these works are also important for the social functions they served. Scribal publication, writes Love, "was one of several means of acquiring and transmitting information" (177). Manuscript books helped bond together "like-minded individuals into a community, sect, or political faction, with the exchange of texts in manuscript serving to nourish a shared set of values and to enrich personal allegiances" (177). And finally, scribal publication was "a means by which ideologically charged texts could be distributed through the governing class, or various interest groups within that class, without their coming to the knowledge of the governed" (177). The Gyldenstolpe Miscellany, a manuscript collection belonging to Count Nils Gyldenstolpe, Sweden's ambassador at The Hague from 1679 to 1687, was typical in its transmission of ideologically charged information about court intrigue and political factions. As David Vieth and Bror Daniellson, who published a facsimile edition of the collection in 1967, argue, "With the marriage between... Mary and William of Orange in 1677, it became very important for the Swedish ambassador... to familiarize himself with the doings at the court of Charles II, including gossip and the latest scandals" (xxi). Because of their political and satiric content, Vieth and Danielsson say, the poems in the collection "would render it valuable to a foreign diplomat trying to follow the changing situation in England in order to determine where and how strings should be pulled in the interests of his country" (xxi). Knowledge of events at Charles's court was particularly important in 1680--the height of the Exclusion Crisis. By August of that year, the probable compilation date for the collection, Titus Oates had already declared the existence of a Popish Plot to kill the king and thousands of Protestants, and the first exclusion bill, a measure that would bar Catholics in general and lames, Duke of York, in particular, from ascending the throne, had been introduced in Parliament.
"Tho' Wean'd from all Those Scandalous Delights" and "The Queen Street Ballad" are two of the works in the Gyldenstolpe Miscellany that lampoon exclusionist members of the court by purporting to reveal their steamy sexual activities through innuendo and allusion. In the first poem, the narrative persona looks back at his youth, nostalgically recalling how his days and nights were wasted with the pursuit of the "scandalous delights" of libertinism (1). Vieth and Danielsson note that the poem evokes the poetic voice of Rochester, and even "purports to have been written from Newmarket at a time when Rochester was there" (355). Rochester's status in the poetic satires of the late 1670s is complicated by the fact that, while many readers saw him as the epitome of the sexual license in Charles's court, he was simultaneously associated with republicanism. His notorious scepter lampoon, for example, famously asserts, "I hate all Monarchs and the Thrones that they sitt on" (Wilmot 34). (3) In adopting Rochester's poetic voice, "Tho' Wean'd from all Those Scandalous Delights" exploits the earl's ambiguous status. On the one hand, this borrowing allows the poem to claim an insider's status: it will reveal the true goings-on at court in the "words" of one of its most scandalous members. On the other hand, like the works Weil studies, the poem evokes Rochester's anti-monarchical reputation in order to use an ironic, mock-heroic tone as a means of attacking the libertinism at court and associating exclusion with debauchery--what the persona praises, the poem condemns.
The poem's version of Rochester has been weaned from libertine excess but nevertheless still enjoys listening to and reading gossip of other people's sexual misdeeds, some of which can be found in "Julians volumes" (6), a reference to Robert Julian, who collected, copied, and sold poetic miscellanies similar to the Gyldenstolpe volume. The majority of the poem is spent listing examples of the kinds of scandal the narrator relishes:
... fain I'd heare What upstart Fops in lulians volumes are Whether the lisping Lord who lately writt With many words and with so little witt Hath found more work for his correcting Friend Who slyly laughs at what he seems to mend What Vintners break since Drunkness hath been Found Treason above killing of the King And witnesses for that are Cherish'd more Than Oates and Bedloe ever were before Fain would I know who limes that nauseous Bitch Whose filthier mouth officiates for her Breech Whether the Booby Whelp of Kingly Race Or the soft Earle Contented with disgrace And yet me thinks 'tis strange if any Son Should Rivall Rowley there besides his own I'de hear whether the wight with antique pace Embroydered Coat and Antiquated Face Changing his Hebrew for a warlike Cant Still meets the Queenstreets lewd Inhabitant. (5-24)
Many of these references are to identifiable people and their activities. According to Vieth and Danielsson, the "passage on the lisping 'Lord who lately writt' almost certainly alludes to Mulgrave's 'An Essay on Satyr'" (353-54), which "retaliated against satirists like Rochester who had been sniping at him for at least four years" (Vieth 142). Mulgrave...
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