by Janet Todd
While pursuing a court case and visiting one of her women friends in Ireland after the Restoration, Katherine Philips had translated Corneille’s Death of Pompey, which, with the help of influential friends, was staged in Dublin in 1663. Subsequently it was printed in London. Later, in February 1668, the London court witnessed a lavish production of a further translation from Corneille, Horace. But Philips had not completed this, for she had died of smallpox in 1664 at the age of thirty-three.
As a young married lady living a sheltered respectable life, Katherine Philips would be no real role model for Aphra Behn working for ‘Bread’ and negotiating the sexuality of the Restoration. Her platonics were not inspiring, although the two women would share some of the pastoral vocabulary and habit of pseudonyms: Behn’s Muse was, from the start, more down-to-earth. At the same time, Philips must have been real encouragement to print and Behn must have thought a good deal about the woman with whom all her life she would be compared if praised, and contrasted if denigrated. Already aware of the intermingling of sex and politics, as her recent friendships with George Marten and William Scot showed, she would not wish immediately to write the sort of heroic political play Philips had created from Corneille. Nor did she have the clear status of Philips or the help of influential patrons. Without them, it was not easy to associate with the theatre and retain the modest reputation of ‘Orinda’. But perhaps it was unnecessary. In some contexts, Behn’s unstable status might be a different kind of asset. So, also, with her experience. To work as a spy and to ascend the social scale, to acquire education informally and through the good will of others, Behn had had to live much on the surface of life, ventriloquising, imitating, and always playing a part. Indeed she may well have concluded that this role-playing was what life was about and that there was only a surface. The theatre displayed surface.
Professionally, it was a good moment for a theatrical debut. The two companies were in intense competition and anything from twelve to twenty-five new plays a year were becoming necessary. Thomas Shadwell started just before Behn, William Wycherley and Elkanah Settle about the same time, Edward Ravenscroft, Henry Nevil Payne, and Nathaniel Lee just after. Culturally, however, it was an ambiguous moment. Evelyn had found the playhouse immoral almost from the start and, by 1665, he was very seldom at any time ‘going to the publique Theaters’, claiming they were marked by ‘atheisticall liberty, fowle & undecent’.42 Others had found little risqué in the 1660s when plays were mainly revamped old ones with thumping morals or new ones very much in their mould. As the 1660s closed, however, there was a sense that the court and its shadow, the theatre, were changing. The glamour of Restoration had dimmed with royal penury and losses in war, and the supporters of the Interregnum regimes, the old republicans and Parliamentarians, as well as the poor and unrewarded Cavaliers, felt a malaise. This was often expressed in gendered terms, as when the misanthropical Anthony à Wood described ‘A strang effeminate age when men strive to imitate women in their apparell’, bedecking themselves in ribbons, scent and breeches like petticoats, while women strived ‘to be like men, viz., when they rode on horseback or in coaches weare plush caps like monteros, either full of ribbons or feathers, long periwigs which men use to weare, and riding coats’.43 According to Gilbert Burnet, the change came about 1668 when ‘the court fell into much extravagance in masquerading’, frolicking about the town in disguise. Rochester thought the three businesses were now ‘Woemen, Polliticks & drinking’.44
Sexuality was always a political factor, and the influence or assumed influence of the most notorious of the royal mistresses gave new vigour to the tradition of castrating female power. In the first decade of his reign, Charles had not been outrageously promiscuous, largely confining himself to the voracious Barbara Lady Castlemaine. Then in 1669 Nell Gwyn was installed as mistress and was pregnant by 1670; meanwhile the plump, pretty, baby-faced Louise de Kérouaille, the most expensive and influential of Charles’s mistresses, hated agent of the French Louis XIV, was awaiting her public bedding at Lord Arlington’s country house in Euston near Thetford. The King’s sexual desires were openly more rampant and many nocturnal visitors were conducted up the back stairs to his apartments.
Royal promiscuity in sex was matched by promiscuity in politics. Disheartened by the Dutch War and his inability to control Parliament and gain enough money, the King turned to Louis XIV, who was only too pleased to subsidise his cousin’s independence from his people. The duplicitous Treaty of Dover, signed in 1670, whereby the King agreed to reintroduce Catholicism ‘as soon as the welfare of his kingdome will permit’ in exchange for a handsome subsidy, was known in its murky detail only to a few people, including Arlington. Yet the atmosphere of dissembling was sensed. Marvell declared the times bewitched.
Still on the periphery of events, Behn could not fully experience the corrosive and liberating effect of royal cynicism which blasted through the theatre, allowing plays to grow more bawdy, more sexually exploitative, and also freer to explore the vagaries of sex and gender. Although not yet aware how to capture its texture in words, Behn was intrigued by her society. In common with Rochester and the King himself, she relished scandal and gossip and enjoyed the major genres of the age: libel and satire.
Behn’s first concern had to be pay and conditions in the theatre. She saw under what pressure playwrights often had to work if they were true professionals. A play might be demanded in great haste for a particular event or date, giving the writer only a week or two to compose, sometimes even less. Behn believed she had fluency and facility, however, and would not require the luxury of time to deliver. She was fairly confident of her talents, while knowing that self-confidence did not guarantee success. As for pay, it did not seem too low to her. She had not yet come to know Dryden, now Poet Laureate, although she probably met him casually—theatrical society was fairly small—and she certainly knew and greatly admired his work. Dryden was contracted to supply Killigrew with three new plays each year—he rarely managed it—in return for a portion of the company’s profits, but no one else could have expected such terms. Some may have received a set amount in return for giving first right of refusal: Elkanah Settle was supposed to have had £50 a year from 1673, as long as he offered his plays to one company. But most playwrights subsisted on the revenue of the third night’s performance. This meant that a writer must maximise profits by puffing the play between first and third nights.
Behn was not put off by anything she saw or learnt and she resolved to make the spy Astrea into the playwright Astrea. The pseudonym was a fashionable device, but it also separated the image from some more private self, as it had no doubt done for Orinda. So she would be less vulnerable to the inevitable comments made about a publicly writing woman.
For Aphra Behn, the most important development in the theatre was the arrival of the female body. It was not a neutral or ‘natural’ body, but a highly sexualised one. A decade of actresses had cemented the initial association of actress and prostitute, which Evelyn had quickly apprehended, and no one could be more aware of this than Behn. The first prologue to a play—Othello—known to include an actress on the public stage assumed that men would titter and, astounded by the female body, confuse the woman and the role. Decades later, the satirist Tom Brown summed up the tie of actress and whore from the male perspective: ‘’Tis as hard a matter for a pretty Woman to keep herself honest in a Theatre, as ’tis for an Apothecary to keep his Treacle from the Flies in Hot Weather; for every Libertine in the Audience will be buzzing about her Honey-Pot.’ The imagery is characteristic of this sort of comment, but it did not much bother Behn, who could see the commercial possibilities of the tie.
Actresses had to provide part of their costumes themselves. Since everyone knew that they must have acquired their rich garments from admirers and keepers, there would be some amusement when they were worn. Similarly, they might borrow their acting costumes for society occasions, muddying the distinction between life and stage. Men could and did go
to the tiring-room to watch actresses dressing, although the King, who had other opportunities for voyeurism himself, tried to stop the practice. Royal disapproval did not prevent Pepys, who went to the tiring-room to be shocked by pretty Nell Gwyn and her bawdy talk.
When she first attended the theatre after her travels, Behn must have been out of touch, not one of the coterie that picked up the scandalous allusions and swipes at rival dramatists. The core of the small audience of under a thousand people consisted of regular theatre-goers, a few hundreds in number, including the courtiers who formed an identifiable group. In the early 1660s, Pepys was already grumbling at the citizenry coming to the theatre and even apprentices, but it was not they who counted. Indeed conduct manuals informed the lower-ranked spectators to watch ‘Quality’ and applaud only after aristocratic hands had clapped.
With its diverse components, the audience was vibrant, often uncontrollable and smelly—the heat from candles mingled with the odour of unwashed bodies, which even powerful nosegays could not mitigate. In George Etherege’s play, She Wou’d if She Cou’d (1668), a character describes young sparks rambling ‘from one Play-house to the other Play-house, and if they like neither the Play nor the Women, they seldom stay any longer than the combing of their Perriwigs, or a whisper or two with a Friend; and then cock their Caps, and out they strut again’. Gallants ‘enjoyed the prettiest creature, just now, in a room behind the scenes’ or at least ‘toused and moused’ naughty ladies, laughed at tragedy, faulted the music and whistled at the songs.45 As for women, they might go to be seen, as Hannah Woolley described: after making up her face, a lady sends out to find out the name of the play and resolves to see it ‘that she may be seen; being in the Pit or Box, she minds not how little she observeth it, as how much to be observed at it’.46 As Wycherley put it, the theatre was a place where ‘Widows and Maydes are exposed’. Meanwhile, the vulgar watched the ‘fine Folks’: ‘men that comb their Perriwigs, and women that looking on their little Looking Glasses, did set their locks and Countenances’. They noted hair and clothes, the physique of the actors, and a saying of the clown, ‘but few of the Vulgar understand the cheifest Part, the end of the Play, the Soul and Plot of it.’47
There were some people who did understand, however, the regular spectators who could weigh one play against another because they saw a whole series. This was an easy business when plays had small runs—eight to ten consecutive performances being an exceptional success for a new drama. Many lasted only the necessary three days for the author to have his money from the third night’s takings, and few were revived after the initial season. The intimate knowledge of plays allowed barbs across works and among playwrights whose style the audience knew; soon Behn would be picking up such allusions and experiencing a heady sense of belonging. She would then relish the prologues and epilogues that began and ended plays.
These were a peculiar Restoration form, spoken by actors or actresses though written by the playwrights or their friends. They were recited on the forestage in front of the proscenium arch and allowed a special intimacy between actor and audience. Often separated from the play and lengthened and published independently, they could also be a communication between playwright and public, dealing with topical issues in politics and the theatre. Traditionally the prologue railed at groups in the audience, mainly men, although women were also addressed, usually in categories of ladies, citizens (cits) or whores. The tone was bantering, thoroughly aware of the listening men. Often the relationship of men and women imaged that of playwright to audience: the latter would become male, wheedled into being pleased by a play, or spectators would be flirtatious females whom the playwright-lover cannot quite please. Meanwhile, playwrights could be virgins, frightened of the first night’s ordeal. Ladies tended to sit more in the boxes and men more in the pit; so arose a fantasy of a senate of ladies and a lower house of men. Pepys concluded that ‘the upper bench’ of the pit ‘next the boxes’ was the best place to be: ‘I find I do pretty well and have the advantage of seeing and hearing the great people, which may be pleasant when there is good store.’
Epilogues punctured any illusion of realism a play might have created—theatricality was very much the mode. They were often spoken by the actress, to whose sexual peccadilloes they sometimes drew attention, and her charms could be used to plead for the play now over. If the men were not kind and did not applaud, she could threaten to withdraw her services. (The fact that she was sometimes rendering services offstage added piquancy.) She could also draw attention to her physical attributes beyond the part and mock a playwright who had given her a role that ignored them. Some epilogues ridiculed the very play that had just been performed and negatively drew attention to the presumably male playwright behind the coquettish teasing actress. There was no reason why a female playwright as well as an actress should not try to titillate with her femininity. But it would be a risk if the play were disliked.
It is difficult to assess the effect of women spectators on theatrical fare. From the comments of ladies to gentlemen which she overheard, Aphra Behn understood why it was assumed that women sanitised plays: they objected to indecency and bawdry. But these comments were, she noted, made in a fluttering voice to gentlemen against whom they leaned: were women acting out the natural feminine characteristic of modesty or were they playing a sexual game? What was the mandatory blush that accompanied the comment? Did it indicate real innocence or ignorance or, more rationally, did it mean that the sexual innuendo had been understood? Was it, in Wycherley’s phrase, ‘a conscious blush’? Was femininity a mask? Behn was not sure.
The uncertainty was aided by the habit of masking, which had caught on in London in the early 1660s. To keep in fashion, Pepys had bought a mask for his wife and, in 1663, he noted of Lady Falconbridge that, ‘when the House begun to fill, she put on her vizard and so kept it on all the play—which is of late become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face.’48 Masking was a fashion accessory, not only obscuring tired or over-emotional eyes and other blemishes, but also enhancing the face through mystery. There was much ambiguity in the fashion since it was adopted by whores as well as ladies. Pinchwife in Wycherley’s Country Wife prefers to let his wife cross dress as a boy rather than wear a mask, since he believes it ‘makes people but the more inquisitive...masks have made more cuckolds than the best faces that ever were known’. On the stage, play would be made of the mask as sign at once of modesty and of immodesty. Aphra Behn probably had her mask or vizard: she might even have worn it in witty allusion to what she was about to do and what she had done. Both the spy and the playwright were kinds of masked woman.
During the last months of the decade and into 1670, Aphra Behn must have haunted the theatre, both the Duke’s and the King’s, seeing the old plays of Ben Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare, as well as new ones by Etherege, Shadwell and Dryden. She would have known of further plays through announcements in earlier ones and through bills stuck on walls near the theatre or distributed directly to potential spectators. These bills gave the name of the work but not the author; since he or she was so much part of the production and the actors so much part of the final creation, there was no reason to puff one over the other.
To see a play, Behn would have set out in the afternoon with or without company, to be in her seat by about 3.30 when the play was put on. This afternoon performance allowed as much natural light as possible through the windows to supplement the candles. Given her recent money troubles, she probably paid half a crown and sat in the mixed seating in the pit, so scandalous to foreigners, on one of the backless benches with the ‘sparks’, ‘fops’, fashionable men of wit, some ladies, courtesans and the more expensive prostitutes touting for business. If she had a paying escort, she might have been in one of the boxes forming a U round the pit, where seats cost four shillings.49 Having arrived early, she could pay a person to sit and save her seat while she went out for a few minutes or she could stay put, eat an orange bought from an or
ange-seller, and banter with the men. Then the curtain rose and the play began.50
Chapter 11
Theatrical Debut: The Forc’d Marriage
‘The Poetess too, they say, has Spies abroad’
In January 1669 Walter Aston entertained his young cousin, Elizabeth Cottington, from the country. After explaining in a letter to her uncle that ‘Wee are in expectatin still of Mr Draidens play,’ Elizabeth announced:
Ther is a bowld woman hath oferd one: my cosen Aston can give you a better account of her then I can. Some verses I have seen which ar not ill; that is commentation enouf: she will thnk so too, I believe, when it comes upon the stage. I shall tremble for the poor woman exposed among the critticks. She stands need to be strongly fortified agenst them.
Elizabeth could not banish the woman from her head and, in her postscript, added: ‘I can not but tell you, I think my self more bowld then the wooman I have named, when I wright to you. For yr sensure is to me what all is to her.’1