by Janet Todd
Like its predecessor, The Amorous Prince has divergent political messages. Prince Frederick embodies the Stuart doctrine of the divinity of kings, in which the king is responsible to God alone. Articulated by James I, the conception had survived the execution of Charles I and was held discreetly by Charles II and overtly by his less flexible and duplicitous brother James. But, since Frederick was also a rake who must be reformed, reverence was coupled with criticism of royal gallantry, which might just have arisen from Behn’s irritation with a king who had abandoned her penniless, whilst wasting the nation’s substance on expensive mistresses. Nearest to Frederick’s pursuit of his friend’s lady was Charles’s public pursuit of the beautiful Frances Stewart, who incensed her monarch by refusing his overtures and eloping with the Duke of Richmond. The King responded with something like the amazed rage of Frederick in the face of sexual rejection.
In Behn’s play, the figure of Frederick, like that of Orsames in The Young King, is disturbing in its abuse of power and hereditary privilege—Frederick is supposed to be a Duke’s son but no father appears and, for most of the time, he acts as absolute monarch. A prince ruled by sex becomes a danger to his subjects, and, whatever his initial good qualities, turns injudicious and intemperate. The amours of Frederick even provoke a normally faithful subject to plot his death.
It is this sense of the arbitrariness of rank and power, far more than Antonio’s trial of his wife, which makes the play a tragicomedy. Curtius, the abused friend of the prince, sounds decidedly republican as he muses on royal authority:
—And he who injures me, has power to do so;
—But why, where lies this Power about this Man?
Is it his Charmes of Beauty, or of Wit?
Or that great Name he has acquir’d in War?
Is it the Majesty, that holy something
That guards the Person of this Demi-god?
With this reproach goes a contrast between a dissembling courtier and an honest countryman. As times changed and Behn with them, these were the sorts of political statement she no longer felt inclined to make in public.
The prologue was the usual mixture of petition and seduction, rallying the audience for its confused desire for flattery and satire, regulated theatre and farce. Since The Forc’d Marriage was separated from The Amorous Prince only by a few months, Behn could still declare herself a novice and allude to the novelty of her sex. Yet she now had the assurance of a theatrical insider and she made in-jokes about the comedians, Nokes and Angel, and the broad-brimmed, cartwheel hat worn by tiny Nell Gwyn in one of her last acting appearances at the première of Dryden’s Conquest of Granada in the rival theatre. Only those in the know recognised the allusion and were aware that the hat was parodying one worn by Nokes; he had been caricaturing the French entourage of Charles II’s sister, Henriette, on her visit to England.
Behn also showed herself much aware of her form: she was on the side of the ‘natural’ not of the regulated playwrights. This division, sometimes expressed as the contrast of Ancients and Moderns, pitted those who believed that plays should be regulated by classical rules and by what she later called the ‘learned Cant of Action, Time and Place’ (the demand that a play have a single tone and take place in a single location and during one day), and those who could regard their works, in the prologue’s words, as ‘Th’imperfect issue of a lukewarm Brain’, not ‘serious, nor yet comick’. She joined the mockery of ‘Grave Dons, who love no Play / But what is regular’, despising ‘Farce and Droll’.
The Amorous Prince still had many elements of the old theatre. The masque, so much a feature of Charles I’s court drama and more recently used by Dryden, was employed here to unravel plot, not for the audience but for the actors. It was a device for which Behn never lost her fondness. In addition, there were too many asides and some of the verse was so irregular that later editors suspected it to be prose.11 Yet, although the play had some old-fashioned facets and awkward parts, it had few longueurs, and it displayed the quick pace for which Behn was becoming known.
It was speedily printed, this time for Thomas Dring, possibly collaborating with Magnes as J.M., although the carelessness of The Forc’d Marriage may have caused a temporary breach with Magnes. Edward Howard, whose publisher Dring was, probably made the introduction. The result was a better job than the first play, but not perfect.12
The Forc’d Marriage was staged again on 9 January and Jeffrey Boys was in the audience. Clearly Behn and he were still close friends, perhaps sharing evenings after the tavern or outings in Hyde Park. Probably they went to the theatre together and took the rare opportunity of visiting the Continental puppets, which could teach Behn how much timing was the essence of good slapstick and how versatile slapstick could be. Together they survived the hot June when audiences forsook the stufly theatre and the court left town. In the beginning of July, when Behn had a copy of her second play in her hands, she sent her boy with it to Jeffrey Boys. He probably dashed off one of those gallant notes that convention demanded.
If Behn had any complacency about her dramatic achievements she was jolted out of it by a wicked burlesque called The Rehearsal. This was ascribed to the witty politician, playwright and critic, the Duke of Buckingham, with the help of several other theatre-goers including the cleric and scientist, Thomas Sprat, whom Behn may have known by this time. Although, in Evelyn’s words, it was ‘buffooning all Plays’, it was primarily aimed at Dryden, called here Mr Bays, mocked for his heroic drama and tragicomedy. It also ridiculed lesser writers, including Aphra Behn—probably seen as connected with Dryden because of her association with his brother-in-law, Edward Howard. It was gleeful over the more ludicrous moments in The Forc’d Marriage, such as the scene where the overwrought Prince Phillander is grimly serenading his beloved but married Erminia outside the bedroom. It also mocked the echo song—mockery Behn ignored since she later reprinted it in her collection of poems—as well as the funeral scene for the living Erminia: in The Rehearsal the dead Lardella’s coffin is opened ‘and a Banquet is discover’d’. Buckingham may have had the huffing and puffing Alcippus partly in mind, as well as Dryden’s Almanzor from The Conquest of Granada, when he made his hero declaim: ‘I huff, I strut, look big and stare; / And all this I can do, because I dare.’
More than The Forc’d Marriage, The Amorous Prince was ridiculed for pretentiousness, its use of ‘in a cloud’ to mean ‘veiled’. It was also mocked for its scene in which, according to the ‘key’ to The Rehearsal, ‘you will find all the chief Commands and Directions are given in Whispers’: Mr Bays was made to begin his play with similar whispers. In Act V the mockery of Behn’s copious and narrative stage directions grew even more wicked: Behn had the despairing Cloris leap into the river and be taken for dead: The Rehearsal rendered this:
The Argument of the Fifth Act.
Cloris, at length, being sensible of Prince Pretty-mans passion, consents to marry him; but, just as they are going to Church, Prince Pretty-man meeting, by chance, with old Joan the Chandlers widdow, and remembring it was she that first brought him acquainted with Cloris: out of a high point of honour, breaks off his match with Cloris, and marries old Joan. Upon which, Cloris, in despair, drowns her self: and Prince Pretty-man, discontentedly, walkes by the River side.13
When the epilogue to The Rehearsal begged that ‘this prodigious way of writing cease’, it must have given Behn some pause and perhaps decided her not to risk The Young King at this moment. Although she had declared The Amorous Prince a comedy in her prologue, she was aware it was a tragicomedy of the sort that made people ‘laugh at Tragedy and cry with comedy’ as The Rehearsal put it. Clearly fashion had moved from her practice.14
She was probably not devastated by the mockery. It was something to have been satirised in so famous a play as The Rehearsal; one might have felt worse by being left out. Besides, Behn was not the first female playwright to be ridiculed: the respectable Katherine Philips had been burlesqued for her Pompey by Davenant in his Play
-house To Be Lett in 1663. Probably the publicity helped rather than hindered sales.
Far more upset by mockery was her friend Edward Howard, whose play, The Six Days Adventure, or the New Utopia, produced in the same season as Behn’s Amorous Prince, had been thoroughly trounced by the critics. Although she disliked the influence of Ben Jonson, on whose plays Howard’s was partly based, Behn was interested in Howard’s fantasies of strong women ruling and fighting. The women were tamed at the end of the play, as Cleomena would be in Behn’s Young King, so as not to disrupt the social order, but they were not destroyed, and they made some telling feminist points against male misogyny.
Howard blamed everyone but himself that his play was, in the witty Earl of Dorset’s words, ‘Laugh’d at by box, pit, gallery, nay stage’. Howard faulted the actors; then he suspected concerted malice in the audience, some cabal of the influential Earls of Rochester and Dorset.15 Finally he blamed the vogue for ‘Drums, Trumpets, Battels’, by which he probably meant Dryden’s Conquest of Granada and other heroic tragedies. To get his own back, he wrote a preface designed to irritate Dryden and Dorset. It was overkill: twenty-four pages with Latin quotations on the qualities of good drama, contemptuously dismissing farce and eulogising the comedies of Ben Jonson. Drama was serious and must delight and correct; comedy was for ‘the reformation of Fopps and Knaves’. Since he himself would quit the stage, the advice was presumably for others. Howard did not rest here, but supplied poetic testimonials for his play from his friends, ‘several persons of ingenuity, and worth... impartial and knowing apprehensions’. The first of these ingenious people was Aphra Behn, the next Ravenscroft.
Commendatory verse was usually paid for and it was wise to pick up a few pounds where one could. There was, however, much in Behn’s poem that suggested more than a commission—something of a warning and pep talk for any writer, including herself. Howard should, Behn counselled, rise above the abuse. Other now-famous authors had been unpopular too: the ancient poets ‘found small applause’ and ‘still were poor’, and even Ben Jonson in his time displeased the public. Like these illustrious forebears, Howard would probably have to wait for ‘Ages more refin’d’ to esteem him at his true worth. This warning was especially apt for a well-connected playwright who might not be rich but did not have Behn’s own desperate need for money.
For the purpose of the poem, Behn decided to accept Howard’s estimate of ‘mighty Ben’ although she could not bring herself to see audience reform as the purpose of drama. So she associated Howard and Jonson in their supposed effect on the stage: bringing crude and rude farce to ‘Comick order’. Indeed, in the customary fulsome rhetoric with which poets addressed each other, she saw Jonson and even Thomas More, author of the original fantasy Utopia, being surpassed by Edward Howard:
This New Utopia rais’d by thee
Shall stand a Structure to be wonder’d at,
And men shall say this! this is he
Who that Poetick City did create,
Of which Moor only did the Model draw.
You did compleat that little world, and gave it Law.
It is an interesting convention. Both Behn and Howard knew by now that the play had failed, and yet one could give and the other gratefully receive overblown and hyperbolic rhetoric having almost no connection with their shared reality.
At the same time Behn pointed out that no amount of justifying would change public opinion: ‘Dull souls’ could not be brought to sense ‘By Satyre’ any more than the stage could be reformed by ‘wholesome precepts’. There was no point in writing to revenge oneself on ‘the multitude, / Whose ignorance only make them rude’. If one were sucked into disputing with critics, there was an end to art. Behn’s advice was to ignore them and get on with writing:
Write on, and let not after Ages say
The Whistle, and rude Hiss could lay,
Thy mighty Sprite of Poetry,
Which but the Fools and guilty fly;
Who dare not in thy Mirror see,
Their own deformitie.16
More persuasively, she argued that ‘Silence will like submission show / And give advantage to the foe.’
Behn’s poem was in the ‘pindaric’ mode, a form of public praise made popular by the poet Abraham Cowley before the Restoration. With Waller, Cowley was one of Behn’s poetic models, for, following her age, she had turned from the obscure and rough metaphysical writers like John Donne to embrace the smooth Cavaliers, whose flowery, pastoral and courtly works she found invitingly erotic. Cowley had treated the Greek poet Pindar ‘cavalierly’ and he made direct imitation seem pedantic, associated with Puritans. The free pindaric was a useful form for the unlearned Behn, who was excited by its combination of poetic liberty and authority, as well as by its ability to express anything from desire to grief.
Yet, although the Pindaric was not a strict form for anyone, Behn’s use of it was castigated. In The Battle of the Books (1697) Swift imagined a contest between Behn (‘Afra the Amazon light of foot’) and Pindar himself in which, as one might expect, Behn was thoroughly routed, while the editor of The Muses Mercury, when he reprinted the poem to Howard in the early eighteenth century, airily declared: ‘The Reader will perceive, that Mrs. Behn had no Notion of a Pindarick Poem, any farther than it consisted of irregular Numbers, and sav’d the Writer the Trouble of even Measure; which indeed is all our common Pindarick Poets know of the Matter.’ Had she been alive to read this comment, Behn would have recognised the common elitist abuse to which her sex and lack of education exposed her and against which her pep talk could have functioned.
Only partly pleased with her response, Howard replied in a rather confused poem.17 Although he declared Behn’s wit gave him fame, he also suggested that wit needed luck more than skill. Perhaps he expressed some ill-concealed resentment at his friend’s greater theatrical success, a success that, Howard implied, she needed more than he. He also seemed slightly stung by her notion that he might be stopped from writing by public disfavour. If he had offered such a view, he had now forgotten it.
Having backed up her colleague, Behn returned to her own career. She had produced her two plays, was holding back on the third, and now needed time to create others. So she may have approached Killigrew again for some suggestion on how to augment her income while she worked. One or both came up with the idea of compiling a theatrical anthology, which would consist primarily of unpublished songs, prologues and epilogues from plays of the King’s Company, given or sold to Behn by Killigrew. (No one thought twice of lifting songs from published works for, as a character in Behn’s later play, Sir Patient Fancy, remarked concerning the search for a poem, ‘’tis but rummaging the Play-Books, stealing thence is lawful Prize’.) Since the King’s Theatre had just burnt down and the company was in financial difficulties, the volume might have had some benefit for Killigrew as well, not least as part of an advertising campaign for his troupe and its plays. The volume needed a catchy title; one of them hit on The Covent Garden Drolery, ‘Written by the refin’d Witts of the Age’.18
In the Interregnum, the form of the ‘drolery’, a fashionable collection of light verse, had occasionally been used for protest: Cromwell had ordered the Choice Drollery of 1656 to be burnt. So, after the Restoration, the term had a good Royalist ring, as well as a touch of naughtiness. Covent Garden, a London square like an Italian piazza, had been fashionable at least from the 1630s, when plays described the gentry and aristocracy mingling there. More importantly it was, in the 1670s, the theatrical area and most of the pieces were theatrical, fourteen out of the original seventy-five coming from John Dryden.
If Killigrew collaborated with Behn, he did not want his name on the work: it might displease the King and irritate the authors. Perhaps Behn too did not want more than her anonymous initials on a collection which included several salacious poems. These came from the King’s Company’s all-female productions, where Killigrew, who had at first resisted the introduction of female players, used the titillat
ing device of putting the shapelier women into breeches. In Dryden’s prologue to The Maiden Queen, printed in Covent Garden Drolery, men were expected to lust after the actresses in drag, while women were assured that they had all male advantages except one. In the epilogue spoken by Mrs Reeves, reputed to be Dryden’s mistress, actresses boasted that they could be ‘To the Men Women, to the Women Men’ and that ‘ln Dream’s both Sexes may their passions ease...’. The smuttiest prologue and epilogue Behn used were to Killigrew’s own Parson’s Wedding: here it was declared that the theatre, even of Shakespeare and Jonson, had always been lubricious:
When boys play’d women’s parts, you’d think the Stage,
Was innocent in that untempting Age.
No: for your amorous Fathers then, like you,
Amongst those Boys had play-house Misses too:
They set those bearded Beauties on their laps,
Men gave ’em Kisses, and the Ladies Claps.
So the theatre had better be turned there and then into a brothel. Another saucy piece came from Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode in which the aroused woman, foreseeing her lover’s premature ejaculation, slows him down until she cries ‘Now dye my Alexis, and I will dye too.’ When the lovers wish to repeat the success, the imbalance returns: ‘The Nymph di’d more quick, and the shepherd more slow.’ Behn also included chaste fare, such as the prologue to Katherine Philips’s unfinished Horace, spoken at court—perhaps a tribute to Philips or perhaps simply an opportunistic taking of a free poem, the writer of which was dead.
Behn’s use of so much salacious material suggests that her own fairly innocuous early plays were somewhat behind her present taste. The collection in general breathed of easy morals—tolerant copulation without pregnancy and much disease, though there was reference to the fiery pox—and it celebrated the Restoration mania for masquerade and disguise. The few political poems assured the reader that the compiler was a firm supporter of the King, an enemy to ‘Fanaticks’, and those who killed in defence of law.