In 1974, Viking Press issued Lord Rochester’s Monkey, Graham Greene’s biography of the Restoration poet John Wilmot. Greene actually wrote the book forty-four years earlier, but was unable to publish it for fear of the scandal its salacious details might cause: copies of a contemporaneous edition of Rochester’s poems had been incinerated by the New York Customs Authority. That lurid history gave the biography an immediate cachet, and helped to revive the poet’s reputation. Greene certainly had precedent. Voltaire called the poet a “man of genius.” Dr. Johnson, despite firm disapproval of the Earl’s personal comportment, praised him for “the vigor of his colloquial wit.” In the last century, Rochester earned the esteem of Ezra Pound, who identified him as an early practitioner of “logopoeia,” or that “dance of intellect among words” that the modernist writer so prized.

But can any of these brokers of reputation really compete with Johnny Depp? That’s right. In something of a reprise of his role as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Carribean, the actor will be starring as that most piratical of poets in an upcoming movie called The Libertine. Based on Stephen Jeffreys’s play of the same name, the film has been directed by John Malkovich, who makes a cameo appearance as King Charles II. It hasn’t yet debuted in this country, but when the movie does appear it could be something of a wonder: it could actually be the first passable film about a