The significance of “Lord Rochester's monkey’

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This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library] On: 02 November 2014, At: 13:53 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Studia Neophilologica Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/snec20 The significance of “Lord Rochester's monkey’ DonJohn Dugas a a Department of English , The Pennsylvania State University , 117 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA, 16803 Published online: 21 Jul 2008. To cite this article: DonJohn Dugas (1997) The significance of “Lord Rochester's monkey’, Studia Neophilologica, 69:1, 11-20, DOI: 10.1080/00393279708588192 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00393279708588192 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http:// www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Transcript of The significance of “Lord Rochester's monkey’

Page 1: The significance of “Lord Rochester's monkey’

This article was downloaded by: [The University of Manchester Library]On: 02 November 2014, At: 13:53Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Studia NeophilologicaPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/snec20

The significance of “LordRochester's monkey’Don‐John Dugas a

a Department of English , The Pennsylvania StateUniversity , 117 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA,16803Published online: 21 Jul 2008.

To cite this article: Don‐John Dugas (1997) The significance of “Lord Rochester's monkey’,Studia Neophilologica, 69:1, 11-20, DOI: 10.1080/00393279708588192

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00393279708588192

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information(the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor& Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warrantieswhatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of theContent. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions andviews of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. Theaccuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independentlyverified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liablefor any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Studia Neophilologica 69: 11-20, 1997

The Significance of "Lord Rochester's Monkey'

DON-JOHN DUGAS

That ugly little brute the monkey, he's just like us!Ennius, Saturae 69.'

I tell you, where there is Mischief, there's Wit.Don't we esteem the Monky a Wit amongst Beasts, onlybecause he's mischievous? And let me tell you, as goodNature is a sign of a Fool, being Mischievous is a signof Wit.

William Wycherley, The Plain-Dealer, 5.2.233-37.2

Jacob Huysmans' portrait of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, has often been reproduced andalluded to, but remains only imperfectly understood.3 Almost every critic has been struck bythe work's obviously satiric nature, yet those who have enjoyed the joke and played off ithave not investigated further. What is the iconographic meaning of Lord Rochester'smonkey? What is the larger interpretive significance of that meaning? And, finally, howdoes this significance extend our understanding of Rochester's poetry and life?

The iconographic nature of the painting is immediately apparent: Rochester is making ajoke by treating a monkey as the poet laureate. However, the exact meaning of the portraitas a whole is more difficult to fathom—perhaps because the monkey is so obviouslysymbolic that closer readings have seemed unnecessary. We see a meaning, smile, andmove on without recognizing another layer beneath the surface.

In "Simia Laureatus: Rochester Crowning a Monkey", Hans-Joachim Zimmermanoffered the first full-scale analysis of the Huysmans portrait. Through his use of literary,historical, artistic, and physiological analysis, Zimmerman did much to further ourunderstanding of the work, and his belief that "there is a good reason to approach theportrait through a literary perspective" is persuasive.4 Especially valuable is Zimmer-man's attempt to recreate "the cultural ambience of a society in and for which such aportrait was meaningful", his conclusion that the portrait itself is a work of Rochesteriansatire, and his attempt to locate and analyze it within Rochester's oeuvre (149).

Rochester enjoyed being outrageous in many ways, and the painting is certainlyshocking in its flouting of all decorum, both social and artistic. But though Zimmermanlaid an excellent foundation, his failure to investigate the iconographic significance of themonkey in relation to Rochester allows him only to explore the surface of the startling,multi-layered statement that the portrait constitutes—a statement that is a consummateexample of Rochesterian self-representation, satire, and irony.

Zimmerman claims that the portrait represents Rochester's "most complete self-revelation, a Utopian projection of his social and private character, and his sublimestsatire against mankind" (170-71). However, Zimmerman provides no support for thisconclusion, instead focusing on the portrait as a very specific attack on John Dryden. I willargue for a broader, more complex reading—specifically, that the portrait articulatesRochester's multi-pronged satiric attack on the person and work of John Dryden, poeticinspiration, and the supposed "reason" of mankind. Recognizing that his own inspirationand reason must be suspect, Rochester characteristically implicates himself. Con-sequently, the Huysmans painting is not only a portrait of Rochester's body, but arepresentation of his satiric self.

Before we consider the painting, some historical concepts and circumstances requireattention. Since both the literary and visual arts play a major function in the formulation of

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Plate 1. Attributed to Jacob Huysmans, John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, canvas, 125 x 100 cm, datable c.1670-1679. Private collection.

Rochester's conceit, we should recall that the Earl was both an artist and a patron andwould have been thoroughly familiar with the possibilities of literary pictorialism. As apoet he employed the Anacreontic tradition of the literary artist directing an artisan tofashion an object that is to convey literary significance in Upon His Drinking a Bowl.5 As apatron, he commissioned portraits of himself by the two greatest portrait painters of hisage, Sir Peter Lely and Jacob Huysmans. While such portraiture was very common forsomeone in Rochester's social position, Huysmans' famous picture of the poet crowning a

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monkey stands out as a work entirely removed from the hundreds of contemporaryaristocratic portraits (see figure I).6

In its imagery, the Huysmans portrait of Rochester is a striking example of whatAndrew Wilton has called the "swagger portrait". Infused with Baroque energy andpanache, the' 'swagger'' implies a degree of self-consciousness on the part of the artist, if not the sitter (though often the twowill coincide [emphasis added]), which causes the portrait to transcend the private statement (in which the sittercommunes with a single viewer), and addresses itself to the public at large. There is therefore an element ofrhetoric in it, even of challenge—the "insolence" that was always inherent in the meaning of the word. Thatchallenge can often be erotic; swagger nearly always demands sex appeal.7

Indeed, the rich aesthetic attractiveness of the painting and the fact that Rochester'seyes meet the spectator's—almost challenging us to understand—are compelling inthemselves.

Rochester stands in a stone chamber, yellow light dimly illuminating the scene. He isyoung, confident, and handsome, wearing an orange silk mantle and white laced shirt. Thepoet's body and face are depicted in three-quarter view, with lips closed and eyebrowsslightly raised. In his left hand he carries a manuscript; in his right a small laurel-wreath,which he holds above the head of a monkey—"the common green monkey", asZimmerman observes (160)—seated to his right.

The most enigmatic object in the portrait, the monkey, sits upon two leather-boundtomes that rest on a cracked marble table bordered with hearts. Four torn pieces of paperlie scattered on the table. In its right hand the monkey holds a partially-opened,handsomely-produced book bound in red leather, its thumb inserted as if to mark aparticular page. With its left hand it proffers to Rochester a newly torn page of the book.The monkey faces Rochester, and Huysmans has painted it with eager eyes and an openmouth. This creates the impression that the monkey is either in mid-sentence (perhapsmaking a suggestion to the poet), laughing, or awaiting the reaction of its master with keenanticipation. Thus, a strong narrative effect is achieved. We seem to be observing an event,not just a still-life.

Zimmerman is almost unquestionably correct when he claims that ' 'it was Rochesterwho suggested the idea of his portrait to Huysmans" (153). Well-educated, aristocraticcommissioners of works of art often dictated the composition of their own portraits.However, the degree of artistic influence that Rochester exercised in this case went farbeyond the norm, as a comparison with a more typical Huysmans portrait—that ofElizabeth Somerset, 1st Marchioness of Powis—reveals (see figure 2). This painting ismuch closer to the grandiose, energetic, and colorful style of portraiture made fashionableby Rubens and common in France and Italy until the late seventeenth century. In contrast,Huysmans' portrait of Rochester exhibits the cool sensuality for which Lely had becomeso renowned, but with a greater depth of color and certainly a surer understanding of thesubject than Lely's own portraits of the Earl.8

An artist who conceives of an image and then oversees its execution, as a film directornow does, is still exercising the creative force, even though another hand may hold thecamera, or in Huysmans' case, the paint brush. When an artist conceives of an image ofhimself—an image that abounds with iconographic significance—and has that imagereproduced, we should recognize self-portraiture. Rochester's poetry has long beenrecognized as highly personal, satiric, and self-deprecating.9 These same qualities seemto me manifest in the Huysmans portrait—qualities that Zimmerman fails to acknowledge,and hence fails to incorporate into his reading of the portrait.

In the central section of his article, Zimmerman focuses on the portrait's resemblance tosome seventeenth-century woodcuts. While these woodcuts have as their elements humanfigures, monkeys, and laurel wreaths, all of the central human figures are women("Academia") and none of the woodcuts depicts an actual laureation. Largely ignoringthe difficulties that these differences present, Zimmerman concludes that the central

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Plate 2. Jacob Huysmans, Elizabeth Somerset, First Marchioness of Powis, canvas, 238 x 147.3 cm, datable c.1665-70. From the Collection at Powis Castle.

meaning of the Huysmans portrait must be located in the laureation itself. But, although helists several influential Flemish and Dutch paintings containing monkeys, he ignores theimportance of the creature that Huysmans and Rochester chose as the recipient of thewreath. Quite simply, Zimmerman's analysis is a case of too much laureates and notenough simia.

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Studia Neophil 69 (1997) The Significance of "Lord Rochester's Monkey" 15

Plate 3. Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria with Her Dwarf Sir Jeffrey Hudson, canvas,228.6 x 129 cm, datable c. 1633. From the Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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Plate 4. Headpiece from Joachim von Sandrart, Teutsche Academie derBau- Bildhauer- und Maler Kunst, 8 vols.(Niirnberg, 1768-75), [21]. Courtesy, the Rare Book Room, the Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

Laureation naturally suggests a laureate, but is the painting simply an attack on the PoetLaureate, John Dryden? Rochester and Dryden started their relationship as patron andclient with Dryden's dedication oi Marriage A-la-Mode to the Earl in 1673. Both werepoets familiar with each other and with each other's work. After their falling out—causedlate in 1675 by Dryden's dedication of Aureng-Zebe to Rochester's bitter enemy, the Earlof Mulgrave—Rochester and Dryden used verse to ridicule one another. In his mostdevastating attack upon Dryden, Rochester recalls his former protege's inadequateattempts at courtly sophistication:

Dryden in vain tried this nice way of wit,For he to be a tearing blade thought fit.But when he would be sharp, he still was blunt:To frisk his frolic fancy, he'd cry, "Cunt!"Would give the ladies a dry bawdy bob,And thus he got the name of Poet Squab. (An Allusion to Horace, 11.71-76)10

The possibility exists that the man who penned these lines might have chosen toimmortalize this "Poet Squab" as Dryden himself was to do later for Shadwell. However,for Rochester to do so in a portrait—and a portrait of himself at that—seems mostunlikely. Indeed, if Zimmerman is correct that the portrait is simply an attack on JohnDryden, we must ask what Rochester is doing in it at all. One can imagine him havingHuysmans paint a portrait of the monkey crowning John Dryden—which would haveallowed Rochester to pink two of his favorite targets—Charles II and Dryden—with asingle thrust.

Zimmerman's fascination with the laureation and the poet laureate leads him to attemptto date the portrait by relating it to Rochester's A Very Heroical Epistle in Answer toEphelia and the Epistolary Essay from M.G. to O.B. upon Their Mutual Poems.Disagreeing with Vieth, Zimmerman adopts George deF. Lord's 1676 dating for thesepoems.11 This allows Zimmerman to make the specious but entirely unprovable claim thatthe painting was executed in the summer of 1676, a mode of dating far too precise for anyart historian. Indeed, the belief that the portrait is merely an attack upon Dryden bothtrivializes it and ignores its more daring and personal statement on life and art. Huysmans'portrait of Rochester is not just a witty joke, not just a swipe at John Dryden. Tounderstand the nature of this self-revelation and satire, we must address what Zimmermannever does: the iconographic meaning of monkeys in the mid- to late-seventeenth century.

The modern distinction between the terms "monkey" and "ape" would have beenunimportant to Rochester. Etymologically, the Latin simia probably derives from theGreek word simos meaning "flat-nosed", and is used interchangeably to mean both

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monkey and ape. However, well into the Renaissance many writers believed that simiaderived from the Latin similitudo, linguistically reinforcing the physiological connectionbetween man and ape, making the ape an ideal figure of satire and allegory for authorsthroughout history.

Regarding this historical etymology and usage, H. W. Janson noted that for "Greek andRoman authors, the epithet 'ape' denotes both extreme ugliness and an evil disposition; wefind it applied to sycophants, hypocrites, ignoble imitators, and crafty tricksters".12

Indeed, when we turn to Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Martial, Quintilian, and Juvenal, weencounter many simians.13 The negative literary connotations would have been familiar toRochester from his earliest days of study at Burford Grammar School, where hedistinguished himself as a classicist. St. Evremond's assessment of Rochester's classicalknowledge is quite definite:

He laid such a Foundation of the Latin Tongue, and obtain'd so great a Mastery of it, that he never lost a true Tasteof any sovereign Beauty of those great Authors of that Language in its most flourishing Age... Whether it be, thatthe Moderns want Genius to come up to the Energy and Excellence of the Ancients, or that great part of the Charmof the ancient Poets be in the Expression, which it is impossible to preserve in any less perfect Language.14

From Rochester's interest and undoubted ability in imitating classical authors both inLatin and in English, we can probably assume that he was familiar with the word and itsclassical associations. Proverbial phrases such as Uide utfastidit simia! ("How scornful isthe monkey!" [Plautus, Mostellaria, 887]) and Turpissima bestia, simillima nostra ("Theuglier the beast, he more like us", a Renaissance refashioning of the first epigraph of thisarticle) enhanced the impact of these classical allusions for both Rochester and otherwriters, even those not formally trained in the classics.15

Iconographically, the meanings of monkeys and apes were also perceived as inter-changeable. As Janson demonstrates, man has always seen a distorted image of himself inthe ape. In the middle ages, apes were associated with vice in general and were used in thearts to personify lust. Significantly, they were also used to personify the arts themselvesuntil the late eighteenth century. As James Hall observes, the predominant icongraphicinterpretation of monkeys in relation to the arts in the seventeenth century was "expressedin a popular saying 'Ars simia Naturae' — 'Art is the ape of nature', which was taken upparticularly in the 17th cent. Flemish painters [who] depicted the artist as an ape'' .16 WhileJanson and Hall concern themselves with etymology and symbolism, others discuss theiconographic significance of the simians.

In his classic Studies in Iconology, Erwin Panofsky argues that the image of the monkeyas the symbol of the artist was less widespread than the monkey's lustful associations:Now the most common significance of the ape—far more common than its association with painting, let alonewith the other arts and crafts—was a moral one: more closely akin to man in appearance and behaviour than anyother beast, yet devoid of reason and proverbially prurient (turpissima bestia, simillima nostri) the ape was usedas a symbol of everything subhuman in man, of lust, greed, gluttony and shamelessness in the widest possiblesense.17

Sir Anthony Van Dyck's Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson (see figure 3) isanother portrait of an English aristocrat by a Dutch-trained artist in which a monkey isfeatured. Andrew Wilton argues that there, too, the monkey "stands for lust", while aheadpiece from Joachim von Standrart's Teutsche Academie der Bau- Bildhauer- undMaler Kunst (see figure 4) demonstrates that the meaning of monkey-as-artist was stillemployed as late as 1775. 8

To launch his satiric assault, Rochester makes a startling elision of these twoiconograhic meanings, this time against certain types of poets (among whom we cancertainly include Dryden). If the monkey represents the base human desires (especiallylust) and the artist, then these same desires represent the artist. Rochester's laureation ofthis figure strengthens this reading, implying, as I read the portrait, that great poets arethose who acknowledge and utilize these baser human characteristics.

This interpretation reflects the complexities and contradictions of Rochester's own

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poetry, which is marked by the conflict between the high forms of classical antiquity andthe artistically "low" images and subjects of promiscuity, infidelity, copulation, disease,impotence, and sexual frustration.19 Since this contradiction is also strongly present inRochester's personal life, such a statement is entirely in keeping with our knowledge ofRochester's disarmingly candid notions of humor and art.

Rochester reveals the qualities that he most admires in poetry when he writes:But Wycherley earns hard whate'er he gains:He wants no judgment, nor he spares no pains.He frequently excels, and at the leastMakes fewer faults than any of the best. (An Allusion to Horace, 11.50—53)

Hard work, lack of pretense and hypocrisy, and the ability to recognize truth and franknessare essential qualities of good poets and good poetry in Rochester's estimation. To this wecan probably add the ability to recognize that we are all food for worms. These are thequalities of those who recognize the animal within. Among those who cannot recognizethe monkey within each of us is certainly John Dryden. In his essay "of Heroique Playes"(1672), Dryden criticizes the language of "ordinary converse" and the merely "natural"while proposing that his superhero Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada "is the moreexact Image of humane life".20

Unlike Dryden, Rochester is willing to see the monkey in himself and incorporate it intohis art. Moreover, just as he recognizes the limitations of his own life and art, so too doeshe recognize and mock our unwillingness to see life as it really is. In a letter to his friendHenry Savile, Rochester observed that "Most human affairs are carried on at the samenonsensical rate, which makes me (who am grown superstitious) think it a fault to laugh atthe monkey we have here when I compare his condition with mankind".21 Rochestersuggests that, because of our supposed "reason", we are blind to our own degeneracy, anidea that seems to have little place in the idealistic world of Restoration literarypictorialism and classical artistic imitation, but that is at the very heart of Rochester'scontradictory nature. Rochester's physical beauty and personal charm mirror the eleganceand wit of his age, while his poems reveal a mind and spirit both more dark and moresubstantial:

Bless me! thought I, what thing is man, that thusIn all his shapes, he is ridiculous?Ourselves with noise of reason we do pleaseIn vain: humanity's our worst disease.Thrice happy beasts are, who, because they beOf reason void, are so of foppery. (Tunbridge Wells, 11. 166-71)

It is most fitting that the author of this piece and A Satyr Against Reason and Mankindshould choose to voice and preserve this image—his most critical attack on the vanity ofreason and the vanity of the artist—in his self-portrait.

In the Huysmans portrait, Rochester constructed a complex and brilliant visual conceitsatirizing incidentally the person and work of John Dryden, but more centrally poeticinspiration, mankind's "reason", and himself. In The Self Portrait: A Modern View, SeanKelly argues that "The self-portrait has consistently been one of the enduring traditions inthe history of western art, and a medium through which a number of artists have producedsome of their most revealing work".22 Seventeenth-century artists, Kelly notes, werepassionately interested:

in the roots of human personality and a more specific fascination with the nature of artistic creativity. As a resultalmost every successful artist attempted a self-portrait, even if portrait painting was not his usual occupation ...Taken as a group, the self-portraits of the seventeenth century are perhaps the most brilliant and the mostprofound ever to have been painted.23

Indeed, both Rochester's personality and his fascination with the nature of artisticcreativity are revealed by the two syllogisms that the portrait suggests. If the monkeyrepresents the artist, and Rochester is an artist, then the monkey must represent Rochester.

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Furthermore, if the monkey represents the base human desires, and Rochester's life wasmarked by the indulgence of these desires, then—once again—the monkey representsRochester. On one level these are, of course, jokes. However, given Rochester's poeticrecord for frankness, self-mockery, wit, and, above all, irony, we can conclude that heconsciously intended to make an artistic statement regarding the connection that herecognized existed between poetry, artists, and the monkey.

Visually and metaphorically, Rochester is laughing with, not at, the monkey. Indeed, theonly figure in the portrait that we could argue is laughing is the monkey. Is he laughing atRochester? Does he see Rochester—the only man with the sense not to criticize themonkey that is within and without himself in all of its meanings—as a kindred spirit, theonly one worthy of receiving the preferred gift of text? Rochester meets our eyes, his faceenigmatic. With an ironic arch of the brows, he asks us to share in the joke, a joke aimedwith unerring precision at himself and at all artists. Thus, Rochester mocks the high idealsof classical imitation and literary pictorialism by revealing the lustful, mischievous sourceof potetic inspiration represented by the monkey.24

Department of English117 Burrowes BuildingThe Pennsylvania State UniversityUniversity Park, PA 16803

NOTES

1 Quintus Ennius, Ennianae Poesis Reliquiae Itemtis Curis, ed. Johannes Vahlen (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner,1928; rept. Amsterdam: A. M. Hakkert, 1967), 211: Simla Quam Similis turpissima bestia nobis!

2 The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 494.3 For (mostly biographical) discussions of the portrait, see John Harold Wilson, The Court Wits of the

Restoration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1948), 136-37; Vivian de Sola Pinto, Enthusiast in Wit: APortrait of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, 1647—1680 (London and Lincoln, NE: University of NebraskaPress, 1962), viii and 173; Dustin H. Griffin, Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester (Berkeley, LosAngeles and London: University of California Press, 1973), 23. While the title of Graham Greene's LordRochester's Monkey (New York: Viking, 1974) is striking, Greene never discusses the portrait.

4 Hans-Joachim Zimmerman, "Simia Laureatus: Lord Rochester Crowning a Monkey" in Functions ofLiterature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on his Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Ulrich Broich, Theo Stemmier, andGerd Stratmann (Tubingen: Niemeyer Verlag, 1984), 149. Hereafter, all references to this article will be madeparenthetically in the text.

5 For a discussion of Rochester's use of the Anacreontic tradition in his poetry, see Marianne Thormålson,Rochester: the Poems in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 9-23.

6 As Zimmerman indicates, the portrait was painted sometime during the 1670s. It was left by Rochester'smother to his daughter Anne, afterwards Countess of Warwick, in 1683. Although unsigned and undated, theportrait has been attributed to Jacob Huysmans since C. H. Collins' analysis in 1912.

7 Andrew Wilton, The Swagger Portrait: Grand Manner Portraiture in Britain from Van Dyck to AugustusJohn (London: Tate Gallery, 1992), 17.

8 For a good comparison, see Lely' s portrait of the young Rochester c. 1666-67 (Victoria and Albert Museum),reproduced in Greene, Lord Rochester's Monkey, 37.

9 For a discussion of the self-mocking irony of Rochester's work, see Barbara Everett, "The Sense ofNothing", in Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Hamden, CT: Archon,1982), 1-41; Peter Porter's "The Professional Amateur", Spirit of Wit, 58-74 makes a strong case forRochester's virtuosity of poetic disengagement; and James E. Gill, "The Fragmented Self in Three ofRochester's Poems". Modern Language Quarterly 49 (1988): 19-37 addresses the radical self-doubt thatpervades much of Rochester's poetry.

10 The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1968), 124. All references are to this edition.

11 For an excellent discussion of the problems involved with dating these two poems, see The Poems of JohnWilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Keith Walker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 293-96. Walker notes Vieth's andGeorge deF. Lord's conclusions, but does not commit himself in either case.

12 H. W. Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: The Warburg Institute,1952), 199.

13 Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1763.14 Charles de Marguetel de Saint Denis, seigneur de Saint Evremond, Memoirs of the Life of the Right

Honourable John, Late Earl of Rochester (London: E. Curll, 1709), 8.

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20 Don-John Dllgas Studia Neophil 69 (1997)

15 Shakespeare, for example, made over a score of references to them, especially in Love's Labours Lost wherehe employs the ape as the symbol of imitation: "Imitari is nothing; so doth the hound his master, the ape hiskeeper, the tired horse his rider", (4.2.125-27) and "This is the ape of form", (5.2.325). Apes and monkeysalso figure in the writings of Donne, Marvell, Etherege and Wycherley, to name but a few.

16 James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, intro. Kenneth Clark (New York: Harper and Rowe,1974; rev. ed., 1979), 22.

17 Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1939; rept. New York: Harper, 1967), 195.

18 Wilton, Swagger, 64.19 For recent discussions of Rochester's life and art, see Sarah Wintle, "Libertinism and Sexual Politics", in

Spirit of Wit, 135-65; Ian Donaldson, "The Argument of "The Disabled Debauchee". Modem LanguageReview 82 (1987): 30-34; Harold Weber, "Charles II, George Pines, and Mr. Dorimant: The Politics ofSexual Power in Restoration England". Criticism 32 (1990): 193-219; and Raman Selden, "Rochester andOldham: 'High Rants in Profaness' " . The Seventeenth Century 11 (1991): 89-103.

20 Preface to The Conquest of Granada in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 11, ed. John Loftis, David StuartRodes and Vinton A. Dealing (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978),3-7.

21 The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Jeremy Treglown (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 194.22 Edward Lucie-Smith, The Self-Portrait: A Modem View, intro. Sean Kelly (London: Sarena, 1987), 5.23 Lucie-Smith, The Self-Portrait, 13-14.24 I am grateful to John T. Harwood and Robert D. Hume for their criticism and advice.

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