Texts and publishers

David Roberts

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139227100.009

8 - Texts and publishers

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014

David Roberts

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David Roberts: Affiliation:
Birmingham City University

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Summary

In 1668 the dramatist Edward Howard observed that

the impression [i.e. printing] of plays is so much the practice of the age, that few or none have been acted, which fail to be displayed in print; where they seem to put on the greater formality of authors.

The phrasing teases: ‘display’ reads like a continuation of ‘acted’, yet it is an act of metamorphosis that produces a new ‘formality’. No one, he implies, would be interested in reading a play that had not made it to the stage. Even so, closet dramas from the period have survived, none more precariously or notoriously than the Earl of Rochester’s Sodom, which some believe was not printed until 1904, for the obvious reason that it was close to unprintable. Its roster of roles (King Bolloxinian, Queen Cuntigratia and the maids of honour Cunticula, Clitoris and Fuckadilla, etc.) is often held to announce a satire on Charles II’s willingness to wield the member of state over any woman he chose. As the title declares, however, it is more obviously obsessed with a pastime Charles that did not favour but that was all the rage in the circle of his brother-in-law, the Duke of Orléans, and aptly captured in the antics of the man Rochester describes as ‘General of the Army’, Buggeranthus.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Restoration Plays and Players
An Introduction
, pp. 189 - 216

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139227100.009 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2014

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