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In one of his most audacious roles ever, Johnny Depp will star in The Libertine as John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1647-80), the brightest star at the court of the "Merry Monarch," King Charles II, played by John Malkovich.
While living a life of reckless debauchery and sexual adventuring, Rochester produced comic verse, scurrilous satires, and highly explicit erotica. His Selected Works, edited by Frank H. Ellis and now available from Penguin Classics, show him to be one of the wittiest and most complex poets of the seventeenth century. With endless literary disguises, rhymes and alliteration, humor and humanity, Rochester's poems hold up a mirror to the extravagances and absurdities of his age.
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