[Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, attrib.]

The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (1999), pp.302-333, 496-501, 674-680 [and see his web-site: www.monash.edu.au/english/research/rochester%20edition/index.htm
David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England 1660-1745 (1964), pp.11-13 and plate II.
Johannes Prinz, John Wilmot Earl of Rochester: His Life and Writings (1927), pp.390-400.
D.S. Thomas, “Prosecutions of Sodom: or, The Quintessence of Debauchery, and Poems on Several Occasions by the E of R, 1689-1690 and 1693”, The Library, 5th ser. 24 (1969), pp.51-55.
Peter Beal, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. II, part 2 (1993), pp.286-7
J. McLaverty, Pope's Printer, John Wright: A Preliminary Study (1977).

Sodom is not recorded in Wing.

Title-page: Sodom, | Or The | Gentleman Instructed. | A | Comedy. | By the E. of R. | [rule] | Mentula cum Vulva saepissime jungitur una, Dulcius est melle, | Vulvam fractare Puellae. | [rule] | [triangular ornament, 41 x 61mm.] | Hague: | Printed in the Year 1000000.

Contents: A1, Title (verso blank); A2-A3r, The Prologue; A3v, Epilogue; A4r, Dramatis Personae; A4v-E3v, Sodom, &c. (Acts I-V); E4, The Epilogue Spoken by Cunticula; F1-F2r, The Eplogue [sic], Spoken by Fuckadilla; F2r, Madam Swivia, in praise of her Cunt (verso blank)

Printer's ornaments:  Cupid  with his bow on a pedestal between two cornucopiae being attacked by birds (on title-page and E4^v); cornucopiae, central urn and foliage (A2^r, F1^r);  central cornucopia supported by two naked cherubim flanked by birds (A4^v, E4^r); and narrow horizontal typographical bands elsewhere.

the apparently unique extant copy of one of the most notorious publications in english literature.

it is the rarest piece of early english pornography on record.  except for one destroyed in the 1830s, no printed copy since the early 1700s has ever been recorded.

The play
The “Bawdy Play” Sodom, evidently fashioned as a closet drama rather than for the stage, was written in the mid-1670s. Outrageously obscene in its sexual and scatological references, language and content, the play deals with a decision made by the lustful King of Sodom, Bolloxinion, and its dire consequences. Wearied and bored by the “Drudgery” of normal sexual intercourse, the King is persuaded by his court panders to issue an “Indulgence” to “set the Nation free” and allow “buggary” to be “us’d, / Thro’ all the Land”. Thence follow scenes in which various acts of copulation, buggery, masturbation, fallatio and even bestiality are enacted, recalled, or prepared for ‘off-stage’, as groups of courtiers, ladies in waiting and especially the Queen Cuntigratia contrive to find satisfaction with different partners and rhapsodise on the joys of sexual diversity (“We study pleasures still, and find out new”). After the King of Gomorrah sends Bolloxinion “forty striplings for a present”, and ladies lament the inadequacy of dildos and the dispiriting tendency of “Lovers young” to suffer from ejaculatio praecox, news comes that the country is in sore distress through rampaging venereal disease (“The tortured pains, your Nation doth endure; / The heavy Symptoms have infected all”). With the Queen “dead”, the Prince with “a Clap”, and the Princess “Raving and mad”, the King is urged to “let buggery be no more, / It doth the procreative End destroy, / Which Nature gave with pleasure to enjoy”. Nevertheless, he vows defiantly to “reign and bugger still”, whereupon “fiery Dæmons Rise” and the play ends with “Fire, Brimstone and a Cloud of Smoak”.

Although in every sense, and in almost every line, pornographic (even though its humour sometimes recalls that in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), the play has two primary purposes: one literary, the other political. One aim is the production of a hilarious burlesque of the then fashionable ‘heroic’ plays promoted especially by John Dryden, with all their grandiose characters and settings, inflated poetic language, statically formal speeches and rhymed couplets. In this it echoes the Duke of Buckingham’s popular stage burlesque The Rehearsal (1671), although taken to far greater extremes. Its other main aim, however, is to satirise uncompromisingly the court of Charles II – not only the notoriously lecherous Charles himself, with all his mistresses (“Thus, in the zenith of my lust I reign”), but also the venality of his courtiers, who are depicted as slavishly imitating him and indulging in the common state of moral and sexual anarchy. It seems likely also that King Bolloxinion’s “Indulgence” permitting buggery is a direct parody of Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, which allowed for the legal toleration of Catholicism and Nonconformity. 

Authorship
The authorship of the work has been hotly disputed. Following the death in 1680 of the most famous and most outrageously brilliant of the Restoration court wits, the Earl of Rochester, various works were published and attributed to him (“By the E. of R.” and the like) – including Sodom -- whether actually by him or not, evidently in order to capitalise on his celebrity. The play’s trenchant humour and obscenity are certainly not beyond his scope. There is even at least one echo of verses by Rochester: when the King declares “My Pintle only shall my Scepter be”, we might recall Rochester’s celebrated epigram on Charles II:  “His sceptre and his prick are of a length, / And she who plays with one wields the other”. It has been argued, however (notably by Harold Love), that the roughness and crudity of the versification in Sodom is not up to Rochester’s usual standard (deliberately so?), and that the satire against courtiers is targeted against “his own kind” (also not an impossibility with the sometimes self-deprecating Rochester). Alternatively, there is some evidence that the play may have been written by the appropriately bawdy poet Christopher Fishbourne, a nephew of Sir Christopher Wren. Fishbourne is cited as the author of the play by Charles Gildon in 1699, and a contemporary manuscript at Harvard has an obscene mock-song ascribed to Fishbourne which might, perhaps, even once have been part of Sodom. Then finally, there is the complicating factor that the text of the play exists in manuscript copies in at least three different versions, one in three acts, another in four acts, and (the usual one) in five acts (with variant scenes). This raises the possibility that, as with satirical poems of the period, different drafts and copies got circulated among select court or inns of court circles, possibly at different stages of composition, and that more than one wit contributed to the text or had a hand in its evolution – including even, perhaps, Rochester.      

Texts and publications
The text of Sodom has hitherto been known only from contemporary manuscript copies (besides recorded references to lost French translations of the play). Eight of these manuscripts are recorded in Beal’s Index and in Harold Love’s edition of Rochester’s works, and two others have come to light more recently. Two of the recorded manuscripts (in the Bibliothèque Nationale and at the University of Hamburg) were apparently copied from a printed edition of the play, entitled “Sodom A Play by the Earl of Rochester”, with the false imprint “Antwerp” (i.e. London) and date 1684. No copy of this unlicensed and surreptitiously printed edition is known to survive, although, according to the connoisseur of erotica Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900) -- whose papers on Sodom are in the British Library (Add. MS 57732) – the executors of the great book collector Richard Heber (1773-1833) destroyed a copy they found in his library. At least one further edition of the play is known to have been printed (again no copies survive) because the publisher Benjamin Crayle and his printer Joseph Streater were prosecuted in October 1689 for publishing “a Play Calld Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery”, which the jury judged to be a “librum flagitiosum et impudicum” (a shameful and lewd book). Although Streater was let off, Crayle had imposed upon him what was then the huge and unprecedented fine of £20, a penalty which did, in fact, bankrupt him and terminate his business. There is also a recorded prosecution of John Marshall for publishing Sodom in 1707, though its outcome is unclear.

It may be added that the title quoted in the indictment against Crayle is echoed in one of the extant manuscript copies (British Library, Harley MS 7312), where the play is called “Sodom or The Quintessence of Debauchery By E of R Written for the Royall Company of Whore masters”. Two other manuscripts simply cite the play as “The Farce of Sodom”, and one other, lacking a title-page, cites the play in a prologue as “Sodom & Gomorah”. In view of all this, it seems now impossible to know exactly how many other unlicensed editions were actually published in this period for clandestine sale and circulation, all of them presumably read to pieces or deliberately destroyed.

Modern editions
The text of the play was first made available in modern times in an edition based on the Hamburg manuscript, by L.S.A.M. von Römer, published in Paris 1904. Apart from a pornographically illustrated German translation published in Leipzig in 1909, the next notable edition of the play was published by the Olympia Press in Paris in 1957 (in Maurice Girodias's well-known Traveller's Companion series, which included first editions of Lolita and The Ginger Man). The play has been subsequently edited (from a manuscript in the National Library of Austria) in Paddy Lyons’s Everyman edition of Rochester’s Complete Poems and Plays (1993) and (from the main Princeton manuscript) in Harold Love’s OUP edition of Rochester’s Works (1999).

The present text
The present volume has yet another title: “Sodom, or the Gentleman Instructed. A Comedy”, with an obviously false imprint, “Hague”, and a plainly nonsensical date, “1000000”. it is therefore not only the first contemporary printed copy of the play to come to light in modern times, but is also an unrecorded edition of it. The style of printer's ornaments used (see above) would suggest that it is a relatively late edition, perhaps of the 1720s. The Cupid one, with birds and cornucopia, is similar to an ornament used by Thomas Wright, Pope’s printer (McLaverty 6). This does not have the birds, but another  ornament used by him does have similar birds likewise engaged in  attacking fruit ( McLaverty 1). Wright used these 1728-1740. The head-piece used above "The Prologue" and "The Eplogue [sic] spoken by Fuckadilla" is again of a type also used by Wright in 1736-50 (McLaverty 29). However these cornucopiae and birds are found in many slightly different guises, and were used by all manner of printers. Even so, it seems now clear that Sodom continued to be surreptitiously printed in the early eighteenth century, as well as in the previous two decades, more times than has been realized. There is even an engraved print, probably of the 1700s, by Nicholls Sutton (fl.1680-1740), called The Compleat  Auctioneer showing gentlemen (with ladies to the side) browsing though the books on an open-air stall where Sodom appears alongside Rochester's Poems (the British Library copy of this print may be viewed under the title on www.heritage-images.com, where, however, the book titles themselves are not discernible).  

The text of this edition basically conforms to the five-act version edited by Love from the main Princeton manuscript (though without that manuscript's unique alternative continuation of Act II, scene ii and Act III, scene i: his pages 307-315). The textual variants are legion, however. This is partly because lines and 'stage directions' tend to be presented in the present text  in shorter form (for instance, the direction in the Princeton manuscript "Soft musick is plaid to the purling water, after which is sung this song that follows by a smal voice in a mournfull key" is rendered in the printed copy "Soft musick is heard, after which, is sung this Song in a mournful Tune"); and occasional lines are omitted in the printed text, although at least one appears there which is incomplete in the manuscript. The numbering of acts and scenes varies; there is sometimes variant distribution of speeches to different characters; one of the prologues and one epilogue in the printed text are not in the Princeton manuscript (though they do occur in other manuscript texts); and there are innumerable substantive variants in the verse dialogue itself, some undoubtedly through careless printing errors ("lust" rendered as "last", etc.). How much light this newly discovered edition will throw on the textual history of Sodom must await full scholarly collation of all the different sources, a task which no editor has yet attempted.