Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

by Janet Todd

  At rehearsals the author was frequently in charge of the actors. How far this would be true of Behn as a novice and a woman is difficult to gauge, but she must have played some part, although not always directly. Perhaps the copious stage directions in printed versions of her plays, indicating gestures and attitudes for the characters, as well as locations, to some extent compensated for her not being present to rehearse stage hands and actors.21 In the next century, when The Female Tatler commented on the duties of a playwright, it was after Aphra Behn had dominated the stage for twenty years; there the intending female dramatist is warned ‘that no woman ever turned poetess but lost her reputation by appearing at rehearsals, and conversing with Imoinda [a character originally created by Behn in Oroonoko]... [the] treatment authors meet with from the players is too gross for a woman to bear.’22

  Just before the staging, a prologue and epilogue would be written either by Behn herself or by a friend. On this occasion the prologue must have been concocted to amuse those in the know, perhaps by Behn and Ravenscroft together. Seemingly escaping the control of the playwright, the actor creates the author as a new kind of potent female and, pointing to the whores and masked ladies in the audience, suggests both are spies or secret agents for the female playwright. A sense of slightly threatening feminine collectivity is created: ‘The Poetess too, they say, has Spies abroad.’ Jealousy becomes like a ‘cunning Spy [which] brought in intelligence / From every eye less wary than it’s own’. (Did any in the audience know the author’s past or guess it from persistent mention of spies within the play? The prowling Pisaro grows ‘wiser... by observation’ and ‘the King has many spies about the Prince’, an unusual detail between father and son.) The actress who follows to conclude the prologue denies the female collectivity, however, as well as the stratagems it implies; she firmly separates the playwright and actress from the whore and reduces women from agents and manipulators to sexualised bodies with amorous power but no threat—since these bodies exist only ‘to pleasure you’. The epilogue, spoken by ‘a Woman’, continues this gender reassertion, by giving wit to men and beauty to women. Female political agency is seductive, not assertive.

  Despite this apparent obeisance to stereotypes, Behn (or her friend) is subtly innovative in prologue and epilogue. There is no pathetic appeal from a feeble woman to her audience: by now, Behn knew how much pathos depended on the erotic female form. Also, despite wit’s resting with men, a witty seduction by a female is planned and expected. The image of the female playwright contrasts with that created much later in the dedication to The Young King, where Behn called herself or her play a ‘Dowdy Lass’. She had learned that such conventional feminine modesty was not seductive within the theatre.

  The Forc’d Marriage, or The Jealous Bridegroom: A Tragi-Comedy opened the season of the Duke’s Company on Tuesday, 20 September 1670. There was excitement behind and in front of the proscenium arch, but in one breast there was more than usual first-night nerves. Behn had come to know a youth of nineteen, who shared her admiration for Shakespeare. His name was Thomas Otway and he was the son of a country rector and, although he was disorganised, rather feckless, and not very cleanly in his habits, she had warmed to him. He had been at Oxford for a time but had left, possibly beause the death of his father had halted his flow of money. Before that he had been at Winchester where, like Behn, he had felt what it was to be near a class of people to which he himself did not belong. Now he was stage-struck and, in a rash moment excited by her own power in the matter, Behn followed her feelings and gave in to his pleas to have a small part in her play. He was to be the old King, an odd choice for a youth; perhaps it was the only small role still on offer or perhaps the regular actor, Westwood, was unwell. It did not seem a great risk, for the King was silent through all the middle acts, but he did have an important function in opening the play.

  Otway was a highly-strung young man, the extent of whose nervousness Behn did not anticipate. As she waited to see the effect of her first staged play on what she saw, with both trepidation and joy, was a full house, her own tension must have been heightened by awareness of Otway’s mounting hysteria. She was used by now to actors’ nerves, however, and like many people who have withstood difficult moments themselves, she probably presumed that the young man would manage at the crucial time to control himself; indeed the anxiety might well contribute to the conviction of the playing. With such ideas she must have argued against the evidence of Otway’s sweating body and agonised moans.

  In the event he could control nothing. The prompter, John Downes, completes the story: ‘he being not us’d to the Stage; the full House put him to... a Sweat and Tremendous Agony’. He was, added Downes laconically, ‘spoilt... for an Actor’.23 (That Downes rescued this incident from oblivion was perhaps because he remembered his own debut in the summer of 1661, when he too was ‘spoilt... for an Actor’ by the sight of the King and Duke of York seated in the royal box at the première of The Siege of Rhodes. On that occasion he played a eunuch so disastrously that he was hissed off the stage, and his prompting career began.)

  As for Otway, he retained Behn’s friendship despite this fiasco, but he never again tried to act. He went on his unkempt way, until, with his own play, Don Carlos, a few years later, he had so great a success that even he felt the need to clean and tidy himself up. Or, as a satire of the time put it: ‘Don Carlos his Pockets so amply has fill’d / That his mange was quite curd, and his lice were all kill’d.’24 Yet, despite his later writing success, his one stage appearance still haunted him and his acquaintances, for, in the same poem, he was not chosen as the greatest poet by Apollo because he ‘had seen his face on the stage’. Behn no doubt also remembered the incident.

  When she watched her play, she felt she had some reason to be pleased. Her couplets were ragged in places but surprisingly powerful and she approved her attempts at rhyming across speeches in the French manner. The music of the King’s composer, John Banister, complemented the words and was well liked, a little ditty about Amintas and Silvia using the echo motif being especially popular. The stagecraft was competent, too, though Behn sensed she was not using all the resources available, happily so according to some of the elderly who deplored the theatrical changes as detracting from the words. At the beginning of Act II, she made quite an effective tableau of marriage, which alerted the audience to the lines of desire connecting the various mismatched lovers, and she conveyed, as she had intended, the power of state ceremony. Her scenes of discovery worked: the audience was slightly shocked to see Erminia in undress, so momentarily wondering if the improper marriage had been consummated. She saw as well where she might have done more: in the final act she had simply left reported speech to carry events that could have been enacted.

  Behn watched anxiously the ‘fop corner’, where critics and beaux in fashionable blond wigs sat and talked, often loudly, to the more prosperous prostitutes in masks. She had learnt by now the power of ridicule, the effect of a shouted witticism from a self-regarding spectator. She desperately hoped no one would joke tonight or declare his halfcrown admission wasted. She need not have feared. According to Downes, Behn’s play was a good one and it had a good run for a first effort, ‘lasting all of six Days’. It was taken off for the staging of ‘a greater, The Tempest’.

  Given this happy reception, Behn may have expected ample reward; if so she would have been disappointed. Every stage of putting on a play was expensive. In the anonymous Comparison between the Two Stages (1702), a would-be playwright describes the process. He began by entertaining ten or so judges to a tavern dinner, after which all except himself and a friend disappeared, leaving him with a bill of £2. Another £2 went on licensing the play with the Master of Revels—a process Behn too had undergone, although, with some exceptions such as the luckless Edward Howard’s The Change of Crownes, suppressed because it satirised the sale of government offices, this was largely an expensive formality in these years.25 Then the actors had to be treated to keep th
em rehearsing; otherwise they lost interest. Together with their coach hire and wine, this cost nearly £10. When the play was performed, the author had more expenses: gloves, chocolate, snuff and presents. Then came the third day and, with a good house, the author totted up the takings, subtracted house charges, and anticipated a reward of about £70.26 He got £15. Looking into the matter, he discovered he had lost one half of the takings ‘by the roguery of the Doorkeepers, and others concern’d in the receipt’.

  After her death, the editor of Behn’s posthumous play, The Younger Brother, Charles Gildon, wrote about the iniquities of theatrical payment in the Restoration, and complained that, while actors and managers made considerable profits from playwrights, Otway, Lee, and Dryden got little in their turn: ‘Otway had but a hundred pounds a piece for his Orphan and Venice Preserv’d, tho’ the players, reckoning down to this time, have got no less than twenty thousand pounds by them.’27

  Behn may have made between £15 and £25 for The Forc’d Marriage, not a lot but enough to persuade her to continue play-writing. With it she could support herself and a few servants. There was no further mention of a brother, still living when she went to Antwerp. From now onwards, Behn appeared before the public as Astrea, a woman without male protection of father, brother or husband.28

  Chapter 12

  The Amorous Prince and Covent Garden Drolery

  ‘I have a thousand little Stratagems / In my Head’

  ...as ’tis my interest to please my audiences, so ’tis my ambition to be read: that I am sure is the more lasting and the nobler design: for the propriety of thoughts and words, which are the hidden beauties of a play, are but confusedly judged in the vehemence of action: all things are there beheld as in a hasty motion, where the objects only glide before the eye and disappear...those very words and thoughts, which cannot be changed, but for the worse, must of necessity escape our transient view upon the theatre.

  So wrote Dryden and Behn agreed.1 Not for her Betterton’s casual attitude to literary ownership; she was eager to get her play into print. She also wanted the fee: after the Restoration, playwrights could dispose of their plays instead of finding them owned by the theatrical companies as in the past, and publication was a useful if not substantial source of income.2

  As a woman, Behn might have felt the stigma of print, remembering Lady Mary Wroth’s experience of abuse, Katherine Philips’s outrage at finding herself piratically published, and a general male attitude that women should have nothing to do with the Muses. Dorothy Osborne had remarked of the publishing Cavendish, ‘Sure the poor woman is a little distracted, she could never be so ridiculous else as to venture at writing books and in verse too. If I could not sleep this fortnight I should not come to that,’ and she later added, ‘there are certain things that custom has made almost of absolute necessity, and reputation I take to be one of those.’3 (It was as well that she remained unaware that many of the romances in which she delighted had in fact been written by Madeleine de Scudéry rather than her brother Georges, under whose name they had been published.) Evidently Behn was unmoved by such attitudes.

  Several playwrights never made it into print, but almost all of Behn’s plays were published, a considerable achievement.4 The first, The Forc’d Marriage, came out with James Magnes, a predominantly literary publisher who also worked with Dryden. Behn and he were to continue their association until 1679 when Magnes died; then she was taken on by others of his family and by his partner Richard Bentley.5 Together Magnes and Bentley formed her longest collaboration, appearing individually on her first and final published works. When she had secured Magnes, Behn either sent round the original unmodified version of her play, a modified one, or the theatre’s copy, a prompt book, which could be returned after printing. Then, as a written text, the play had to pass the censor.

  The notion that language had been debased by the endless quarrels of the Civil War and needed purifying allowed censorship of books and pamphlets to return after the Restoration, although it was somewhat relaxed around the early 1670s. Theoretically, all books had to be licensed by a Secretary of State, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London or a Vice Chancellor of Oxford or Cambridge; in reality ‘seditious’ authors continued to publish through various stratagems or circulate work in manuscript. Behn’s play was innocuous enough and must have passed without comment.

  Since prestige and patronage might be gained with a dedicatee, Behn considered the option. She had not yet courage to approach a suitable nobleman, however, whatever her imagined audacity in distant Surinam. So her first published play came unpartnered and she was left to face the incivilities of ‘this loose Age’ alone.6 She added only the playful French tag, ‘Va mon enfant, prend ta fortune.’

  Printed quickly to take advantage of the publicity of performance, The Forc’d Marriage was a careless job, probably abandoned to more than one compositor.7 The epilogue was placed next to the prologue in the beginning of the volume and the latter was squashed into two pages by changing the type size halfway through the second page. The page numbering was often awry. Typographical errors like upside down letters abounded. Characters were variously named. Nothing else of Behn’s printed in her lifetime would arrive quite so shoddily on to the public scene.8 Unlike many of her fellows, she would in time realise the power of print and try to look after her texts as she looked after her productions, but, as yet, she did not have the confidence and authority to insist on stop-press changes.

  By the time Behn saw The Forc’d Marriage in print, her main care was for her next ‘child’, her second performed work, The Amorous Prince, Or The Curious Husband. It was already in rehearsal at the end of the year and it was staged in the beginning of the next, in 1671, only five months after her first play.

  The Amorous Prince must have been written early since, like older works, it relies more on costume and disguise than on staging. In some touches it seems later than The Forc’d Marriage, however: although no sexual activity occurs on the stage, it is an oddly sexy play for a woman author to own. It is hard to imagine that Behn could have opened her very first work with a scene of two lovers whose undress indicates sexual activity and whose dialogue declares it extra-marital, or that she would have presented so easy an acceptance of homosexual or paedophiliac desire: a pretty plump white boy would ruin the market for women, one character points out.

  When Gerard Langbaine was compiling his list of Restoration plagiarists in the 1690s, he was flattering to ‘Mrs Astraea Behn’, whose many plagiarisms he put down to haste. The Amorous Prince was the first of her plays to be noted, the subplot being based on an episode called ‘The Curious Impertinent’ from Cervantes’ Don Quixote.9 Behn was fascinated by Spanish intrigue plots and rigid misogynous Spanish or Italian society, which she tended to see as essentially comic material. The contemptuous fascination with Mediterranean culture had been inherited from the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists who had used the South for revenge plays and as a cover for comment on English matters. Behn’s setting allowed her to exaggerate the social distinction of the sexes and point to the absurdity of cloistering women from the world and then expecting morals higher than those in men. The point was as true for England as for Southern Europe, despite Englishmen’s complacency about the freedom of their women.

  In Cervantes, a man asks his best friend to test the fidelity of his wife; the trial backfires and all ends tragically. Behn converts this ending into an absurd orgy of marriages. There need be no tragedy because the tested woman, Clarina, is knowing and does not fall. The threatening maid of Cervantes’ story is replaced by a sister-in-law and a maid, both assiduously husband-hunting, and they enter spiritedly into the intrigue, so that the trio easily outwits the husband, Antonio, and his friends. Although the plotting of women had been in Cervantes, Behn greatly expands the motif. As one woman says,

  ... I have a thousand little stratagems

  In my head, which give me as many hopes:

  This unlucky restraint upon our
Sex,

  Makes us all cunning.10

  The need for female virtue to be bolstered by cleverness is also stressed in the other plot, in which young Cloris is the victim of the male obsession with female sexuality: men think to control this aspect of women by raising girls in complete sexual and social ignorance. But, when such girls are exposed to marauding men, tragedy or near tragedy follows, for they mistakenly believe they can hold rakish gentlemen in their rankless, feminine realm.

  Easily seduced by the amorous Prince Frederick, poor Cloris is rescued by other women and her own realisation that she must learn to scheme. She is even persuaded to cross-dress—although she regards this transvestism more as transgression than opportunity. None the less, she cannot avoid noticing that she arouses interest in men when dressed as a boy and her education in the fluidity of gender has begun. In the epilogue which she speaks, Cloris touches on the female predicament, declaring herself saved simply because ‘the Prince was kind at last.’ In the comic allusion to her creator, she claims her fall was ‘want of art, not virtue’ and she blames this on the author. Yet, all the author has done is allow Cloris to express ‘simple nature’. Behn’s belief in natural gender seems to have been dented since she created the naturally feminine Cleomena.