Libertine Character and the Caricature of Debility

In this chapter, I explore the character of the libertine in poetry attributed to John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647–1680). In attending to how Rochester’s libertine poetry presents the character of the libertine, my reading remains invested in this period-specific duality of character as a mode for describing typical characteristics as well as for revealing an interiority that denotes a newfound selfhood. Moreover, following Jonathan Kramnick’s line of enquiry, I attend to the ways in which libertine poems like ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ (1685) and ‘The Maim’d Debauchee’ (1675: ms) also work to position physical debility and impairment as external conditions, which do not wholly denote one’s character. Although scholars have long recognised the libertine as a stock character of the page and stage during the long eighteenth century, little or no sustained attention has been paid to the ways in which representations of libertinage and physical debility served to question the boundaries of embodied character itself. In libertine poems like ‘The Imperfect Enjoyment’ and ‘The Maim’d Debauchee’, the debilitated libertine flaunted how character itself could be construed as both a bastion of newfound interiority and a canvas upon which external forces are impersonally pressed.